Earlier this year I was going
through the movies of Bong Joon Ho and watched “Snowpiercer” for the first time.
It was a decent movie about the last living humans spending time on a high-speed train whose cars
were divided by class. The poor cars were in the derelict overcrowded caboose and each subsequent car being nicer and more luxurious.
The content of each car was a mystery before the main characters invaded them,
so there was a pleasant anticipation every ten minutes in the movie. The second to last car was a electronic music rave party. Lots of music, lights, drugs, and
grinding. I felt that was an odd choice for the highest strata of society. Then
I saw “Eurovision Song Contest: The Son of Fire Saga”. Now I get it. This movie is the last car on the apocalypse train.
This is a Will Ferrell comedy, written
by Will Ferrell and a recent collaborator Andrew Steele. Andrew Steele was the
main writer for the very funny miniseries “The Spoils of Babylon” and the just funny
“Spoils Before Dying”. This movie has a certain comedic professionalism to it.
The story telling is very efficient. Within the first five minutes we know the
lifelong goal of the protagonists Lars Erickssong and Sigrit Ericksdottir is to win
the Eurovision song contest, that Lars Erickssong has a disapproving father and
that Sigrit Ericksdottir is secretly in love with Lars but Lars doesn’t know it
(and they might be half-siblings?).
These are all well-worn comedic
premises but they still work not less because of general wit of the screenplay
and the performances of Ferrell as Lars, Pierce Brosnan as his father, and Rachel
McAdams as Sigrit. Besides everything about Eurovision is a ridiculous music
video fantasy. The freshness of the subject matter enlivens the entire movie.
Not that Eurovision is a new
thing. Apparently it has been going on since the end of the World War II. Its
huge in Europe and no-one in America knows anything about it. That dichotomy,
Will Ferrell, says is what drew him to the project. Eurovision is a contest in which
European countries sponsor home-grown acts in a singing contest held in a giant
stadium and shown to millions of people on TV. We are shown a clip of ABBA singing
a song about Waterloo in the early 1970s.
Lars and Sigrit are from a small
fishing village in Iceland. When Lars learns that he and Sigrit get into the semifinals
for Iceland, Lars rings the emergency bell in the local church tower. This is
against the law and Lars promptly gets arrested. But in the police station,
Lars and Sigrit plead with the local cops to just “be cool” and the cops just let Lars go. At another point, after Lars and Sigrit have
inexplicably gotten into the Eurovision contest, they take part in what is
called a Song-A-Long in a gigantic mansion. Every participant has ridiculous
over-the-top makeup, hair, and costuming and check all the boxes in terms of
ethnic and sexual identity. These people don’t have a care in the world. This
musical interlude is the last car on the Apocalypse train.
Eurovision was directed by David
Dobkin, who has done some pretty bad work in comedies before (see the lost
opportunity that was Wedding Crashers). He is probably better appreciated
for his music videos. The material here is a much better fit for him than his
other movies. The movie has music throughout and Dobkin knows how to shoot in stage
choreography for film. In particular, the closest this movie has to an antagonist,
the Russian Alexander Lemtov (played by Dan Stevens), has two kind of
ridiculously number involving taming lions, lions represented by male dancers
with chiseled abdominal.
I had a lot of fun watching this
movie. I enjoyed all of the songs, even Ya Ya Ding Dong. This movie is like the
opposite of all the concurrent crises we have in America. We could probably use
something like Eurovision here. The closest thing I guess would be American Idol,
but that is a celebration of individualism and Coca-Cola, when it isn’t explicitly an
exercise in sadism, not something that would bring people together.
No comments:
Post a Comment