Glorious mud

Forget for a moment those forecasts predicting snow showers for Friday. Spring is really-honest-to-goodness-cross-my-heart-no-fooling here at last. We'll be just shy of 20℃ this afternoon. Plus I saw the first daffodils! Only a couple fully opened, unless you're talking about the fairy daffodils across the street, in which case it's party time. Plus there are buds on the trees at last--big red ones on the silver maples, large enough to be brought down with the recent high winds. Just as important as the warmth is the rain. I was really getting concerned at how dry it had been, but now they're predicting wetness every day of the week. Good. The combination will make all the difference; I expect to see forsythia blooming by the end of the week. Maybe even some magnolias? I dare not hope.

Seems like we finally have the garden situation sorted. I sent around an invitation for garden plots last week as a formality, since Scooter and I had pretty much divvied up the beds between ourselves already. Then out of nowhere, two longtime residents who--to my knowledge--have never gardened before suddenly announced their intention to seek plots. We grumbled (I ended up having to move the dormant dogwood twice), but acknowledged that it was our own fault for jumping the gun. At least we've got the plot between us with the firebush, and once that's relocated (c'mon, Peoples, get your freakin' act together!) we'll move in on it.

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The Old Man and I are starting to lose patience with NetFlix. Given how many damaged discs we've gotten in the last couple months, it looks like we simply need to get ourselves in the habit of inspecting each one when it arrives. We had planned to spend a chunk of the afternoon yesterday watching 달마가 동쪽으로 간 까닭은? (Why has Bodhidharma left for the East?)--a movie I've literally been wanting to see since Iron Maggie was still in power--but as he was trying to load it he discovered it cracked. They already had to send away to another depot for this copy, so Buddha only knows when its replacement might get here.

(I know, I know, streaming. monshu tried setting that up last time I was out of town, but there were fatal incompatibilities which their helpline simply couldn't diagnose, so he gave up. I had similar problems with the Roku box--even the brand-new one I bought is invisible to our fancy HD television which I have no intention of replacing before I absolutely have to.)

So after dinner, the GWO retired to read while I finally sat down and slipped in Frygtelig lykkelig (Terribly happy) (which they'd gone ahead and sent to us while scrounging up a copy of the Korean film). I'd gone and queued it based on the trailer alone (or with at most some vestigial memory of having read a positive review in The AV Club) because its morbidly deadpan Scandinoir seemed apt for the Land of Neverending Winter. Also, manky bear hotness in the form of brooding heavy (see what I did there!) Kim Bodnia (picture).

Rereading the Noel Murray's review, I see he describes lead Jakob Cedergren as "compelling". That wasn't my response; I found him frustratingly passive. Like other summaries, Murray's mentions his "attempt to restore order" when reassigned to a small town, but he struck me as incompetent at his job and unmotivated to do better, despite a plotline that has him desperate to return to distant Copenhagen [which he's closer to than I am to the state capital, incidentally] in order to be reunited with his daughter. He doesn't seem too good at plumbing anyone's motives, so when he does act, it's only to dig himself in deeper.

What's compelling about the movie is the setting. In the featurette, director Henrik Ruben Genz tells a charming story of getting lost in the featureless flatness of Jutland while biking back across the German border to Tønder and deciding that one day he'd set a film there. He and his cinematographer do such an excellent job of portraying the creepy isolation of the decaying village that I was amused to discover that Højer is mere minutes from Sylt, the Martha's Vineyard of the North Atlantic. Tønder itself is only 45 minutes by bike, yet the villagers talk about it as if it were another country. (Which in some ways it is.)

I was impressed by the complexity they'd brought to Bodnia's character and wished they could've done the same for Lene Maria Christensen, who plays his battered wife, but she seems underwritten and arbitrary in the way that is far too common for femmes fatales. The disdainful conclusion to her arc left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. Lars Brygmann is excellent as the creepy drugged-out doctor, but I didn't see the degree of clinginess that I felt would've explained his actions. At least they managed to play with the "hostile villagers" tropes in a way that made them feel less worn-out than they are. All in all, recommended with reservations, but not something I'm likely to watch again.