The Killing on AMC HD - Page 14

If you want other recommendations, the last two Beck (TV4) releases have been on Blu-ray.

They are Beck 25 (I stormens öga = In the Eye of the storm) and Beck 26 (Levande begravd = Buried Alive). The Blu-rays both have English subtitles, are 24p, and have DTS HD MA sound tracks)

I think the earlier releases are 50i DVD only, though some are 5.1 Dolby, whilst others are 2.0. (Sweden has had 5.1 audio for SD broadcasts for years)

The DVDs I have of eps 17-24 (two box sets) have English subtitles, the previous DVDs don't (I've done my own)

Martin Beck - the lead character - is played by Peter Haber (who was in the first of the Millennium films), and Gunvald Larsson is his assistant, played by Mikael Persbrandt (who recently starred in this year's Best Foreign Film Ocar-winner "In Another World"). They are loosely based on the characters from the Sjöwal and Wahlöö 10 novel Beck series set in the 60s/70s - though not based on storylines from the books. SVT made some of the original books for TV in the early 90s - some are pretty faithful to the original novels, whilst others diverge significantly, and to be honest they look a bit dated now (though I like them as period pieces!)

I don't think they'll be making any more of the Haber/Persprandt Becks - the final two were kind of a surprise.

Yes, while I've already watched the first 2 films I decided to wait on "Hornet's Nest" until the extended release of the whole series comes out later this year from Music Box Films(same distributor that brought the 3 films to the US), apparently it's around 9 hrs of actual content.

Yes, I meant Norwegian, and I should be more aware of that being 25% Norwegian myself, grandmother was born in Oslo.

I've been trying to hunt down the disc releases but they're not all that popular it seems, I may have to purchase from Europe, as long as they have English subs of course. Found one site, DaaVeeDee.com but they're on the expensive side. Looks like they have the first 6 though with one Blu-ray release.

Have you seen any of the Van Veeteren series? I started reading the books awhile back and just noticed that there appears to have been a (TV?) series produced based on them.

Have a look at Zailor.no - I ordered the Blu-rays from them. They're not cheap (around NOK179 each) - but the entire series has been released on Blu-ray. They don't have an English front-end, but with the help of Google Translate and cut-n-paste you should be OK. As English is universal in Scandinavia, their customer services are fine with e-mails in English. Though I try and use the odd "Hei" and "Ha det".

I read the Millenium series. I think Larsson is not a very good novelist, unfortunately. He was journalist by training and it shows. He needed a good editor. Sadly he died so they probably felt they could not edit his work too much. Lisbeth Salander is a fantastic character, however, and the series had many compelling moments. The first book is probably the tightest plotted and best. Probably why Fincher is remaking it.

I'm enjoying the Harry Hole series and have read and liked a couple of Indridason and Fossum. Have their stuff been filmed?

Btw, why is there so much crime fiction (good crime fiction, too) coming out of Scandinavia? What's going on over there? You'd think Scandinavia must be filled with sadistic murderers and psychopaths and have appalling murder rates.

Yep - the infamous Ikea shopping list...

On the other hand - they're still real page-turners as published - and have sold through the roof. Travelling on the tube in London it was spooky how many people were reading them. Worse than Harry Potter...


I love the Indridason books. The BBC showed the Icelandic production of "Jar City" recently as part of a BBC Four season of Icelandic themed programmes - so that one has been filmed (and I think it is out on DVD) Very bleak.

Haven't read any Fossum yet. Have tried the Jo Nesbo stuff a couple of times but didn't get into it (too many abbreviations in the first chapter) I know they're great though - so will try again when the mood takes me.

Anne Holt's Vik/Stubo series is being made by the same production company that made Wallander, Irene Huss and the Millennium films, and I really enjoyed those books.

There have been four Camilla Lackberg adaptations made for Swedish TV (but the DVDs don't have English subs).

Viveca Sten is also pretty good. I'm attempting to read her first novel in Swedish, as there haven't been English translations yet. Her first novel has been made into a 3 part Swedish TV series "Morden i Sandhamn" aka The Sandhamn Murders. That DVD release does have English subtitles, and I really enjoyed it. I'm hoping they continue with the other books. It got brilliant viewing figures in Sweden - so that's a good sign.

It may be trite - but there is a suggestion that the long winters cause introspection, and effectively they are two different places in Summer and Winter. The Nordic countries have gone a long way to "the caring state" principle - but there are cracks in society just the same - so the contrasts are interesting to explore.

Interesting that in Norway there is a tradition of reading a crime novel around Easter for some reason...

No - have a read a couple of Nesser's books. I find the 'generic North European' setting a bit offputting, with Dutch and Nordic influences. I'd prefer them if they were set in real places, or ficticious places in real countries, but that's me.

That sounds like the SVT TV releases - 6 x 90 minute episodes. I have that on Blu-ray (without English subs) It was 3 x 3hr Blu-rays and a DVD of bonus/extra material.

Jar City is available on Netflix IW, I started it but never finished it. I will watch it, just got caught in a time crunch and haven't revisited it yet.

Read "Jar City" and "Hypothermia", the whole time I'm reading these novels I'm thinking what a drab, depressing and claustrophobic place Iceland must be, good reads though!

I'll have to check out the Netflix IW of "Jar City".

Yes - I know what you mean. The movie of Jar City does a good job of communicating that.

The thing that shocked me is discovering that Iceland has a population of around 300,000. It really is a tiny country in population terms. (And it doesn't have any trains, which also surprised me.)

Apparently it's also the most genetically "pure"(if that's the right term to use) society in the world, everyone is very closely related to everyone else. There have been some special studies done in Iceland and because of that "purity", although I don't recall what the details were, they supposedly would find things out that would help the rest of the world in the area of genetics(disease prevention, etc).

How 'bout the fact that they pipe cold and hot water to all residents?

Geothermal energy, extremely environment friendly.

Of course, do they have fire coming out of their water faucets like we do in some areas where gas fracking is taking place?

No, but when you live atop a series of giant volcanoes and a huge fault line, I doubt you'd lose much sleep over a little fire potentially coming out of the spout.

Other than a boring scene with his shrink and dinner with a hot nun, you nailed it!

LA is one long drive from northeast seacoast Massachusetts.

That's not that surprising to me as a European. It's not just Iceland that has district hot water systems. Whilst Iceland uses geothermal heat sources, other countries used combined heat and power, where the excess heat from power stations is used to heat water to distribute to residential areas, rather than left to dissipate in cooling towers.

Yep. Not sure how to insert "Spoiler" stuff - so won't comment directly on this...

Are you referring to how

{spoiler} qwerty {/spoiler}

replace the {} with [] to get this:

Indeed.

Indeed it is... and not bad, you got the hang of how the spoiler code works on the first try!

Just caught the first epside of the US remake of The Killing. Being a fan of the Danish original it was kind of strange.

Lots of stuff directly lifted (even down to the rugged stereo that Meyer/Holder character brings into the office on his first day!) - but something slightly off kilter. The Seattle location works well - and is suitably rainy - but it's like watching a Hallmark channel Biopic of the characters in the Danish original for some reason!

Glad they kept the music from the original though. (And it looks great in HD)

I know what you mean. I'm just starting the Danish one ( about a half dozen eps in ), and the characters are much more 3-dimensional. Maybe it's the pace and more room for development. Also it is amazing the stuff that's *exactly* the same ( like the rich father slapping his son in the interrogation room ) -- makes me wonder why, if that bit of business is identical, why would something as major as the ID of the killer ever be in question in the US remake ( if I understand correctly some of the US producer's comments ).

He would be driving down from Seattle (1000 miles to LA) if he was solving the case. Fueled with enough coffee and gum it's nothing Jesse and Reggie couldn't handle in 24 hours.

I don't know if it looks better in HD over there, but over here on AMCHD it may have been the worst looking most MPEG-artifact affected HD program I've ever seen.

Not pixelated, but those horrible MPEG-blocky effects like when you re-size/re-compress an already badly compressed initial low-bitrate AVI file. Just horrible. Add in lots of difficult scenes to digitize (like heavy rain, in the dark), and it just adds to the negative result.

While I enjoyed watching the show, I would give it 4 out of 10 on video quality. I'd call it poor.

Maybe the version you saw was better.

^^^ I think a 4 is generous. This one had even worse PQ than "The Walking Dead" which I gave up on after three eps, and waited for the Bluray.

I thought the PQ for both shows was excellent on E*.

Both DSperber and I are on TWC here in SoCal. I'll be curious to see how the next season of Mad Men will look, as it definitely wasn't this bad the last time around. I don't watch any other shows on AMC.

Dumb question, but what's E*?