The movie was a total cliche. It was basically Sister Act in Sweden, but impossibly more overacted.
Affected genius takes on a rag tag bunch and turns them into angels. Yawn.
I appreciated the comments on religion and sin, but the whole love story between genius and babe "you teach me to sing, i'll teach you how to ride a bike and have the childhood you never had" was a bit sickening really. Did anyone else find this to be cheesy nonsense too?
Yes I agree it was cheesy nonsense. But its comments on religion and sin were also the same old ludicrously exaggerated anti-Christian cliche. Come on, is there really a Christian pastor anywhere who thinks that it's a sin to have sex with his own wife, but OK to look at porno? And who threatens to shoot anyone who is a threat to his tyrannical power over his parishioners? And if all of the choir members (bar one) had always been convinced that religion is a load of crap (and then the one religious one went along with rejecting religion when the others did), why did they join a church choir in the first place, and stay in it for decades, mouthing words they didn't believe? They're even worse hypocrites than the impossibly hypocritical pastor.
share"Come on, is there really a Christian pastor anywhere who thinks that it's a sin to have sex with his own wife, but OK to look at porno? And who threatens to shoot anyone who is a threat to his tyrannical power over his parishioners?"
Well, most sexual deviants and gun nuts are also the most religious of the so-called "Christians" here in the US. The porn-addicted, gun-nut priest reminded me of any ol' "christian" in say... Texas, Oklahoma, or Louisiana.
They weren't rejecting religion, they just rejected the way the pastor was doing things.
And I think there's probably pastors like that out there; not all Christians are that moral, you know. Although I don't think the pastor thought it was "OK" to look at porno - he probably asked for forgiveness for his sins afterwards.
Cheesy? Yes, indeed we did. Embarassingly facile, nauseatingly sentimental, and very much like a Hollywood film, which is exactly what we were hoping to avoid. Watch Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown, and see a film which is quiet, understated, deeply moving, but also realistic and believable.
So many unanswered questions and undeveloped plots as if the director couldn't wait to finish the film. Perhaps Nyqvist was embarassed. He should have been. Are there no police in Sweden? No shelters? What about the seen where Conny trashes the guy's Volvo? Does no one call the police? Why doesn't someone tell Arne to shut off his damn cell phone? What universe do these people live in?
The priest looks like a stray from a Bergmann film set in the 19th century. No one tells the bossy pseudo-Christian town gossip to shut up. None of this strikes me as remotely believable.
The songs are more like American pop solos than actual choral music, and the pretenciousness of the first couple months of rehearsal time made me gag. Most singers would have been out of there after the first 3 weeks of this nonsense. The first scene we see of Daniel conducting was ridiculously exaggerated, and unrealistic. Has Mr. Nyqvist ever been to an orchestral concert of classical music? And the orchestral piece chosen was also a piece of pretentious bombast. Certainly not Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, or Tchaikovsky. Was it Mahler?
And please, do we really need another film showing an abusive husband? Haven't there been thousands of TV series and movies about this already. Nothing new here, nothing ground-breaking. And, of course, it's just such a stereotype that the pastor's wife drags out a bunch of nudie mags to show him up. Reminds me of similar stuff in British films of the 1960s.
And then the end, where we sense reminiscences of the old coke/pepsi commercial: I'd Like To Teach the World to Sing, in Perfect Harmony.......
Terrible drivel