Still, I do like this film more than I don't, narration and all. I just find it annoying that the parts that I perceive to be uninspired (plus the one scene with some very dodgy consent) do bring down what I would otherwise consider to be internationally competitive movie from this time period.

Unfortunately, I do think that the first 5 and the last 30 minutes are the most interesting parts of the film, and that if the energy had been similar to those the entire time the fact that the narrative is mostly about mundane countryside relationship drama wouldn't have lost me quite as much.

The acting was still a bit overblown, but it did work for me in some ways.

The main character, Viktor, being theatrical while trying to be sophisticated despite being obviously drunk off his ass the whole runtime felt appropriate for the type of character that he was revealed to be by the end.

Very pleasantly surprised by this. The film immediately broke the low expectations that I had from all the overacted dramas and the ok-at-best comedies that usually represented older Finnish films on our public broadcasting channels.

There was some classy directing thorough the whole thing.

(Though I think that most of these aren't readily available outside of Finland, or sometimes WITHIN it, or have official English subtitles in any form. But that's its own issue.)

Unless I end up falling off of it, I'mma be posting the movies I'm going through on here.

Not exactly reviews, just some thoughts on them. I want to have them up somewhere for future reference, and if someone ends up discovering a new film/director due to stumbling upon them then all the better.

While I don't like generalizations, I also cannot really give a good defense against it either. It made me recognize that my own info on the Finnish film scene as a whole, especially pre-2000s, is poor aside from a few individual cases.

So in order to fix that, I'mma be watching a bunch of them.

"The person who tried to boil the neurotoxin out of this thing died, so I'll boil it twice instead."

"...well that person also died. Turns out that three times is the magic number."

It's weird that its taken them that long to import that Hashihime tie-in novel, but I guess that's to be expected for a niche VN like that.

"The life, Adventures and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Luffy: Containing an account of his travels in the East Blue, of his rescuing of bounty hunter Zoro and a boy called Coby; of his encounter with a villain clown and cat thief Nami, citizen of Orange Town, who thence became their navigator;.."

Maybe if stuff like One Piece tried it out too, potential new readers would find its length less intimidating since you're already getting a preview of the story so far when you pick it up.

You're welcome, Oda.

Duelist B is the people's champ.

(The people is me, I betted so much on him)

I had frankly forgotten that the theatrical poster for this film had a blue sky as the backdrop until I looked it up again.