by ·Comments Off on The Mole (2020, Mads Brügger)

Danish Ulrich watches The Red Chapel, agrees with Mads that the movie didn’t find a smoking gun against N Korea, so Ulrich joins the Danish Korean Friendship Society (“a fairly depressing group of people”), befriends the Korean Friends global leader Alejandro (who was a guide for Mads group in Red Chapel and still holds a grudge), visits N Korea regularly as a mole for ten years, bringing in Mads, who hires spies to help. They invent Mr. James, a rich international man of mystery, who would be open to making drug and weapons deals, and soon they’re being asked to transport bombs to Syria, and being sold a Ugandan island for an underground weapons factory (kicking all residents off the island is included in the cost).

I watched Red Chapel in an airport, so it only seemed right that I watch this one in the same place. It nicely unites the other Mads movies: Africa, Korea, int’l crimes, Danish men on a mission. Mole records every damn conversation and gets away with it. Closing text says the UN is investigating, but whatcha gonna do.

by ·Comments Off on The Red Chapel (2009, Mads Brügger)

The end of a week catching up with True/False films, beginning with Black Mother. I watched most of this at the airport – inconvenient since I kept having to lift my jaw off the dirty floor. Very happy to learn that Mads has a new shit-stirring movie and we’ll be seeing it next week in Columbia.

“Comedy is the soft spot of all dictatorships.” A group of antifascist subversive Danish comedians takes an official visit to to North Korea with the stated goal of playing Wonderwall with local kids as a cultural exchange. Their purposely terrible musical-comedy act is hijacked by a local cultural director, who “surgically removes” anything cultural and changes their entire act into something just as unfunny but somehow more politically palatable. Meanwhile, Mads has come as a spy, to shine a light on a hated, repressive system. His secret weapon is Jacob, whose physical disability makes his Danish impossible to understand by the censors and translators, but Jacob becomes tormented by all the duplicity. They end up in a parade on national TV cursing the U.S. imperialists, manage to play Wonderwall once, then get the hell out of there.