And the world fell out of her bottom...

Dog 2 has got an upset stomach.  As dog owners for over 6 years now we've got pretty used to labrador lower GI problems but mostly from Dog 1.  They like to eat and they're not terribly fussy about it, they're also amazingly effective at expelling, well, crap, from their lower GI at high speed.  Assuming it's not a nasty parasite, they normally can be treated the same way as human problems.  24 hours off food, clear out the system and then 'bland' food.

Of course, a dog version of bland food is actually kinda heavenly for them, being mostly rice/potato and chicken.  Anyway, she seems better today and we only had one in-house emergency (thank heavens for Nature's Miracle).

Yesterday we saw Elysium.  It's not a bad film, but is extremely unevenly put together with some editing choices that's I suspect were not Neil Blomkamp's ideas.  Like with District 9, Sharlto Copley shined as the South African mercenary Kroger.  He didn't so much as steal the movie from Matt Damon as pulled the rug out from under him and laughed while doing it.  At one point I thought M was going to pee herself laughing at the scenes.  The thing is, while Kroger is a psychopath, he's doing a lot of it muttering in Afrikaans and apparently a lot of it was very very funny and very accurate to the state that a lot of men were in that M knew when they got back from the Angolan border in the 1990s.  How Blomkamp got them to have 3 characters speaking in South African Slang and Afrikaans without any subtitles is beyond me, but it adds a whole dimension to what could otherwise be quite a flat film.

I'd rather see a directors cut where they take out the pieces that felt like the Deckard voice over in Blade Runner.

The Bridge...

We started watching the US version and got curious about the original which I managed to find, so we've just spent a couple of weekends going cross-eyed on subtitles.

I used to work for a Swedish company which had their head quarters in Malmo, so I spent several years flying to Copenhagen and taking the train across the bridge in question to Malmo and it was weird to see so much of Malmo used.  We had offices by the docks and pretty much every establishing shot on the Swedish side seems to have been taken in the industrial park Teleca were in.

At first I was interested to see how they'd drive the plot from the point of view of the differences in the locations.  In the US version, much is made of the huge murder rate in Juarez versus El Paso...  It's a bit different in Copenhagen and Malmo, no matter what Wallender would like you to think.  Then there's the issue of finding out that the top of a body was white and the bottom Mexican.  Whereas in the original this critical plot point is described is 'this one is slightly paler...'

The subtitles in the version we watched were dreadful (a key plot point hinged on a character coming out of a comma...) but mostly it was interesting to watch the Swede's and Danes stereotype the crap out of each other.  The Danish police are, apparently, lazy, corrupt, incompetent and generally useless.  Whereas the Swedish are such anal retentive control freaks, it's not a problem to have a cop with serious Aspergers.

While I'll probably watch the conclusion of the US version, it's been, basically, a scene by scene remake, and one that probably didn't really need to be made.  Casting a German Actress as Saga seems pointless.  Why not get the original?  She's a better actress than Diane Kruger.