Doin' the Omoralisk Schlagerfestival '12

Maybe I have to crawl out of my hiding hole now that we actually won the Eurovision Song Contest 2012. And I didn't write anything about this year. Mostly because when the Swedish competition was I actually had an internship in a bank and also prepared to move out of my apartment. So I didn't watch carefully enough or invest anything in it, mostly sat at the computer doing other stuff. Like listening to some good music. Of course that doesn't stop the rest of Sweden or Europe from going crazy about this. Just yesterday some danish commentator argued that the rest of the nordic countries should join in an alliance against Sweden to put us down to earth. How admirable that is in this context, it didn't work out that well for them with Norway ending last with an Eric Saade copy, Denmark ending in 23d place with an Anna Bergendahl copy and then Iceland going to the 20th place with an Marlena Ernman copy on stage (tall the similarities was all pointed out to me by political scientist on twitter, because I would really not know and it works for the narrative at the moment). Not to mention that Norway had Swedish songwriters, actually 8 other countries also had Swedish songwriters in the finals, in total 10 including Sweden itself. We may be weak on hard power, but we got a lot of soft power in our music export.

So what can we expect from next years Eurovision in Sweden? First of all, were is it supposed to be? My guess is Gothenburg since the last time was in Stockholm and apparently Globen will be booked with the Hockey finals or whatever. Malmö is... well lets say they have enough trouble as it is. So thats my guess for location. Entertainment then? I have only one idea and that would be, after all the voting's been done, the light goes down, electric lights spout out of guitars to a heavy metal rendition of ABBA's Waterloo (after all, Gothenburg are Sweden's heavy metal capital), the drums drum synchronized to pyrotechnic fire, synths and orchestra all in a glorious symphony, all instrumental, then silence. BANG, an explosion of fire and light while all the music you here are the sound from the  70's version performed by... a reunited ABBA performing Waterloo for just one night. How awesome wouldn't that be (from a theatrical point of view that is)? Eurovision's best song performed once again by the originals. You can't possibly top that. Unfortunately the chance of that happening is pretty slim due to the artist themselves. Have to go with the second best so I it would probably be one of the other swedish winners then, but that wouldn't be as fantastic in my opinion. Maybe get all the other winners performing waterloo instead... Dammit, I give this to much thought it actually deserves.

The Avengers

Saw The Avengers movie yesterday with my sister. After the trailers I wished I went alone so I could used the free tickets I got from my work at Swedbank on the movies I saw. Especially Prometheus looked really interesting and then it was another Spider-Man movie. Nothing wrong, but it's the second origin movie about him and the last one was just something like 10 years ago. At least it had the Lizard as the main villain or it seemed to be him with Dr. Connors making an appearance (hard to miss a man with just one arm). There's also a new Tim Burton movie with the usual cast of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Christopher Lee.  And lets not forget the music by the usual suspect, Danny Elfman. Dark Shadow is the movie based on some TV-series I don't know about, but this one got Alice Cooper in it so that could be interesting. The last trailer (technically the one first shown, but lets not get into that) was nothing interesting. Snow White and the Huntsman didn't seem to impress me with all the special effects. If I want to see a Snow White story I would honestly prefer the Disney version.

What did I think of the movie itself then? Awesome! It was fun, action packed and I felt correct emotional response the film wanted to give me at the different times. The story worked and the actors did a great job and the music fitted the mode. No problem knowing who the heroes were even though I haven't watched all the movies building up to this one. In fact I have only seen Iron Man missing out on Thor, Captain America, The  Incredible Hulk (I don't know if I had this going on the TV while I did other stuff on the computer)  and Iron Man 2. Of course, it didn't hurt that I saw the animated cartoons of Spider-Man and Iron Man from the 90's when I was a kid and have a fairly good idea on what the different heroes and organizations are as well as the 2003 Hulk movie. So I'm not completely lost to the mythos around the characters. I don't know how you would react if you haven't seen anything about these characters, but at least they are all wearing bright colored costumes that all look different (with some minor exceptions).

Last thing to note is that it is important to sit still in the cinema until the lights go back on again so you don't miss the stingers at the end as many did when I watched the movie. I think it was just me, my sister, half the row in front of me as well as a few more people in the back that saw the end of an almost full cinema when it started. Patience people.