SPECIAL MENTION: STAR TREK & DISTRICT 9

Star Trek and District 9 were surprisingly similar films in many ways. At first, they felt like a bite out of a fresh apple, but slowly they started to taste mealier, ditching head first into a pool of cliches and unanswered expectations. Visually, both were outstanding – at first. District 9 ran out of money somewhere around the midpoint, and JJ Abram’s visions of running around on powerplants and blinding the audience with lens flares became too apparent by the end.

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And finally, both had quite amazing marketing campaings: Star Trek was sold to me as a teen gay drama in space, and District 9 as a harsh commentary on prejudicament and western immigration politics. Unfortunately, neither of the films eventually responded to things that made me interested. But they were both definitively remarkable films, and deserve to be mentioned.

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10. METROPIA

Whine, whine, boo-hoo it was boring, the story was crappy, the world was shitty and nothing happened in it. Wrong. It was a great film, the atmosphere was amazing, the story was maybe the strangest and wildest of the whole year and the cast was excellent. Metropia was not flawless, but a brave, ambitious and exactly what the world of animation needs – completely different from Pixar/Dreamworks dominating the market nowadays. I think we’ll see loads of groundbreaking films from the director Tarik Saleh in the future. So quit whining and respect the film!

Here’s Essi’s review of Metropia.

9. UP!

Pixar never fails. I love everything they’ve done so far, even Cars, and Up! didn’t let me down. The first 20 minutes of the film is easilly the best and most moving 20 minutes in 2009 – hell, maybe in 2000’s. Unfortunately, as the film takes the absurd Pixarian twist, surprisingly enough the story doesn’t live up to the expectations (which is strange, since usually it’s exactly the absurdity that makes their films so excellent). Nevertheless, Up! is a lovely story and Edward Asner delivers one of the best lead performances of the year as the old man Carl Fredricksen. And as a viewer, I feel like somebody respects my time, unlike with most of Dreamwork’s pieces of shit they keep on spitting on the big screen every year.

(BTW. Ever wondered what’s the main difference between Pixar and Dreamworks? Well, here’s quite a good explanation.)

8. CORALINE

Stop-motion 3D animation is here to stay, and Coraline is a living proof that you don’t need a CGI-rendered animation when you have a visionary director working on a story that’s based on a book by one of the greatest modern storytellers. Those being, of course, Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick, in reverse order. Coraline is fun, atmospheric, brave, experimental, beautiful and dark and creepy enough! It’s a humble courtesy for the animaton lovers.

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7. AVATAR

The film looks like one of those creepy airbrush-painted dolphin posters that were quite popular in among the most tasteless of us back in early 90’s. The story may not be the most original one – hell, you know exactly what’s going to happen from the very first minutes, and if not, make sure to watch a trailer, it’ll spoil the rest for you. But still, it’s a honest work of love from the grown-up nerd James Cameron, and if you’re able to leave behind the cynicism that’s probably fueling your lost fight against mediocrity, the film is quite damn enjoyable. Most importantly, it’s a film that will last quite long, and spawn heaps of sequels, TV-serieses, cool merchandising – and create a massive fanbase around it. You should enjoy it while you still can – it’s either theaters now, or never on your home telly. The 3D environment is such a big element of the whole film that watching it in 2D is almost like watching bad quality internet porn instead of… Well, the real thing.

Here’s Essi’s review of Avatar.

6. PONYO

The overlord Hayao Miyazaki is back, and takes a dive into the story of the Little Mermaid, giving it a surreal and fantastic twist, and delivering another masterpiece into a long line of masterpieces from the Ghibli Studios. Ponyo felt completely different from any other animation this year – honest and loving in a way only Miyazaki can do. His style is unique, and we sure should hope he stays in good enough shape to make at least few more, because as much as there’s nobody to step in for mr. David Lynch once his time is up, also Miyazaki is unique in this way.

5. MARY AND MAX

“So, you want to make a monochromatic animation about mental illnesses, and you want an all-star cast to it? Yeah, good luck with the funding…” Mary and Max was one of the biggest and most positive surprises – no, out-of-the-blues – this year. It’s a really touching, intelligent and extremely well-written animation about a life-long friendship between a girl in Australia and a man in New York. The story follows the letter exchange between these two, and builds up two perfectly believeable lives with all of the stranger-than-fiction odds and quirks life brings to you.

4. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

To be honest, I was a bit bored with Quentin Tarantino before watching Inglourious Basterds. I mean ever since Jackie Brown, his films haven’t been that impressive, and I started to feel like he had “found his slot” in the industry and descended from this once so promising young director into another retro freak repeating the same joke film after film. But I was wrong. Inglourious Basterds proved that there’s quite a lot of gunpowder still running through his veins, and he’s brave enough to do a film that’s basically long dialogues following each other, seasoned with hefty dozes of sudden violence. And there’s never enough of alternate history movies out there.

Here’s Essi’s review of Inglourious Basterds.

We got so excited about the film that we even did our own version of the trailer – sort of :) Enjoy “Iroun Sky Basterds”!

3. MOON

Semi-hard science fiction with slow pacing, great music, awesome performance and close relations to my next film, Iron Sky, when it comes to Moon as an environment, and Helium-3 as a new target for pure humane greed. Moon is the directioral debute for Duncan Jones who, with this film, catapulted himself among the most interesting directors of the next century. It was recently announced that he will direct the feature film adaptation of Escape from the Deep: The Epic Story of a Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew by Alex Kershaw. Jones also revealed that he will be doing “another science fiction film, called Mute, which takes place in a future Berlin. It’s a Blade Runner-inspired piece, a little love letter to that film.” And he will also direct Summit Entertainment project Source Code, a Science-Fiction thriller from Vendome Pictures, which will be produced by Mark Gordon. Actor Jake Gyllenhaal is in negotiations to play a major role in the film. So there you go, quite interesting films – and Duncan Jones is also a very active Twitterer.

2. A SERIOUS MAN

The Coen Brothers are able to “tilt my camera”, so to speak, so that suddenly everything around me feels a bit stranger and makes a little bit less sense, making life a little bit more exciting experience. A Serious Man was definitively one of those films – but it’s also a film you can do with two conditions: you need to be Jewish, and you need to have an Oscar to prove you know what you’re doing. Otherwise, you’d end up lynched.

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1. DEAD SNOW

We’ve been raving about Dead Snow enough for one one year already, and to be honest, I’m not even sure if the film’s actual official release year is 2009 (that’s what IMDB claims, though, but I saw it in 2008 already) but who the hell cares? I just can’t get enough of the Norwegian Nazi Zombies, and Tommy Wirkola’s excellent timing in both comedy and horror genres is stellar. He’s among the few directors I’m following very closely, and I’m very interested to see how his next film, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, turns out!

Here’s my review of Dead Snow.

Everyone – have a merry christmas time and remember not to go outside after dark – who knows what’s lurking there!

Ps! I challenge other Energidiots to do their own lists, too!

(Via ZombieRoom)

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Filmmakers are not the most positive bunch when it comes to future. The visions of tomorrow are rarely too encouraging – usually, it’s just death and oppressin waiting for us.

But not always! Every now and then, a sci-fi film comes up with a world to come that’s almost beararble.

Almost.

Zombie Room takes a look at the top-7 most promising days after tomorrow. Enjoy.

7. VANILLA SKY

You know Second Life? Yeah, it’s the hyped application where you are able to create your “second life” – you know, own a home, look cool, have actual friends and have no bad hair days. The only thing is that uh… Second Life sucks the shit out of your ass through your mouth – it’s ugly, it’s slow and it’s the birth place of the saddest Internet phenomenon out there: Second Life sex.

Can’t beat the SL Sex

In Vanilla Sky future – it’s all happening. And the girls… they are not just any random pixel lumps, but look amazingly like Penelope Cruz or Cameron Diaz.

But in real life, we still have few miles to go…

6. BACK TO THE FUTURE

Hoverboards. Do I need to say more?

I do? Well, one-size-shrinks-to-fit-all -jackets!

5. MINORITY REPORT

In the future, there’s no crime – and even those who are planning to do them, get their asses kicked by Tom Cruise and his special pre-crime unit. But what’s even cooler is that in the future we go back to the times when working on computers actually felt like something. Instead of your boring old mactop, you need a huge room with a screen the size of a small movie theater, special gloves to operate it – and a physique of a sports hero to use things like the Internet. In Minority Report’s future, there’s no more fat nerds rotting away in their mom’s basements – these guys and girls are out on the squash range to be in enough good shape for some serious Googling.

Nerds of the Minority Report future stay fit.

4. THE TRUMAN SHOW

Imagine this: no more Big Brother. No more The Bold and the Beautiful. No more crappy talent shows and no more Survivor – everything is made obsolete by the biggest reality TV show ever – The Truman Show. And what’s even better: instead of you hoping every day you pass a newspaper stand that these clowns on Big Brother, Talent and Idols would get in the same car and drive off the cliff, dying a quick but an extremely painful death – you’d actually care about the main guy! The world would be again a bit nicer place to live, and everybody wins.

Ok, it might not be the most ethical thing – but all we’re asking for is a bit of sacrifice to keep the rest of the world is happily sedated.

3. MOON

In Duncan Jones‘ Moon, everything is just fine. The world’s energy crisis has been solved: we’ve finally established a Helium-3 mining station on the Moon, so no oil or nuclear energy problems anymore!

Helium-3 is an extremely powerful source of energy which we don’t have too much on Earth, but Moon (supposedly) has quite a lot of it. And what’s even better, it only takes one guy to take care of the whole operation. It’s not like he’s going to start rebelling against Earth or anything, he’s pretty much stuck there – and even finding a replacement for him once things go wrong isn’t a problem, thanks to our friend, technology!

Again – it only takes a little bit of unselfish scarification. Come on, you can give that much to your community, right?

2. WALL-E

One thing we all hate is cleaning up the mess we make. Now, in the perfect future, there would be robots to do that for you, right? In the Wall-E future, we would get on a huge spaceship travelling away from Earth – and we’d had to do absolutely nothing in order to survive. Just sit down, chat with our mates and let the ship take care of every need we come up with.

And yeah, we’d be coming back to Earth one day, once the mess we made was cleaned up. And next time, we didn’t have to worry so much about things like environment etc. – the ship would stay there, so if everything would go to hell again, we could just jump onboard and come a back a few hundred years later!

1. IDIOCRACY

If ignorance is bliss – then Idiocracy is the ultimate utopia. In this future scenario, created by Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butt-Head fame) claiming aloud that your highest principles in life are sex and money is OK – actually, it’s considered as a damn philosophical statement! Ok, the world might be going to hell, and yeah, maybe watering your plantations with Gatorade is not the best idea out there – but hell, travelling in time there with your current brain capacity – which we both know is not much – you’d still be the combination between Einstein, Sun Tzu and Aristoteles.

(Via Zombie Room)

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

A number of things occurred to me recently. For one, next week it will be eight years since Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings film came out (and seven and six years since the second and third ones, respectively). Second, the 25th would be Humphrey Bogart’s 110th birthday, were he still alive. Also, apparently writing commenced on what would eventually form the novel Lord of the Rings in December, 1937; we recently covered a “retro-reimagining” of Matrix; and not long before that, the “pre-made” Raiders of the Lost Ark trailer gained considerable popularity at the offices. (How’s that for a strained lead-in?)
With all that in mind, I thought this a perfect moment to feature something that combines two things rather close to my heart… film noir and Lord of the Rings. What if the complications in getting his novel published had led the frustrated Prof Tolkien to offer his text to Hollywood instead?

As usual, Gollum takes the cake as the most memorable character, even though he’s up against some pretty tough competition here… including Bogie and even Godzilla!

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Storyboarding

What’s been happening in Helsinki is a lot of storyboarding. Then some of the most difficult scenes have been turned into animatics, or crude 3D scenes where you can test camera movements etc. And of course the storyboardskeep changing, because it’s always a process. Meanwhile back in Tampere Jussi is doing production design ie. planning all the Nazi spacecraft, interiors etc.

Budget meetings

There are a lot of these. And they’re not that interesting to talk about. Or take pictures of. Unless someone breaks a chair.

One is a budget meeting in Helsinki, another a budget meeting in Berlin. Turns out budget meetings look exactly the same in both countries!

Living on the edge

Samuli doing some network troubleshooting at the Tampere offices. What might look like chaos is actually a well organised storage unit for high-quality network cables.

Wardrobe

Near the Helsinki offices the costume department is stepping into gear with costume designer Jake Collier.

Location scouting

Meanwhile in Germany the set design is getting into full swing. To complement the built sets we’ll be using both virtual sets and location shooting. That means a lot of time spent location scouting in damp tunnels and abandoned factories in Berlin and Frankfurt. It’s wellw orth it though, since some of the places are absolutely awesome.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

The Xbox Zune marketplace opened here in Finland as well. This means that for the first time we have a VOD service that is 1) As easy to use as The Pirate Bay 2) Offers instant viewing 3) In good quality and 4) Is almost reasonably priced. The price being “almost” since it depends on the film, if you watch HD or SD and where you buy your Microsoft points from. But for example Babylon 5: The Lost Tales would cost you some 2-3e, while a current blockbuster in HD would be 4-5e.

But because the studios are still hell-bent on committing a slow suicide there are two major problems. First is the selection – it’s small, ridiculously small. There are fewer films on offer than there are DVDs on my bookshelf. But this should be only temporary. The second problem is that to watch the HD videos you need a HDCP enable tv that is connected to your xbox trough hdmi. This means that if they want me to pay the 1,50e extra for watching fiolms in glorious Full HD I need to buy a new tv AND a new Xbox (I’ve got one of the older models without hdmi).

This copy protection bullshit is absolutely ridiculous. HD is still in adoption phase, it’s not mainstream. And yet the studios are trying to slow down the adoption by building artificial barriers of entry. The second is that the studios need to sell the HD to get the price of films back up. The price of DVDs has dropped like a rock – the old bargain price of 9.99e is the new norm with films coming down to 3-7e in a month. Still every dvd produced costs, the printing fees, copyright fees & rating fees tend to stay the same even when the selling price goes down. And it’s the part that goes to the filmmakers that gets cut. And if that’s the price of a physical disc, why pay more for a download? Yet the price of online VOD is kept artificially high. HD streaming has the promise to offer the extra value and get some people to pay more. So slowing down the the adoption of HD is just plain stupid.

However, even though most people won’t be able to watch the HD streams in the next few years, the Zune marketplace is still the best VOD service available in Finland right now. And it’s good enough to have the potential to reach critical mass and finally bring film rentals online.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. Please leave any comments there.

The US version of Star Wreck has been released today. See the US trailer above and their website at starwreckmovie.com.

You can buy the DVD from Amazon, or rent it from Netflix.

So how does it feel?

Timo directing lt. Swagger back in the days of ancient Rome.

Honestly, back in 2005 we would have laughed at the idea of the film being released in the US. The whole idea of a Finnish film being sold there seemed far-fetched. But times change, Star Wreck isn’t even the only Finnish film released this month! The origins-of-Santa-Claus-film Christmas Story came out couple of days ago. Also low-budget horror Skeleton Crew from our friends from Ylöjärvi came out last month.

It seems that after Star Wreck and Jade Warrior the whole film industry has loosened their tie and opened couple of buttons from the well-starched shirt. And suddenly this more relaxed Finnish film has made sone new friends. And the best is yet to come, there are interesting projects going on, including a film adaptation of 80’s cult superhero comic Peräsmies that will absolutely destroy Hancock.

We Finns tend to compare ourselves to our neighboring countries, expecially Sweden that has always been more popular in foreign countries. And going down that road,w ell we still have a long way to go before Finland produces a game changing film like Let the Right One In. But it’s good to remember that before letting the right one in the best known Swedish vampire film was Frostbitten that was bit of a mess, even though it included a nazi vampire scientist.

Let’s hope that four years from now things have changed for the better once again.

Edit: Turns out November has seen a real Finnish invasion of the land of the free. Another DVD released yesterday was L.A Without a Map, from Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki who almost always casts Kari Väänänen - L.A Without a Map being one of the few exeptions. But Väänänen plays the Russian president in Star Wreck and Iisakki in Christmas Story.
Edit2: Turns out AJ Annila’s awesome horror film Sauna was also released just last month.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

(This post was originally published on Zombie Room. This is the second part of the Zombie Room’s look into the world of Video-On-Demand. You can read the first part here.)

THE WEBSITE

CDON.Com is a web store that operates in the Nordic countries. It’s owned by Modern Times Group, a company that created the Metro Newspaper, and specializes in entertainment - music, movies and consumer electronics.

The site has tucked the Video-On-Demand -service in the lower parts and shadier corners of the huge site, that’s hoping to serve every customer’s needs. Once you realize where it is, the basic functionality is quite simple. The site looks as clear as a web supermarket can - which means loads of ads blinking everywhere, and very little useful information anywhere.

FINDING A FILM

CDON.Com has a variety of films categorized under top lists, most viewed and by genre. Scanning the site we very quickly noticed that their Finnish language is horrible. Finding a film to watch is equally painful: from their mediocre selection of few hundred film - that’s basically a smaller (and much worse quality) selection than any video rental joint - we ended up picking Choke, a crappy drama based on Chuck Palahniuk’s quite awesome text.

In general, webstores do have a problem with shelf space - in any store you register at least on some level hundreds and hundreds of products, but on webstore you either have to have something in mind already, or you are relying on what other people are watching - unless they have a very advanced search and recommendation system.

CDON hasn’t made the film search too easy: apart from first ~20 films in every category, they just offer a plain list of titles, and even the mouseover that reveals a small picture of the cover works very randomly.

Some kind of a film suggestion system would be preferrable, but with a selection of few hundred titles, making it useful is impossible.

PAYING FOR THE FILM

Once you have something in mind, it’s relatively easy to pay and play. Registration isn’t necessary, and it takes about 10 minutes until the film is on. Payment options are either Visa or Mastercard - so eveyone with no credit cards; sorry, no service to you, sub-humans.

The prices are the best of the whole test - from 0,95€ to 3,95€, which is acceptable (I think 2 bucks a stream is what I’m willing to pay - in a perfect world), and they even have a “free film of the month”. After the purchase, you can either download the film or stream it. However, they’ve added some stupid download manager which, of course, destroys your digital copy after 24 hours.

WATCHING THE FILM

Quality is fuzzy DV, and there’s no subtitles. But the film starts right after you’ve paid it, and the player works perfectly.

SUMMARY

A service which offers the lowest prices, but stumbles with quite a bad selection of aging semi-blockbusters for general audience.

Zombie Room review: 2,5/5

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Movie-TV is the Internet-end of a small, Helsinki-based DVD-outlet called Keskus-Video, located at Eerikinkatu. The shop is a wonderful place, a small, labyrinth-like maze filled from wall to wall with DVDs - and the prices are very much right. It’s one of the places I avoid unless I have loads of money, since I end up spending a 50-100€ every time I just step on Eerikinkatu. Luckily, we live in Hakaniemi…

THE WEBSITE

Hats off to the developers of Movie-TV - they’ve boldly entered into a market that’s very soon going to be dominated by big-ass players, and only very few of the smaller ones will survive. I’m not sure what’s the business idea behind Movie-TV, but what I can gather from the site is that it’s basically a very comprehensive DVD shelf of a real movie nerd commune - it doesn’t have that many titles, but among them are some quite fascinating pearls: a wide collection of Haneke, loads of action films from the 80’s, nice amount of horror, and even kids’ animations and anime. Instead of trying to push aging, two-year-old semi-blockbusters, it’s selling me good films.

Technically, the site isn’t flawless - the design is a bit clunky and usability is lacking certain amount of intuition.

FINDING A FILM

At first, the site throws on my face a random collection of DVD covers. Too small to be of any use, but at least I get an idea of quite a colourful selection. The films are categorized under top lists and genres. We decided look scan around for a while, and ended up on I Heart Huckabees (no idea why, and I still regret the decision).

PAYING FOR THE FILM

Let’s start with the bad news - the pricing is absolutely mindless. They ask 6€/streaming, and there’s no possiblity for download - excuse me, what the hell? It took a while for us to convince that we’re willing to pay, but - reminding us of the test we were working on - we gave up and paid… But, really: please, think about it - what are you doing? You should be competing with Pirate Bay and Mininova, not with Sokos and Stockmann.

But then came the nice surprises: instead of the credit card requirements, you can decide to pay either with a card, directly from bank account, or even with an SMS or a phonecall. No registration is required, so they won’t be spamming me for the rest of my lifed just because I wanted to see a film.

WATCHING THE FILM

Once you’ve selected the film, it takes only 5 minutes before it’s is rolling - and there’s a possibility to choose whatever quality you like - even HD, if available. The film plays nicely and the quality is good - even subtitles are available.

SUMMARY

A small but devoted service with an interesting selection of ridiculously overpriced films.

Zombie Room Review: 3/5

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Red-themed Film2home -service is owned by Bonver Videodata, a company that claims to be the single biggest home entertainment distributor in the Nordic countries. The service is available in Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

THE WEBSITE

Film2home is devoted to films and TV-serieses, and they begin serving you with two major disappointments: first, you need to use Internet Explorer for the service to work, and second - they have a whopping library of “almost 1000 films”. Now having 1000 films in your home shelf is quite a lot, but you’ve picked them yourself. For a service trying to serve thousands of customers on daily basis, 1000 titles is just not enough.

The site looks nice enough and it has big, clear and clickable buttons everywhere for the ease of use.

FINDING A FILM

The selection is limited, yet they’ve been able to drag some quite fresh films there, too. Well, fresh considering their DVD release schedule in Finland… The service is putting a lot of effort in offering enough interesting information about the titles, so you don’t have to go digging for IMDb - they even have a user rating system, which reminded me of how completely inexistent the social dimension in mostly all of the VOD services is.

The films have been categorised in quite an intuitive way - in addition to genres and top-lists, the titles can be searched by the name of actor and theme etc. This is important, and it’s completely unacceptable that services out there don’t put enough effort into good and clear categorizing and search methods - the only reason for that is that mostly they are lazy and don’t give a shit about the user experience.

PAYING FOR THE FILM

There are films you can only “rent”, and films you can “buy”, too - that means, of course, downloading. But basically, that’s what it does anyway, it’s just a minor difference in the tech on how it’s executed - but the pricing is just ridiculous. They expect me to pay 15-20 € for a digital download - it’s really one of the worst deals… I pay considerably less on mostly any DVD, and I get best quality, a physical copy, all the extras and so on…

Again, these services should be competing against Pirate Bay, not Stockmann.

Price range for download is around 4 euroes, you get something a bit cheaper and there’s even a free film for members (this month it’s Mission Impossible…). Payment methods include Visa and Mastercard.

WATCHING THE FILM

Now here comes the shit. First, we needed to change from Firefox to Internet Explorer, go through the painful setup process of a Microsoft products, before nd finally we were able to start viewing. Oh, no - we of course needed install Adobe Flash Player. That’s OK, only problem is that it refused to install - the reason was, eventually, because we were using 64bit Explorer, not the regular one. I almost gave up trying to figure this out, since there was no error messages or anything, it just didn’t work. It took almost 15 minutes from the moment we decided we wanted to see In the Electric Mist, before it was actually running.

Don’t know is this somehow Flash Player -related problem, or something to do with the service - but we weren’t able to pause the film without having to stop and start over again from the beginning (Buffering… attempting to reconnect… buffering… … …). Doesn’t sound a biggie, but remember that “pause” is the greatest feature of home cinema compared to theaters…

SUMMARY

A nice-looking service built on nearly unusable tech, with quite a small selection of films.

Zombie Room Review: 2/5

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Filmnet is a VOD service that operates in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. It’s “powered by Canal+”, which should promise plenty of interesting content available.

Well, not so much. They have exactly 133 titles in the library, which is basically not even a library - we have over 400 DVDs in our shelves. But there’s one we, the Zombies, like very much: they have Dead Snow!

THE WEBSITE

The site looks nice and sleazy in its glossy black suit, almost like an aging playboy in a bit shady nightclub, serving Mickeys for the girls.

FINDING THE FILM

The films are categorized clearly under normal genre categories, and as a nice plus, they have a “recently watched” films in the front page - almost like RedTube!

But here’s an interesting question – during the last 5 days I’ve visited there, the recently watched films –box’s content hasn’t changed a bit. Makes you wonder if it’s either broken, or they have no users.

The site has striking resemblances in general look and feel to the free porn sites on the net – and they even have a 18+ section which has almost as many films as the non-porn site has!

PAYING FOR THE FILM

Payment options are limited, and the system gives a strange errors, trying obviously to hint the user to use Internet Explorer. The price for the films is expensive - 4,25€/film, regardless of how old the film you are watching. You also need to register in order to be able to pay, which is kinda stupid.

WATCHING THE FILM

But the nice thing is that the service is quite straightforward, and it took us only 4 minutes until the film was up and running. The quality is OK, the connection works quite well - only kinda embarrassing thing we noticed was that their subtitles didn’t support the Nordic characters - the “ä”’s and “ö”’s.

SUMMARY

A service that’s clear, fast to use and straightforward, but looks more like a porn site, has terribly bad selection of films (ok, they have Dead Snow, which is a big plus) and the pricing and the subtitles suck ass.

Zombie Room review: 1,5/5

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My expectations for SFAnytime weren’t too high to start with, given the experiences of Jarmo Puskala from Energia. SFAnytime has been for quite a long time the biggest VOD-site in Finland, and they’ve been promoting heavily. And at the same time, it has been criticized the most.

THE WEBSITE

SFAnytime looks neat and clean, and you get very quickly a good idea on what the service is about. The impression of a professional VOD service crumbles quite fast though, when an unexplainable error message halts the process, and you are required to register - after which the service just crashes immediately.

FINDING THE FILM

The film catalogue is nice – not specifically new, but has some good films in it. We decided to pick Steve McQueen’s debut film Hunger, which turned out to be an excellent choise.

PAYING FOR THE FILM

Trying to pay for the film was, again, very cumbersome. The process begins with a strange DRM notice, after which you need to re-register. Visa and Mastercard are accepted as payment methods, and right after the payment, it comes apparent that Explorer is required as a browser. The price is 4€ - again, quite expensive, especially given the overall quality of the purchase process.

WATCHING THE FILM

The service gets stuck into “acquiring media usage rights” –message, and we’re able to continue watching after we had changed the browser. At this point, I’m almost willing to give up, but force myself to continue. The quality of the download needs to be chosen from a very complicated and badly advised menu. It takes total of 10 minutes to get the film rolling. Luckily, Hunger is the best film we’ve watched during the test, so my pain is alleviated.

SUMMARY

A service that has been around for quite some time, and just fails to fix its basic problems, but it still remains to be the first place to go because they’ve managed to establish themselves in Finland as the definitive VOD service, thanks to big promotion and marketing.

Zombie Room Review: 1,5/5

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We had already almost given up hope for a decent service by the time we finished watching the film from SFAnytime, but then our friend Eric Vogel tipped us about The Auteurs, a fresh VOD service we had never heard of.

THE WEBSITE

The Auteurs is a VOD service unlike anything we had encountered ever before. Right from the beginning, it’s apparent that this is something different: the website looks much more like a social network site than a VOD service, it’s clear, simple and focuses more on content than shiny skin - and it makes me feel like it’s made by people who actually have a respect for great films.

The experience starts with a beautifully simple Facebook Connect login. After that, you end up into a site that promotes loads of great films in very informative and detailed way, with big pictures and clear links.

The site makes watching films online a social experience, where you share your reviews, your wishlist and films you watch with other people - and it’s very tightly connected with Facebook and Twitter. You can create your own profile, they have a forum for discussions, and everything you do and see is easilly shareable.

FINDING THE FILM

Unlike most of the other services, The Auteurs has really done a great job in presenting, suggesting and categorising films. And what films they have! No bullshit, only good films by great filmmakers. Masters of cinema like Kubrick, Lynch, Fellini and Svankmajer populate the amazingly international and high-quality film listings.

The problem is that most of the films they have on the site are not available for viewing, at least not now. The site makes it clear that it’s still in Beta, so most of the issues are acceptable - they are working on it, and doing a great job. But you can very easilly just sort the films available for viewing in your area, and although the catalog is not huge yet, you get an impression that somebody has really been working on it.

And the categorization of films is highly advanced - the site has wonderful lists like Festivals, where they’ve listed all of the films in competition on every major festival, beginning from early 30’s.

Each title is described in great detail, and you can view what others have thought of it. For us, unlike in other services, it was a problem to decide which film to watch out of the great selection, and we settled down eventually with Primer.

PAYING FOR THE FILM

The first real issue is the price. At least that’s what I thought first, but then I realized that hell, it’s really not the price I’m paying, but the experience and the extra I get with it. Each feature film costs 5€, and short films 2€ - there’s even some free films available. And even better, you have a possibility for a monthly subscription - with 18€/month you get an unlimited access to the ever-growing selection of the site’s films, and with 10€ you get to watch 4 films/month.

This is almost too good to be true.

WATCHING THE FILM

And as I suspected, it is too good. With the following comments, please be aware that the site is still in beta, so there are problems and beta users need to bear with it. And I’m also not sure why watching the film sucked, and if it has anything to do with the site itself, but it did. And we tested it out with two different computers.

The film twitches a bit. It’s an amazingly annoying feature, and I’m not 100% sure if it’s a problem with every film (we, obviously, tested out just one), but watching Primer was really painful. Bad quality can be forgiven - and the quality at Auteurs is very good - but skipping and twitching can’t. The film was nearly unwatchable, and I felt very bad about it, even more since the site was tuned exactly the way I want a VOD site to be, and they’ve even say: “P.S.—By the way, we’ve worked hard on the quality of the streaming and we are very proud of it… just wanted to let you know…”

I don’t know what was wrong with it, but it sucked big time.

EDIT: As Eric wrote in comments: “Sad to hear about stuttering/streaming problems with The Auteurs. I’ve watched two films there with none of these issues.”

Another big, annoying minus for the viewing experience was the forced subtitles - in Swedish. Watching Primer, which is quite a mindfuck of a film in itself, that’s twitching every now and then, and subtitled in Swedish was well… not very pleasant. Not worth 5€.

Having said that, the great thing is that viewing is possible with every operating system and every browser out there, and it’s really fast and easy - took us about 3 minutes to get the film rolling, fastest of the whole test.

SUMMARY

A great service and social network that’s suffering from some beta problems, but still manages to rise above all the others. Give it another 6 months, and this thing is going to become the definitive VOD service for film geeks, serving films that won’t be available even on Torrent sites.

Zombie Room Review: 3,5/5 (Note: still in Beta!)

- - -

That’s it for now. Check back at Zombie Room for parts one and two, and my attempt at hoe the Ideal VOD Service should be done.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

When there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the Hellsinki.

The Norwegian Nazi Zombies are finally crawling to Finland, and what better way to hail their excellency than throw in a proper Zombie Walk! In collaboration with Night Visions and Zombiewalk Helsinki, and my blog Zombie Room is proud to invite all you freaks to join the Zombie Walk from Helsinki Railway Station to Maxim movie theater, and then watch the greatest nazi zombie film ever - Dead Snow.

Dresscode

Well, it’s simple - Dead Snow Zombies are deceased soldiers and wear military - you know what I mean. Now add some blood, guts and gore and you’re all set. Then show up at Helsinki Railway Station at 20:00 on Wednesday, October 28th - and be sure to book your ticket for the screening beforehand! The price ain’t bad - 7,5€. You can order them in advance (and you should!) from here.

And remember to RSVP to the Facebook event here!

Competition

There’s also a competition here! The Night Visions organizers will pick the most rotten zombie corpse among all of the Zombie Walkers and hand out some cool prices.

Oh, how about the film? Yeah, we’ve seen it - we were actually among the first ~15 people who saw the film - and you can check out a review for the film from here.

TL;DR: Fucking awesome.

Here’s the trailer:

Here are some photos from the movie for inspiration:

For more info visit the official site www.nightvisions.info
Check out also the Helsinki Zombiewalk official site
And here’s Dead Snow official site.

(Via Zombie Room)

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

The grandest of all Nazi films lately is coming to the theaters tomorrow here in Finland, so we decided to celebrate it with a small video we made with the Iron Sky team while in Cannes.

Enjoy ;)

Shot and edited during one quite fuzzy and hot day in Cannes by our wonderful Pekka Ollula, directed by umm maybe me or something :)

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

I’ve already mentioned the Star Wreck fan fiction production Star Wreck 2pi some time ago on this blog, but thought about coming back to it now that it seems that the guys have really managed to shoot most of the film, and just released a short making-of clip of how things are progressing. The folks behind the production are Thierry and Fabienne Gschwind, a bro and a sis, and they are based in Switzerland. Check out the making-of, and join the production on Wreckamovie to help them get this thing off the ground!

They seem to have quite an ambitious hull breach scene!

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

The Finnish Film Foundation just released their latest funding decisions.

Obiously the big news for us is that Iron Sky will be receiving 800,000€ in production support. Most Finnish films receive support from the Foundation and it’s often a big part of the budget. We’re obiously very, very happy of their support. If you read Finnish there’s a lot of other info on the film as well, maybe even bit of a spoiler in the synopsis, so watch out.

Also, it’s been very interesting lately to read the support decisions. There are many interesting projects in developement right now and I’d go as a far as saying that the field of Finnish film is changing. The gem (that has absolutely nothing to do with us) in this month’s support decisions was called Zombie-Risteily, that would translate to “Zombie Cruise” about a cruise ship overrun with, you guessed it, Zombies! And what’s even better for us Finns is that’s it’s one of the ferries sailing between Sweden and Finland - also affectionately known as “drilling platforms” and many other names. Basicly they are huge cruise ships with about 2000-3000 passengers that are not so much going somewhere as going to the ship to get absolutely and totally wasted. There are thousand and one stories to be told on those ships and zero films thus far.

Also in the scripting stages is a film adaptation of Kimmo Risto Isomäki’s book Sands of Sarasvati. A thriller about the climate change - and trust me, it’s good. It should also adapt to the screen very well. If you want to have a look the comic adaptation is already translated into english, but the translation of the novel isn’t out just yet.

Other interesting genre-ish films are Haaska (aka. Carcass) - a horror film about a nature photographer in the Finnish wilderness. And Lykantropia (Lycantrophy) that’s to be a drama/thriller about child killing wolves in the 19th century.

And since we’re talking about Finnish films I can’t resist gushing on about the teaser for Mothgirl, upcoming film from our friend Toni Pykäläniemi.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Here’s the pdf version of the second issue of The Truth Today distributed in dead tree form at the Cannes Film Festival.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

The original paperboy is back, bringing The Truth to the busy people at the Cannes film festival. How do they react to the shocking news of a Space Nazi attack?

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

We talk to our friend Eric Vogel ,producer of the awesome upcoming Norwegian film called Norwegian Ninja. I read the script a while back and even in text form it was a blast in the best possible “Holy crap! Ninjas! In Norway! Oh wait, didn’t that really happen in the 80’s?” kind of way, so really looking forward to seeing this one.

Check out Norwegian Ninja on Wreckamovie.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

The internets in Cannes appear to be acting out revenge for every time the phrase “cheese eating surrender monkeys” has been used, so Cannes updates from the Iron Sky team have been sporadic. It seems the wifi connection works at night when everyone is out partying, but come daytime and millions of laptops it all goes down. Last I heard from the Cannes team was last night when Timo got up at 5am to send out emails.

See Twitter for the latest updates. The team in Cannes includes @LeonBlank, @Gerosimov and @pollula. For Cannes updates you might also want to check out our friend from Norway @vogeleric and #cannes hashtag.

Below is the latest update from Essi, originally posted over at Zombie Room:

The biggest movie in Cannes last year was of course Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which also turned out to be the biggest disappointment of the year. Never the less the whole festival was all about Indy, even me. It wasn´t in the official selection of course, but it was definitely the most anticipated and overly marketed film here. Another big one was Kung Fu Panda, which was actually a hundred times better than Indy. Anyway the real gems of last year (in my opinion) were Blindness by Fernando Meirelles, Che by Steven Soderberg, Entre Les Murs (The Class) by Laurent Cantet, Gomorra (Gomorrah) by Matteo Garrone, Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman.

If last year was Indiana Jones´s year, this year is all about Mr. Quentin Tarantino and his new World War II epic Inglourious Basterds. The movie will open on the 20th and I will definitely be there reporting from the scene. I´m planning to see it on Wednesday morning. Tarantino won Palme d’Or for Pulp Fiction in Cannes in 1994 and now he is back with a vengeance! Inglourious Basterds has the biggest ensemble cast Tarantino has ever had and the footage looks amazing. I also read somewhere that Tarantino might even have a sequel/prequel to it if the movie is a hit. “I have a half-written prequel ready to go if this movie’s a smash,” says Tarantino.

One of the most interesting movies in Cannes is Up. It was the opening film and it was also the first animation ever to open the festival. Up is Pixars new comedy adventure directed by Pete Docter, who also directed the amazing Monsters, Inc. He is also one of the writers behind WALL·E. So all these things considered I´m pretty exited about the film. The movie tells a story about a 78 year old balloon salesman Carl Fredricksen, who finally fulfills his lifelong dream of a great adventure when he ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies away. This year Cannes has finally installed their very own 3D projector(s), so Up will be seen in the best possible format.

On the horror front we have two pretty exiting projects. The other is Antichrist directed by Lars vor Trier, who is one of my favorite directors of all time. It seems that he has returned to his roots a by doing a very visual and beautiful movie. I have heard a lot of talk that the movie is really scary and that it will take some time to recover from it. Sounds just like a Trier movie. Then we have Drag Me to Hell by the legendary director Sam Raimi who is very well known for his horror films, but lately he has been doing huge action films like Spider-Man 1-3. With Drag Me to Hell he is also returning to his roots much like Trier.

There are a lot of titles here that I know nothing about except the director. And for me that is enough in some cases. Here are a few examples: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky by Jan Kounen, Das weiße Band directed by Michael Haneke and Taking Woodstock directed by Ang Lee, which opened yesterday. I´m not sure if I have time to see any of these, but I will definitely be following these movies now and after Cannes.

I also must mention Los abrazos rotos, which is a new film from Pedro Almodóvar. It stars Almodovars muse Penélope Cruz (who else?). I will try to get to see this as well. The premiere is on thuesday, so maybe me and Pekka will go there to do a video blog, let´s see…

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was Heath Ledger last role. Among him the movie features actors like Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell and even Tom Waits. I don´t know too much about this one, but images are quite disturbing. In a good way I mean.

Yesterday I went to see a market screening of a movie called Run Bitch Run, which was a full out exploitation movie. Unfortunately the movie was so bad we had to leave after 30 minutes or so. Today I´m going to see scifi movie called Moon directed by Duncan Jones. I have high expectations for that, after all he is David Bowies son.

As and end note I want to apologize that our blog is not updating as planned. We have huge problems with the internet connection here. But we try to keep these posting coming never the less.

- Essi

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.