I had no idea Christopher Nolan's Insomnia was a remake when I saw it in 2002. (I did know I was one of two people in the theater who burst out laughing at a joke the script intended to be obnoxiously unfunny, because a mutual friend had been inflicting the exact same setup on us for weeks in a sort of determinedly absurdist way: "What has two thumbs and needs to finish his Greek homework? This guy!" The entire audience twisted around to see what was wrong with us. It was kind of great.) I'm not even sure when I became aware of the original; I suspect sometime after I had realized that I would watch Stellan Skarsgård read the phone book, which is sort of what he was doing for most of The Avengers (2012). Criterion had put out the DVD, so it may have gotten onto my radar when I started noticing them. In any case, it was only two or three years ago that I saw Erik Skjoldbjærg's Insomnia (1997) for the first time, at which point I fell in love.
( He sat up in bed and shouted. That's when they recognized him. )
I am not even sure the two movies are the same genre, now that I think about them. Insomnia in Norwegian is cool and richly colored, obscuring with light as a traditional film noir frames with darkness, full of silences and half-notes and so much not an action movie that its few moments of speed and violence are as jarring to the audience as to the characters. American, it ends in a blaze of gunfire; it’s a thriller. Which I enjoyed when I saw it with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dgr8bob all those years ago at Brandeis, but Skjoldbjærg's is the film that feels like not sleeping. Biosphere's tapping, buzzing electronic score sounds like the loops your brain gets stuck in, working the same image over and over. I've seen the movie three times now and I find I'm increasingly unsure of what can be proven to have happened in it, how far back its protagonist's sleep-starved unreliability extends—by the time the credits freeze on that first, final full-screen darkness, you feel like you haven't slept for a week.
I mean, I usually haven't. But I still think it works on people who aren't me. Somebody who likes a good film blanc find out.
( He sat up in bed and shouted. That's when they recognized him. )
I am not even sure the two movies are the same genre, now that I think about them. Insomnia in Norwegian is cool and richly colored, obscuring with light as a traditional film noir frames with darkness, full of silences and half-notes and so much not an action movie that its few moments of speed and violence are as jarring to the audience as to the characters. American, it ends in a blaze of gunfire; it’s a thriller. Which I enjoyed when I saw it with
dgr8bob all those years ago at Brandeis, but Skjoldbjærg's is the film that feels like not sleeping. Biosphere's tapping, buzzing electronic score sounds like the loops your brain gets stuck in, working the same image over and over. I've seen the movie three times now and I find I'm increasingly unsure of what can be proven to have happened in it, how far back its protagonist's sleep-starved unreliability extends—by the time the credits freeze on that first, final full-screen darkness, you feel like you haven't slept for a week.I mean, I usually haven't. But I still think it works on people who aren't me. Somebody who likes a good film blanc find out.
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