Ramblings about crap in my life.
EFC
Internation Film Festival Rotterdam 2008
Jan 26th
Hi, I’m back home after visiting the film festival in Rotterdam and hanging out in Amsterdam. We drove down there late Monday and came back this morning, here’s what happened.
Tuesday
We arrived some time before noon, at the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel, a place that is famed for being disgusting but it wasn’t actually that bad. The room was acceptable, although there was no place in the bathroom to hang or put anything. The hotel’s bar was pretty cool and there was happy hour between 17.00 and 18.00 so we didn’t complain much.
When we were settled in we left to take a look at Amsterdam, we quickly realized 
they have a lot of cool cinemas and we ended up ordering tickets for a sneak preview, hoping it was Cloverfield. While waiting for the movie two guys from the school decided to get tattoos (the guy with the "?!" has a Metal Gear Solid tattoo on his shoulder, awesome!).
After eating we moved to the cinema to settle in for the highly anticipated Cloverfield only to realize the movie was Charlie Wilson’s War, a weird, political film with Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, about the war in Afghanistan. It was rather crappy and Dutch people have no fucking cinema etiquette. People just wouldn’t shut up. After the movie we got drunk.
Wednesday
We got up a little late, but since we were free to do whatever we wanted that didn’t matter much. We started the day off by walking to the Photography Museum Foam, and that was very interesting. The first part of the gallery was beautiful photos that didn’t really make sense until you read the description, e.g. a 
container to cryogenically freeze people, a playboy magazine for blind people, the only legal marijuana farm in the US (government-controlled of course), nuclear waste shining blue in the dark, and an extremely detailed photo of the Death Star II model (the one that’s not completed). The second part of the gallery contained photographs by the famous photographer Weegee. He usually took photos from New York crime scenes in the forties, and they are really stunning. There was also a photo of Stanley Kubrick, on the set of Dr. Strangelove (left).
We then continued on to the center of the city, looking at shops, and I almost bought this, but ended up buying this and this instead.
In the evening we went drinking again, at a cool bar that had the Blues Bros. on the facade (right), and then we went on to the Red Light District. Of course I knew about the district, the famous site of hookers and drug dealers, but still, seeing young girls in lingerie, in almost every window, waving at you, was so surreal. And so sad.
Thursday
The first day of the film festival, we got to Rotterdam around 11.00, and quickly realized how incredibly boring the center of that town is. The first movie I watched was Bootleg Film, a weird Japanese flick about a cop and a yakuza gangster. It was bad. Then I went on to see an Argentinean movie called El Otro, about some guy having a mid-life crisis. That was bad as well. When we drove back to Amsterdam in the evening, we realized that Cloverfield premiered, so, running to the cinema from the bus, me and this guy Mikkel (1st tattoo further up) got two tickets! And it was fucking awesome! A solid action movie, one of the best I’ve seen in a long time, the handheld camera thing worked very well. So, eventually we got to see a great movie that day.
Friday
The last day, first I saw a Brazilian movie, Mutum, and I’m sorry to be such an ass here, but that was god awful as well. Just like El Otro there was no real storyline, no real conflict for the main character, it was very dull. But then we settled in for the 
European premiere of Juno, a movie that was just recently nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Picture category, and it actually lived up to he hype. It was hard not to enjoy it, and it reminded me a little about Garden State. The last thing I did before we went home was buying a 6 GB USB Stick for 30€ (~225 DKK), a pretty good bargain. (The mall also had a huge TV, left)
Over all it was a nice trip, although the film festival isn’t really starting until next week (No Country for Old Men, I’m Not There, The Darjeeling Limited, Q&A with the Coen Bros. etc.) so that kind of sucks. Also, one of our bus drivers was a frickin’ asshole, not wanting to turn off the light in the bus because of "safety issues" (although he suddenly did several hours later), not turning up the heat, whining when we wanted to take a piss and stretch our legs when we had breaks (yeah, he wanted us to stay in the bus) and on the trip home he complained that he had to stay in line behind some of us at a gas station. The other bus driver was cool. Also, Dutch is fucked up.
Zombie and Rotterdam
Jan 21st
It’s been a week with ups and down, I’ve been having a course in adaptation, we all thought it was going to be about how to adapt a novel, but we were all wrong. Our teacher, Marcell, has a rather different definition of the word, in his opinion adaptation is also just getting your thoughts down on paper, so everything is an adaptation in his mind. I didn’t really learn anything, we mostly sat around discussing stuff, and he never really concluded anything or gave us the right answer, so not really the best week ever.
Yesterday I was en extra in a big student-made zombie movie. It was the climatic scene of the movie, a lot of killing and maiming, and it was cold as hell. Also, to make it more realistic, we got C-Vitamin tablets (that dissolve in water), and when you put those suckers into your mouth everything explodes in a nice cascade of saliva: gross. It was a lot of fun though, can’t wait for the final result.
Almost all zombies, unfortunately I was taking a piss at the time.
In 1,5 hours I’ll be on my way to the Rotterdam Film Festival, we’ll be down there from Tuesday to Friday so that’s going to be cool as well. Unfortunately we won’t be there when the Coen brothers come for a Q&A Session, but hey, that’s life. Also, we’ll stay at the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel, a hotel famous because it’s so disgusting… This is hanging in their main hall:
More zombie pictures:
Gore! The movie will be shot in black and white to make the crappy make-up look more realistic.
Me, moments before I’m turned into a zombie.
Water + C-Vitamin pills.
2nd Project with Egmont
Dec 3rd
The second movie project is right around the corner, here at the European Film College. The theme of the first project was musicals, this time around we’re doing it a bit different though. The school has made an agreement with Egmont, the big Scandinavian media group who owns most of TV 2 Norge, all the rights to sell Sony products in Scandinavia (which means there are a bunch of PSPs and a PlayStation 3 in our Reading Room at the moment) and a lot more. Their 2006 revenue was circa 9 billion DKK.
The agreement is quite simple, we’re going to make a series of one minutes movies for them, which will be shown on their website, at conventions (as an introduction to what Egmont is all about) and maybe even in Danish television. We can more or less make whatever we want, the logline of the movies have to be “We bring stories to life” since that’s also the slogan of Egmont. We do have to include some of their products in some of the movies though, but that can be an issue of Donald Duck in the background or something simple like that. I’m going to be writing the script for at least one movie, so I’m looking forward to that a lot. The production starts next week.
Guitar Hero 3
Nov 27th
We're seven guys at the school who play a lot of Guitar Hero 2, so we split the price of the third one and it arrived today! We're currently unlocking all the songs in Career Coop, and we've managed to get most of them on hard so far. The songs are awesome as well, Sabotage, Paranoid, Welcome to the Jungle, Ruby, etc.
Secret screening & Mr. Mejer
Oct 10th
Just a small update in the midst of doing a lot of movie-related stuff. We had a visit by Danish director Aage Rais-Nordentoft (2 ryk og 1 aflevering, Anton) and he actually screened his upcoming, unfinished movie Buddhas Killing (not final title). It was incredible to be allowed to participate in a test screening, since its purpose is to get feedback from the audience. The movie was quite good, although very explicit with a lot of sexual content. It was a pretty good movie, but unfortunately movies like that will only be shown in a small selection of cinemas in Denmark.
Wednesdays we have lectures and today Preben Mejer visited us, he’s the creator of Innovation Lab, Vice CEO of TDC and host from the television program ‘Danmarks Bedste Ide’ (the bearded guy). He talked about innovation and the technology we’ll have in few years, for example bendable flat screens, and it was very interesting. I took some pictures, they can be seen here.
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