Trauma

If you think this is cute you clearly haven't watched the movie.


It's not often I think back on a recent event and realise that it has traumatised me a little bit. Yeah, maybe I am just an impressionable softie who is not sufficiently hardened because I do not watch enough horror movies or perhaps even remotely scary films. Well, I recently saw The Orphanage along with a few hundred other people at 1 a.m. at the Roskilde Festival, and I guess it was just because of the intense mood inside the cinema, but I got really frightened several times while I was watching the movie. The were moments where practically everyone screamed out loud.

Now, a lot of the effects were pretty cliché and the storyline was pretty obscure, but nevertheless it was all effective. The whole movie had as sense of brutal otherworldlyness that just drew you in. If I watched it in my living room chances are I wouldn't be quite as scared, but I'm not sure I'd like to take that chance. I can admit when something scares me even if it is slightly pathetic :-P

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Apart from that I've watched a couple other movies, one of them being 3:10 to Yuma.
It is a remake of an old Western movie, and while I haven't seen the original I'd say this one did the job. It was refreshing to see another take on the whole western gang mythology that - in spite of that particular genre of movie being less prominent that it was in the 20th century - still contains a great deal of fascinating material. Seeing Russell Crowe as a villain was particularly refreshing, and Christian Bale's performance was delicately discrete.
Peter Fonda had a supporting role but really made the most of his limited time on-screen.

With all its twists and turns, cliché or not, 3:10 kept me entertained.

Wreckage

One festival, unspecified amounts of alcohol and some fabulous concerts later, I sit down to write something that might possibly resemble a coherent blog entry. So what is there to say? For large part, memories of that festival are obscured by an alcoholic haze, but there is a wide variety of moments that were powerful enough to stick around.

The most remarkable concert I remember in its entirety was with Radiohead who quietly blew some 50,000 people away. One of those things you just don't forget.
Then there was Judas Priest, an old bunch of guys whose music I didn't know all that well, but the guitar solos and gimmicky stage show kept me interested.
I heard bits of Neil Young, and I heard all of the Kings of Leon concert but was quite positively pissed at the time so there are limits to how much I remember of it.
A lot of the other concerts are bit of a blur though I don't recall hearing more than a couple of bands that I genuinely didn't like.

It's kinda funny talking about the festival like this. I got to know (at least on a very superficial level) a fair lot of new people, many of whom I probably annoyed, being an immediately stranger to the bunch - along with my generally quirky personality. I enjoyed myself though, even if thinking back on the festival is a very surreal process. It's like I was gone from the face of the earth for a week.... Gone into some parallel dimension with a population of around 100,000 people, all living in tents of wherever, waking up to the smell of piss and beer every morning in similar tents that were all heated to oven-level during the day.

It was all addictive and yet I'm glad to be back. Slowly recovering from a bloody cold that I caught. There's that usual vacuum left by spare time. But I think I can fill it in... Just takes a little while getting into the habbit.

Can't stand the silence anymore! Well... I can stand it for another day at least.