"B4 and 4fter" [mp3 removed]
A slightly melancholy nursery tune. MIDI notes playing 3 hardware oscillators* tuned to make a chord - with LFO tremelo on 2 of the oscillators' VCA control voltages. Some obscure Hammond B-3 licks (taken out of context) on the fade.
*1 Doepfer triangle (low note) and 2 Gamma Wave Source
Let the Right One In, 2008, Sweden, film, subtitled
TOTAL SPOILERS - don't read w/o seeing
Let the Right One In is a perfect loop that spins out more even metafiction than the main story contains.
Several mysteries of the clumsy Father, surrogate Father, or captor seen in the first half are explained in the second.
The Father, we learn, is the boy at the end of the next cycle of serving as keeper/guardian for the ageless vampire girl.
What strikes us initially as the Father's slow-witted ineptitude is in fact burn-out and grief after a lifetime of murdering for her and covering up her crimes. He still loves her, because she once seduced him just as convincingly and decisively as she does the Boy in this film. Yet he longs for death, wants to get caught, and disfigures himself horribly when he sees he is about to be replaced, inevitably, by a younger guardian.
All of this will happen to the Boy, as it happened to unknown other boys before. We are seeing the beginning and the end of his life.
One critic complained about the violence of the revenge in the swimming pool at the end -- was it just a cheap thrill for the audience? Perhaps, but the pleasure is hollowed-out by the scenes of the Boy weeping afterwards. Also the extremity of the event further explains the Boy's willingness to give the girl decades of servitude -- he owes her big time. Prior to this we saw him vacillating over her murders, even losing his taste for his serial killer clipping collection. After this incident, he's hooked for life.
I pondered the gender-bending of the vampire Girl. It explains how/why she offers "guy advice" to the Boy about defending himself from bullies. She asks the Boy to "be me" but also wants to be him.
We see hints of how the power dynamic of this very alike couple will play out over years of the Boy's servitude. The girl bosses the Father around and occasionally offers him a stroke on the cheek. The Boy, feeling his oats after shellacking his first bully, plays games with the girl's weakness of not being able to enter a room uninvited. She must give him a bloody demonstration of where such games will lead.
Most the reviews I skimmed talked about the coming of age/romance aspects of the story but not its exposition of the roots of a lifetime co-dependent relationship.
cf. Laloux's Time Masters (1982) - surprise ending involving origins of "old man" character.
Update, June 2016: Reading John Ajvide Lindqvist's original novel, source of the film, lowers the above interpretation a few notches. [Spoilers] In the book, the "father" is an alcoholic with a jones for boys, picked up by the vampire late in the alcoholic's life, and the vampire is in fact a boy, missing genitalia since his transformation to bloodsucker instigated by a sadistic vampire aristocrat in centuries past. (The purpose and mechanics of the de-sexing are a bit murky in the book.) Although Lindqvist wrote the script for the film version, the decision was made to downplay the sexual elements. Those changes certainly still leave open the interpretation above -- that in the film, the Father was once a Boy to the vampire, and the story hinges on the acquisition of a new Boy. Nevertheless, this spin was not in the author's mind.
Have been looking at the Phone Arts blog and decided to start a battle of the band(width)s with some "MSPaint Phone Art." This is the new Windows 7 MSPaint which allows you to (i) draw a phone outline, (ii) draw with a crayon, (iii) draw with a magic marker, (iv) paint with semi-transparent wash, etc. (The above was made on a PC.)
Phone Arts' mission statement has changed since I first wrote about them. Now it says they are "experimenting using only the mobile phone as the medium to create unique compositions" and that they "explore the boundaries of the phone to create graphic illustrations and designs." Previously it said their aim was to "create something on a mobile device with the intended purpose of designing graphic arts that are spontaneous and reactionary."
I quibbled about the word reactionary (it could mean conservative as well as "reacting to each other") but the rest of the statement was fine before. "Graphic arts" is better than "graphic illustrations and designs." Both illustration and design are usually done for a purpose and for a client, whereas these one-off compositions are made for no other purpose than to exist on your phone (or be downloaded for enjoyment, delectation, etc). Also, I see no "exploring the boundaries of the phone" going on there. Instead a handful of "factory setting" techniques are used over and over--various flat brush shapes, sprays, "3D" brushes, some CAD-like rendering, and remixing existing photos and designs. No one is throwing the phone off a building, painting underwater, or opening up the back of the phone and wiring it to respond to household appliances.
