I was multitasking, writing holiday cards and watching Cool and Crazy earlier today. (Note to self: don't multitask while watching a movie that's in Norwegian with subtitles. You miss half the movie.)Cool and Crazy, which I could not convince Mi Hermana and bro-in-law to watch even though I dragged the DVD all the way to Michigan for Thanksgiving, is a short documentary about a men's intergenerational choir in a small Norwegian fishing village. Essentially, the choir is their livelihood. The film interviews various choir members and ends with their singing tour in Russia.
I don't recall how this got in my Netflix queue, but what the hell, I worked with it. The Norwegian folk songs were a great soundtrack for holiday card-writing. The times I looked up to read the subtitles, I discerned that a lot of the older guys in the choir considered themselves ladykillers back in the day (and were very excited to go to Russia), that there was a token communist singer who made choir practice and the road trip to Russsia reeeeally interesting, and that the landscape and town shots were very well done (the stark contrasts in colors were amazing. But other than that, I'm not sure that it tried to say anything political or economic (though a few of the conversations for the camera were Cold War-related), and I always look for some political message in documentaries. Need to stop doing that. I think this one was just about guys from a small economically depressed town, who sing.
Kind of like The Fully Monty, but Norwegian fisherman instead....
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