COP SECRET***** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 2

Hannes Þór Halldórsson is the Iceland national football team's goalkeeper who once saved a penalty by the greatest footballer who has ever played, Lionel Messi.  That's reason enough to be famous.  But Hannes has obviously also spent A LOT of time watching cheesy American buddy cop action movies like BAD BOYS as well as, I suspect, ZOOLANDER and has created an absolutely hilarious low-budget buddy cop spoof called COP SECRET.

The movie stars Auðunn Blöndal as Bussi, a cliched drunken loner cop who drives around Reykavik in a suped-up shitty car at great speed with no respect for the rules. As we would expect, Bussi comes into conflict with his hard-as-nails boss Þorgerður (Steinunn Ólína Þorsteinsdóttir),  His rival is super-buff ex-model suburban cop Hörður, played by Egill Einarsson.  One of the most brilliant decisions in this film is to make explicit the implicit homosocial tones of many of these movies, and have beer swilling, fast-food eating hyper-macho Bussi admit that he's totally into his rival and vice versa.  The two cops are united when a dastardly criminal gang led by disfigured ex-cop Rikki (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), starts robbing banks but apparently taking nothing.  What are they really up to?  And how is this going to impact the upcoming England-Iceland football match?!

 

The resulting film is fast-paced, genuinely funny and a great time, but only if you're familiar with the tropes its spoofing. Highly recommended!

COP SECRET has a running time of 98 minutes and has played Locarno and the BFI London Film Festival 2021. It will be released in Iceland on October 20th.

Preview - BEYOND THE POLE

Reviews are getting posted a little less promptly now that the locks are off the alcohol cupboard in Bishopsgate (quite literally) and the European fixed income divergence trade is starting to bear fruit. Which brings me to a preview of a movie that one might think a little at odds with the purported aim of this blog - a review site that loves shameless violence and scorns vegetarianism in all its manifestations. Not that I don't have time for the earnest agit-doc, but it always seems to me that they make not one iota of difference: after all, no unrepentant flat-earther is going to shell out his hard-earned cash to see some flick from the Lib-Lab coalition. To my mind, this genre of film is basically preaching to the already converted Guardian readership. This is where BEYOND THE POLE comes in - a new British film touting itself as the first environmental comedy. We sent our correspondent - a man more at home with ultra-violent Korean flicks - to investigate......

"Beyond the Pole sounds ghastly, promoted as a feelgood environmental comedy, which does it a disservice. It's not schmaltzy, doesn't preach, and has no over-the-top scene where everybody cheers. But it is very funny. Filmed documentary-style, Stephen Mangan (GREEN WING) and Rhys Thomas (THE FAST SHOW) work well as the glass-half-full and glass-half-empty buddies who are equally foolhardy. They set off from Lichfield to the North Pole hoping to set some sort of Guinness record. The film charts the obstacles they face, which include polar bears, frostbitten penises and, through their radio, relationship strife back home.

For the most part the film belies its shoestring budget and radio play origins. The Arctic is beautiful even when purpotedly shot on a camcorder. The cast is never hammy, and benefits from the comic timing of Rosie Cavaliero as the long-suffering girlfriend and Mark Benton as the local amateur radio enthusiast. In a stroke of luck for the filmmakers, it also boasts a pre-True Blood Alexander Skarsgård camping it up as a rival trekker.

Moviemaking on ice was never going to be easy. To some extent location filming in three weeks against-the-odds, on a Greenland ice field that was due to melt, has helped the performances. The dialogue comes across as improvised and the tension seems genuine. However, the script's ending needed more development prior to the shoot. We know it's inconceivable that such a pair of losers could make it to the North Pole and back unscathed. Eventually things have to go seriously wrong. This juncture is held off as long as possible to keep the humour flowing, but once the fun is over, the conclusion feels perfunctory. With more pathos, and maybe even a bit of schmaltz, Beyond the Pole would linger in your mind as a charming comic tragedy."

BEYOND THE POLE will be released in the UK in early 2010.

JAR CITY / MYRIN - no gaucamole bullshit here!

JAR CITY is a hysterically funny, visually arresting, tricksy little police procedural set in Iceland. The movie is among the most funny I have seen all year, and yet works equally well as a carefully told character-driven drama.

The movie is written and directed by Baltasar Kormákur, but based on the successful crime novel, "Mýrin" by Arnaldur Indriðason. The source novel is a linear crime thriller. Kormákur has added a rich seam of humour - both verbal and bordering on slapstick as well as an insistent desire to show the rest of the world how tasty sheep's heads are. More seriously, this is a film that lovingly shows us how strange life can be in a small, rather isolated country, where half the population are essentially still country folk, and the other half are embracing the fake-cosmpolitanism of the Starbucks culture. Much of the humour comes from the sheeps-head brigade mocking the latte-drinkers, and in a pivotal chase scene, the latte drinker is quite brilliantly ineffectual.

Kormákur also takes an interesting approach to the contruction of the narrative arc that adds a certain intellectual challenge to the film. It also changes the emphasis from a conventional "whodunnit" to a "whydunnit". In other words, this is no CSI Rekjavik but a proper drama.

The hero of the movie is a quiet, tough, loner called Erlendur. He's a detective investigating the death of a local sleazebag. Erlendur is the kind of guy who buys the same take-out every night. He's also the kind of guy who'll kick you out of his house and throw you down the stairs, but then bring you a cushion for your leg and call an ambulance. He is, in short, a decent but flawed man. This is most painfully shown in his relationship with his daughter - a drug addict. He is strict in not giving her money to feed her habit - on the other hand he'll offer her a home and try to protect her. And by the end of the film, he'll even tell her how deeply he has been affected by his work - a small opening to a real relationship.

The murder Erlendur is investigating is also about relationships between the generations. Thirty years ago, a nasty piece of work with a rare hereditary disease raped (or did he really?) two women and sired two children, both of whom passed on the weakness to their children. This rare genetic thumb-print will allow Erlendur and his sidekcik Sigurður to track down the murderer of the original rapist, thanks to the new, controversial, Icelandic DNA database. Without being overtly political, Kormákur carefully shows the dangers of absolute knowledge of this kind.

Despite the fact our Gmunden correspondent and I watched JAR CITY subtitled into English, we walked out of the cinema quoting lines, still laughing, convincing Nikolai that he simply had to see it. It's one of the best films I've seen all year.

JAR CITY was released in Iceland and was the most successful Icelandic film in history and won 5 Edda awards. It played Toronto and London 2007 and was released in Norway last year. JAR CITY was released in the US in February, and will be released in France and the UK on September 12th 2008.