Well, when things change they certainly change fast. Late last night we found out that Älymystö, Timo’s band that he so recently wrote about, has landed a three-album deal with a major record label. As a result of this and long and serious talks together with the band and the Energia team, Timo is becoming a full-time musician and resigning his post as director of Iron Sky, effective immediately. At this moment, we’re unsure who will direct Iron Sky, but Samuli has intimated that locally famous director Timo Koivusalo has expressed interest in the job - we’ll keep you posted. I guess the next best thing to Timo is another Timo!
EDIT 13.06: It seems that Mr Koivusalo won’t be available, after all. So we’ve made the decision to go with what we have, and have Samuli direct Iron Sky.
Twitch Film wrote about an interesting Russian nazi comedy called Hitler Kaput, that’s under production at the moment. Production values seem to be satisfyingly high, and/but the comedic style slapstique. It’s yet one more Nazi comedy coming out from a country that has had their own umm… should I say ‘history’ (yeah, I’m talking about Germany’s Hitler-comedy Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler). Here’s the trailer - hard to say is it going to be any good or just another ZAZie, but I sure hope to get to see it. The Russian premiere is 20.4.08, if somebody hears when it’s out somewhere with English subtitles, please let me know. There’s not too much info available on the net about the film, but at least they have an IMDB entry (which we, with Iron Sky, don’t have yet - or do we? There’s this one entry that’s mysteriously hovering on IMDB, but none of us knows what it is - if somebody with IMDB Pro access reads this, can you maybe check what’s actually there…)
Oh, and in other news, Inside Steve’s Mind, a YouTube web comedy series of short fiction films has an episode about a love affair between Hitler and Steve, that’s from time to time actually pretty funny. Go check it out here:
(As much as I know that this blogpost will be getting the biggest amounts of spam ever, because it has the word ‘Sauna’ in it (foreign spambots obviously think that it’s somehow sex-related…) - our previous spam-magnet has been Atte’s post “Itävaltalaisessa saunassa“, I’m still happy to be writing about it. :)
The Bronson Club -guys have started blogging about their adventures in making the scariest horror-film ever, Sauna. It’s an interesting journey, they are right at this moment shooting in Prague, burning barns and all that… So if you want to have a good view on the production of an interesting film, that’s a good place to start.
Hotel La Quinta Austin Airport, 22:56. Outside, in the darkness, storm and police sirens are constantly wailing. I’m starting to feel a bit tired already, after full day of working just here in the hotel room. Tomorrow, I’m about to head home, and hope to be back in Finland on Tuesday. Back to the cold, dark and sloshy Tampere, away from the scorching sunlight, t-shirt weathers and reasonably prices *everything*. And I’m really looking forward to it. Here I tried to list few things I’ve missed while in Texas:
- Food. I can’t wait to get something real to eat, something that’s not dipped in grease and rolled in marinade, something that’s not either sweet or tasteless or both at the same time, and something, that won’t make me feel hungry in seven minutes I’ve finished eating it.
- Euro. I hate converting everything in my mind to dollars and back. More than that, I hate tipping. What the hell is that supposed to be, add it to the price and quit whining about tips…
- News. I’m looking forward for good Finnish news, those that are laid-back, serious and informative, and don’t get interrupted by ads every 30 seconds.
- Grumpy people. I just haven’t understood the American way to be always shiny, happy and fake-interested on other people. I really miss the grumpy Finnish folk just caring their own business and being quite honest about it. I hope not to hear any more “AWESOME, MAN! JUST AWESOME! YOU’RE LIKE THE BEST GUY IN THE WORLD” -comments. Good old “Yhm…” will do. - Family. You know, it might sound fun to travel around the world, meet people and party all the time, but it’s not like that all the time. Even less when you have a family back at home waiting, and who you miss constantly.
But the trip hasn’t been bad, not at all. I’ve enjoyed some parts more than others, but I’ve really had great experiences here as well. Here’s a list of what I’ll propably miss of Texas:
- Fuddruckers. Easilly the best food-chain I’ve bumped to. The only meal I actually enjoyed here in Texas.
- The sun. The weather has been the perfect Finnish summer weather all the time, and I’m really not aching to see the sorry-ass wanna-be -winter of Finland at all. It’s just plain depressing.
- The malls. If you don’t find something here, you propably won’t need it. And if you do find, you propably don’t need it anyway. But if you just have time and endurance to race the 20 huge shopping centers and malls that are spread around the city, you’re in the shopping heaven. I happen to hate shopping, though.
- The bus trips. I’ve really enjoyed the local bustrips I’ve had, rolling around a strange city, listening to music (mainly PMMP and Disco Ensemble, plus a bit of Deftones), reading a good book (Lauren Weisberger’s Devil Wears Prada) and trying to interpret the cryptic bus route map. It’s like playing chess with yourself. And I’m just as good in that as well…
- The live music. Wherever you turn your head in the downtown Austin you can hear live music ringing loud from some of the bars. The SXSW is really a street festival at it’s best - a lot of closed streets, music everywhere, and a lot of people.
Last few days have been all running around the city after certain miserable softwares I’ve been trying to hunt down from here. After my failure couple of days ago, I spent the day after that in even worse hell, walking 10+ kilometers on different malls, waiting for buses to get to another mall that’s more than 10 kilometers away, leaving off on wrong busstops and trying to cross half-deserted lands with a huge Target’s sign as my guiding light shining somewhere in the distant horizont. And even worse than that, listening to people’s totally f*cked-up advice on where some place is and how to get there. It seems like Americans just can’t admit they don’t know something, they rather keep on talking and talking and giving their best guesses until you’re just too exhausted to care and find yourself walking again 5 kilometers to wrong direction just because that nice old gentleman didn’t have a clue on where CompUSA actually is, because he didn’t even know *what* it is… Grr…
I left my hotel room 10 o’clock AM, and came back 11 o’clock PM, totally beaten, and with only a pack of socks with me, since I hadn’t found anything else I was looking for.
The next day was even worse. This time, I knew where I was going to, but that day being Saturday, when already very bad public transportation had halted most of it’s buses, I found out that to get where I wanted to, I would have to get off the bus 5 kilometers away from the mall I was going to. Well, not a problem, yesterday I had walked around even longer trips and the sun was shining bright on a clear blue sky.
And it really wasn’t a big problem to get there - weather was good, Paprika Korps gave the extra push to me and I was feeling good. But one thing I didn’t know was that the software I was going to get wasn’t just your normal DVD-cases, but they were packed in 10-15kg boxes filled with manuals and everything. And I had to carry two of them, walking five kilometers under mercilessly hot sun… When I finally collapsed to my room, I was half dead.
Since Saturday was the last day of SXSW, I wanted to go and see the city for a bit, so after gaining enough strength I hopped back to bus and traveled this time to the Austin center, which was filled with partying people. I just walked around, watching people have fun, visiting pubs to listen few songs by the endless stream of mediocre indie-rock bands, and finally decided to call it a day and took a taxi back to the hotel.
And that’s about it. Today all I did was worked in my hotel room, visited Denny’s for a disgusting dinner, and came back to hotel. I’ve been mainly packing my stuff, trying to fit all that I bought into same two bags that were already totally full when I came here… And tomorrow I’m about to head back to Tampere.
On a related topic, here’s a motivational poster for the week!
I just got back here to the hotel after wandering in the latin suburbs of Austin for few hours. This morning I woke up, gathered my gear, had some skype meetings and then went of to Austin Convention Center to meet a great guy called Mark who works for O’Reilly. We had a good chat over Wreckamovie, I showed it to him a bit, gave him a copy of Star Wreck, and then left to find some software and electronics to buy. Right now it’s an awesome time to buy stuff, € being so strong when compared to $, and electronics and software being so cheap in the States compared to Europe.
Ínstead of hailing a cab and travelling to the mall that way, I wanted to save some bucks and decided to use the bus. It’s way cheaper than taxis around here - with $1 you can travel as much as you want. It’s also a transportation method for the lower middle-class folk, so no rich-ass white beings in bus, only me with my mohawk and laptop. But by bus, you get to see around, and see how the people actually live here in Austin.
As all my friends and the guys at Energia know, I’ve been blessed with an infallible sense of direction and +35 Skill Rank Bonus to Map Reading and Urban Survival Skills - that means: I never get lost.
NOOOOT!
So I suck at that. But still, I never admit it to myself. Just like Ryoga from Ranma ½, only that I don’t know kung-fu…
Somehow, after being lost in the downtown for a while, I ended up into AT&T store, and the nice people there gave me very clear directions on how to find a Target store in a shopping mall some 10 miles away from the downtown, and what bus to take. It was a sunny day, I was listening to Disco Ensemble and feeling very alive when hopping on a bus and travelling through the city to a huge shopping center somewhere in the city borders. At Target store I shopped some iPods and Cars stuff for my kid, and then decided to go out and find a WalMart or some place where I could get couple of Adobe Creative Suites.
Without thinking, I just went across the massive highways, almost got hit by a car and finally ended up on a small forgotten bus-stand, where I for some reason thought a bus to the WalMart would go. Well, it didn’t. Actually, after stepping on the bus and driving some stops, I asked the bus driver if there was a WalMar somewhere close, and he said that yes there is, but you are going the wrong way, you need to step out and go to the other side of the road and pick a bus from there. So that’s what I did, got off the bus somewhere in the suburbs.
And then, instead of going to the bus stop on the opposite side of the road, for some reason I had a brainfart of a thought and decided to go out and find a computer store somewhere in the suburbs. Don’t really know what I was thinking. And it was getting late, sun was casting it’s last rays and I had changed to Deftones in my earphones, feeling still great and self-confident on my infinite urban skills.
Not a big surprise, I didn’t find anything. Just some huge shops with strange objects, a restaurant called Twin Peaks and a interstate highway which I tried to get across but found luckily soon enough it was impossible. So when the sun finally got behind the horizon and the darkness fell, I went to a bus stop to wait for a bus. And I waited and waited and waited… Nothing came, just cars and cars and cars.
Finally, the bus came. It was already pitch black, and I drove few stops forward, then decided to jump out in a streetcorner where I thought another bus would come soon, a bus that would take me close to my hotel.
But it didn’t. I waited like fourty minutes, sitting in total darkness in a small bu sstop, with my laptop, a big Toys’R'Us bag full of iPods and toys, and my white face and mohawk screaming “come and mug me”. All the time huge pickups stacked with latino thughs you see in movies were passing by, and people looking me like I was mad. I was really starting to feel like Bruce Willis in the beginning of Die Hard 3… But I knew that I was no Bruce Willis, had it come to that.
No bus was coming, that was quite sure. I was in the middle of nowhere, with *no* idea on where to go, how to get back or anything, and feeling every minute more that soon I would get killed. So I chickened out, and went to a small 7-11 shining in darkness, explained to a Mexican who knew just enough English to understand me, that I’m from Finland, and I’m totally lost. The shopkeepers laughed, but were very nice and called a cab for me.
So that’s my story. Nothing dramatic, but ultimate bracks were shat, as they say on the Internets.
And I didn’t get my Creative Suites, so I need to get on the same bus tomorrow, and hope for the best to find a CompUSA or Best Buy or something like that… And get the hell out of the suburbs before the nightfall.
Unlike in most film festivals I’ve visited, in SXSW I’ve actually had time and opportunity to visit and see some of the films they are showing here. Around the center of Austin there are several film theaters with films for the festivals, and to get in you need to line up about 30 minutes prior to the beginning of the film to get in with the pass.
What I really love about the theaters is that they act as a very discreet restaurants at the same time. Between each row of seats there are aisels where the waitresses can walk around, and you can order food and drinks during the shows. That’s really a thing I would love to see in Finland, and propably would boost up people visiting film theaters as well, as you can really build an experience around watching films.
Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie
The first film I went to see was called NOT YOUR TYPICAL BIGFOOT MOVIE, a documentary on two guys who really strongly believe they are tracking bigfoot in the forests nearby. It’s a heartwarmingly saddish story on these two elderly gentlemen who have a very special relationship between each others, and who really see what they want to see - bigfoot in every pixel of crap-quality pictures they’ve been taking from the woods. The synopsis says:
NOT YOUR TYPICAL BIGFOOT MOVIE provides a look at the trials and triumphs of life Appalachian foot hills. Through the experiences of Dallas and Wayne, two amateur bigfoot researchers in southern Ohio, we see how the power of dreams can bring two men together in friendship, and provide hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life in a dying steel town.
The film is slow-paced, with slow guitar music in the background, and floats through the lives of Dallas and Wayne slowly. It’s funny in a sad way, and at one point you start feeling bad laughing at these two men chasing their dreams, really believing and wanting to believe into something in the woods, that doesn’t exist. I think I might say I liked the film, but I have to admit that after spending 20+ hours in an airplane and airports, I dozed off few times, and didn’t get to see the big picture very well to actually rate the movie in any way. I blame the super-comfortable soft seats in the theater… This is not a film to see when jetlagged, the slow pace really get you.
Dance Of The Dead
The next day we went to see the midnight show at Alamo theater called DANCE OF THE DEAD. It was a pretty risky shot, since we had to stop partying and go out to a film theater to see a zombie movie I had never heard of, but it turned out to be a good decision. Dance of the Dead is a story about a zombie infection that turns loose during a high school prom. In the best possible American way, of course, the ones who save the day are nerds, and a cute girl, while the high school athleths and staff get killed and turned into zombies. So in many ways, Dance of the Dead is nothing new. What I loved about the film was that the director was really able to pump enough adrenalin to every part of the film - actors did a good job, cinematography was excellent and even the makeup and special effects worked. Obviously, Dance of the Dead is not a big-budget zombie movie, but it pretty much succeeds in keeping up with enough production value and good-enough cast and script to make it stand out among most of the zombie flicks out there.
Woodpecker
WOODPECKER was a film that many people were talking a lot about in the festival, so I had my hopes up when entering the theater of seeing a really worthwhile film. Instead of trying to explain, I let the synopsis speak for itself:
Fanatical birdwatchers have descended upon a small town in the Arkansas bayou in hopes of finding the celebrated Ivory Billed Woodpecker. Declared extinct in the 1940’s, the bird has apparently been spotted by numerous experts. Enter amateur birder and poet Johnny Neander, who has convinced his taciturn sidekick that he will be the one to find the elusive woodpecker. The ensuing chaos divides the small town between believers and non-believers, rabid environmentalists and opportunistic entrepreneurs. Much like the bird itself, Woodpecker explores the intersection of fact and fiction, manipulating our notions of documentary and narrative techniques within a tragic comedy about hope, perception, and some very very strange birds.
From the first moments on this film reminded me of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. It was shot in a document format, and had some real documentary elements on it, the camerawork was very simple, handheld and not very high quality, and the two main actors, Johnny and Wan, were improvising most of the lines. The story started to unfold a bit slowly, and it took me a while to understand why I should be interested in Ivory Billed Woodpeckers that should have been extinct for several centuries, but pretty soon I started to understand about the characters in the film, and see this more like a tragic comedy of people chasing their dreams. There’s that subject again… Americans seem to love people chasing their dreams.
At one point, there film was so great I wished for it to never end, watching the main character Johnny slowly losing his grip to the reality as problems started to pile up and the bird was nowhere to be found, but then the film was Kummelized, the joke was over-streched, and some unbelieveable elements were introduced, newsflashes and fake environmentalists and that sort of things, that took off the edge from the story of slowly drowning into insanity and alcoholism. Without knowing what parts of the story have actually happened and what have been scripted in I can’t judge on how strong the script actually was when compared to real events, but eventually I felt the film to be a bit too long, but overall a very good experience, that’s gonna win a lot of awards in smaller festivals around the world.
Heavy Metal In Baghdad
‘Till now, the last film I saw was called HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD, and so far it has been the greatest film I’ve seen here, and one of the best documentaries about war, and about heavy metal, I’ve seen ever. The story starts when a reporter for MTV went to Iraq to do a story on the only heavy metal band in Iraq, Acrassicauda (“Black Scorpio”). Later on, after USA invasion, they came back to see if the band is still alive, and filmed footage on their last show in Iraq, while car bombs were blasting around the city, AK-47 -fire banging endlessly and mortar explosions ringing al over. That is true heavy metal.
The documentary follows the guys of Acrassicauda and their struggle to survive in a total chaos, but it also describes very well on how the civil war in Iraq actually is. It’s rude to see the pictures of an middle-eastern city bathing in beautiful sunlight, cars passing by, people walking along, and in the background people talking about that if they stop here they will most definitively be killed.
For a person living in Iraq, Baghdad, the everyday life is really hard, since it’s totally impossible to know when a sniper kills you, a car bomb takes you out or your family out or whatever - but for a metalhead singing “americanized” music “for satan”, as local people think of that, it’s totally impossible. Wearing a Slipknot t-shirt can really get you killed. But the guys, one of them being a father of a young child, just keep on pushing. They’ve managed to organize 5 gigs in 6 years, and every time it has been a full house of Iraq metalheads pogoing around, but the death keeps on lurking outside.
One example of how just normal things can be hard in a country that’s in a total state of chaos is headbanging: it resembles the jewish praying in some ways (they keep on bowing their heads when praying), and people don’t dare to do that because if Iraq police would see that, they would put you in a prison for the rest of your life. Just for headbanging. And not to mention growing a long hair, that’s just totally out of the question.
As the director said in Q&A after the show, the bands in the west are getting it very easy. Yeah, it can be hard to organize a gig or two now and then, or find money to go to a studio, but it’s nothing compared to the fact that every day you go to your training joint, you have to carry openly a gun for not being killed.
You need to really check out the website of the film, there’s a lot of more information on Acrassicauda and a possibility to donate them to help them further, and be sure to check out their blog, it’s an interesting read. They managed to raise enough money through the Internet after Toronto film festival screening that they were able to travel to Syria, then Turkey, and they are right now in Istanbul, but are having a very hard time over there as well.
All in all, this film was a great piece of documentary, be sure to check it out when it’s available. Here’s the trailer:
Ok, that’s it for now. Today I’m heading again to the festival, although now the Film-part of SXSW is starting to be over, there are screenings still but no other programme, and everything is Music. I’m gonna go and see some bands, and spread the good word of Iron Sky!
Timo is flying to Austin, Texas on Sunday, to attend the prestigious South by Southwest film (and music, and other things besides) festival. Below is a little something found on the Interwebs to prepare him for his arrival in the homeland of liberty. Be sure to check out the group’s sweet logo on their Myspace page and remember: TSA means Takin’ Suckers’ Assets.
One funny thing that our delayed demo of Iron Sky has produced, is Iron Sky fan teasers. I’ve heard of couple of people working on them, but our fan who goes by the name Mikvi has released in his blog that he has uploaded to YouTube the first unofficial fan teaser for Iron Sky.
Mikvi himself writes:
As many people are interested in different movies the works of Samuli Torssonen have made an impression to me. The Star Wreck-series have been a inspiration for a self-made filmmaker as he has been able to make a reality of his imagination in form of short and feature films.
Star Wreck - In The Pirkinning has been the most viewed finnish movie mainly cause of its distribution way. A whole consept of a free-movie so that everyone could download the movie for free without registrations or extra adds gained a significant amount of viewers. Though the movie is in finnish it still was able to have big number of foreign viewers.
The newest project of Torssonen and his friends is the Iron sky. A fictional science fiction story about a nazis that escaped to the moon after WWII and establish a base there to gather up forces to be ready to return to the earth. The year will be 2018 for their return. More info from the official site : http://www.ironsky.net
As the communitys board there were some fan-made art about the movie appearing - I though if would be nice to make a own fan-made teaser of the movie.
Anyways, it’s great to see people enthusiastic enough to take couple of months of their own time and create a fan teaser, that actually looks pretty cool! So while waiting for the official demo of Iron Sky, here’s Mikvi’s fan teaser, check it out (sorry, it cannot be embedded, so you just have to follow the link)!
Ps. obviously this teaser is released 2 months ago, but it didn’t come to my knowledge until now via Google Alerts, when Mikvi wrote about it on his blog.
In 2005 a group of young Finnish filmmakers released Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. In 2006 they founded Energia Productions Ltd. These are their stories.
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