a man called...

It's w-r-o-n-g to prejudge an artwork of any kind before you've actually experienced it but fuck off with your A Man Called Otto, an american remake of the third most watched Swedish film of all time, which I saw a few years ago at the scandinavian film festival and couldn't help but enjoy; for the little quirks as much as for the big set-piece corny coincidences.* I get less tolerant as I get older, naturally, who doesn't but this incapacity Americans have to experience, much less enjoy, anything that is from outside their national boundaries, makes me want to become disgruntled. 

Look, Tom Hanks is OK, and for all I know this takes the great original film (based on a book I haven't read, so I jumped on the train between stations obvs) and makes it superb, but I just want to say, if 'America's' (i.e. the USA) so great it shouldn't be a clearing house to churn through whatever other stories come into being elsewhere, it should generate its own fuckin' stories and tell them. I would also say that I felt that A Man Called Ove was a really Swedish story and to my mind that valuable quality is not translatable into either some mediocre mass-minded Americana. Yes, there's a story about a grumpy old man who wants to die, but there's also a story about whether there are intrinsic qualities (re: community spirit and willingness to help neighbours) to a small national culture that are adaptable to the modern world. Any other reading is bullshit. Has to be.

*cornincidences