18 sekúndur fyrir sólarupprás [18 seconds before sunrise]

Heima was mindblowing.  Premise: after completing their world tour, Sigur Rós returns to Iceland to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in various small towns in the countryside, under mountains, protesting dams to build aluminum factories, in abandoned fish factories, in coastal towns shrouded in mist, in nursing homes, with marching bands.  It was advertised a week before its showing in a one-page article in Ground Zero - and by advertised I mean spoken of, because it was a free one-time showing (to correlate with their free unannounced concerts in Iceland) at our independent movie theater.  If you weren't looking for it you wouldn't have noticed.  I had heard of it, and I saw the article and screamed. 

My mother and I went.  We were late because dinner at the new colonial-era Thai restaurant took a while (to Lindsey: food was good, called the Blue Orchid, we should go) and we had to tiptoe over a few blocks of black ice to get to the theater.  I had no idea how many people would show up - I was envisioning maybe five homeless drugged out college students.  But it was packed.  Packed as in we sat on the floor ten feet from the screen.  When they performed "Popplagið" in Reykjavik in the climactic ending I could feel the vibrating bass.  That may be my favorite song of theirs. 

Sigur Rós is a secret cult - the only one you know is in it is yourself, and you never know who else is a worshipper.  And they in turn worship the planet so much, if you learn anything from Heima it's that they worship the planet.  Theirs is my kind of paganism. 

The band thinks that their Earth is being lost, replaced with industry.  But I think Iceland is the future, not the past.  Iceland is the world without us.  As Explosions in the Sky says, the Earth is not a cold, dead place - it's got lasting properties, and after we eliminate ourselves, in our anthropophagy without any particular ritual (is cannibalism, looping back on oneself, the culmination of evolution?  Evangelion would agree), the world will revert to Icelandism.  I am sure of it.

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Judging by the Golden Globes nominations, I'm going to have a very angry Oscar party in February.  Atonement?  What?  The movie that A. O. Scott described as "an almost classical example of how pointless, how diminishing, the transmutation of literature into film can be"?  Where "even the most impressive sequences have an empty, arty virtuosity... the impression left by a long, complicated battlefield tracking shot is pretty much “Wow, that’s quite a tracking shot,” when it should be “My God, what a horrible experience that must have been"?  It sounds like Children of Men meets The English Patient.  Brilliant. 

Not.

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Our Journal Star reviewer criticized I Am Legend for becoming standard zombie fare - by having crazy killer zombies vs. a survivor.  As my mother said, that's like criticizing samurai movies as regurgitated for including fight scenes.

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