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Quelle surprise
Not So Vulture-Eyed

By the Time I Got to Iceland...

  • 9/24/10 at 5:55 PM

There's a festival in New York, but who could say no to a weekend trip to balmy Iceland for the Reykjavik International Film Festival, where I'm giving a talk (I'm still cramming! It will take place Sunday the 26th at 4 p.m. Iceland time) about the influences on and influence of Jim Jarmusch (the guest of honor, to be presented with a medal by no less than the country's president)? Along the way I hope to take in several Icelandic movies and maybe swim in volcano. If anyone reading this happens to be in Reykjavik or wants to puddle-jump from, say, Greenland, and would like to accompany me on an expedition to taste hakarl (fermented--aka rotted--shark) or perhaps half a sheep's head (split down the middle, the tongue and eyeballs especially savored by the locals), track me down. The password is "Eat the eyeballs." These are the good times. (Re: Jarmusch. Are there any filmmakers with so many disparate inspirations, from Beckett to Ozu to Keaton to Hawks to Wenders to Kaursimaki to radical leftist politics to jazz to punk to rap to graffiti to the Lower East Side No Wave of the late seventies? And yet he is sui generis. And sometimes incredibly boring. A difficult figure to get a handle on!)

Update: I almost forgot--I'll certainly give a shout-out to my Facebook friend Amos Poe, whose early film The Foreigner inspired Jarmusch to make pick up a camera himself.