Just before I left home, my dad got a harddrive full of movies from a friend. Having just gotten a tablet for my trip, I thought filling it up with movies could be a good thing. You never know when you might need to kill some time.
And I was right. It’s not as if I’ve had time to see even half of the movies I copied onto my external harddrive, but I do have some good movie memories from this trip. Like Winter’s Bone and Black Swan, that I saw with Frida in Edmonton. At Time Out Farms, I mostly watched movies with the German twenty-one-year-olds. Water for Elephants and The Vow. Cutsie things. At Whiskey Creek Farm, I mostly watched Grey’s Anatomy and Community and Smash. At Duckworth Farm, I started being serious with the tablet. There, I saw The Way Back and Rachel Getting Married and a six hour series about Coco Chanel.
And for some reason, the movie watching by tablet got really serious here in Phoenix. In the last couple of days, I’ve seen five movies. The Boat That Rocked was awesome – I really do love the Brittish humour. And the music – WOW! Up was pretty cute, for being a Disney. Blue Valentine was heart breaking, but really good. But the biggest impact on me were given by the two Swedish movies I saw, I himlen finns inga känslor and Stockholm Boogie.
It is a perfect little thing, I rymden finns inga känslor (which translates as There are no feelings in space). Funny, endearing, just serious enough, and as a movie really smart. And it’s about a boy with Asbergers syndrome and his brother, something that’s not hard for me to realate to. Not that I’m an expert (between my dad the cineast and my best friend Kirke the movie maker, I feel like a complete amateur), but in my opinion it is a really good movie. And the soundtrack is amazing! Swedish music can really be phenomenal.
With Stockholm Boogie, it’s another thing. As a movie, it didn’t change my world. But it wasn’t a waste of time either. It was pretty decent. But, what really hit me was the scenery. Every single outside shot was on a street, a bridge, in a park and even outside a club where I’ve been – where I’ve actually spent a lot of time. It took place on Södermalm and Långholmen during one long summer night, and god, have I had long summer nights like that in Stockholm. Walking and biking through the streets of Söder, sitting on cliffs looking at the sun set, going swimming just when the sun rises with people that you’ve just met. Even the big party in the middle of the movie, set on Apberget with a view over the bridge Västerbron, is on the exact same spot as where Natalia had her birthday party last summer. There, Isak and Danne were DJ’ing and Natalia was dancing in her Christmas tree lights.
That made me ache for summer nights in Stockholm. The ones I’ve missed now, the ones I hear barely came this summer even for the ones who happened to be there. The rainiest June in more than a hundred years, I hear. But it’s the Söder of my memories, my teens and early twenties, that magic that never looses it’s charm. I felt so strongly that I was in the wrong place, this desert city full of cactuses and heat. I longed for home.
That feeling didn’t prevail, though, I managed to have lots of fun in Phoenix too. But still. It’s amazing how movies can make us feel. How easily moving pictures can reveal feelings we didn’t know we had.
Katja Malmborg 