Who doesn't love anamatrionic polar bears?

Okay. So. This is my "fairy tales slay me" introductory post. Uh, part 1 of 5,303,227.

I took a film class in college and we all compiled a list of our top ten films, and depending on how they wanted to be perceived the lists were headed by films like Citizan Kane, Fargo, Akira, Blade Runner, Pulp Fiction. One kid wrote his favorite movie was The Exorcist, and in parentheses "(political commentary)".

My list was about 27 films long, and in my top five was Kvitebjorn Kong Valemon, which I knew as The Polar Bear King. It's a version of "East of the Sun, West of the Moon", and when it came out I was [indeterminate age at which a girl is young enough to be pleasantly surprised that the woman in a fairy tale movie was allowed to DO something]. It's a total awesome low-budget Dutch/Swedish/Norwegian production. With three countries helping out, you think they'd have gotten some money together, but apparently it's catch as catch can.

It's mostly because they were saving the money for this AWESOME LIFE-SIZE POLAR BEAR PUPPET.



This is not to be taken as a ringing endorsement of this movie as an addition to the art form. I'm not kidding about the budget, and the acting is, depending on the actor, stilted or superbly over-the-top. But seriously, this movie is AWESOME. One of the biggest triumphs of my life so far is walking into a Rite Aid near my apartment, looking down the entire length of the store, and seeing the DVD of this movie jammed in with a bunch of second-rate horror. I may have made noises. You can't prove a thing.

Anyway, the princess of the Winterland marries the polar bear king, spell of an evil witch, invisible mother-in-law, you know the drill. I wish I could parse it academically or even coherently, but all I can really think about is being a kid and watching Maria Bonnevie setting out to rain some bitchface on the evil witch. She uses her brain, she silently bullies people into helping her with her thousand-yard stare, she climbs up a moutain and when one shoe falls off she doesn't even pause and climbs the rest of the mountain with one damn shoe.




The music is also really appealing to me, though I'm sort of embarrassed to say so since I'm pretty sure it was some lovely Norse bear-calls and then a single harmonium accompanied by a kazoo. So, don't quote me on this, since my mileage for awesome is clearly far different from a normal person's.

Though it's sort of hard to hate a movie whose climax rests on the "too much evil destroys evil" precept, and lts someone mix evil with a huge light-up Casio board. No fooling. Plus, then they dress up in furs and run back to the Winterland with all their chilluns and the wolves herald their arrival! I love wolf heralds! [inserts Norse bear-call]

A lot of childhood movies lose their magic, but every once in a while I come across a movie that was awesome when I was a chillun and REMAINS AWESOME. The Polar Bear King is one of them. Others are just disturbing (I'll get to them eventually).

In fact, if I hit my word count on the novel tomorrow night, I'm totally whipping this out and rewarding myself with some badly-subbed fairy tale action! Oh man. *WRITES*