Snabba Cash: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
On one hand, our girl, Leya, is trying to make a success of her company in the straight world. On the other hand we have a bunch of guys involved in the illicit narcotics trade. Unfortunately for Leya, some of those guys helped fund her start up, and they keep asking her for to do this one little meeting. But it's never just one little meeting, it just keeps going on and on and she keeps getting in deeper.
Meanwhile, Zaki, a new guy, has just got out of prison and somehow he has quickly amassed an organization of spies, street level dealers, and a squad of killers armed with AKs and mounted on dirt bikes. They cut a wide and bloody swath through the established drug distribution network. And now he wants Leya's drugs.
The show is intense. The narcotics business is insidious. Some people are just rotten.
Murder in Bjäre Sweden, a small farming community. You never met such a bunch of disagreeable people. We've got two brothers, farmers, both dying, one in bed, one still on his feet, their wives, kids and associated hangers-on-ers. One farmer inherited 300 acres from his father, the other one got some pigs and machinery. The 300 acres, known as Synland, or the land of sin, is constantly referred to as being worthless, but it brings in grant money from the European Union every year and evidently it's enough to cause some friction. Some kind of serious disconnect here that 300 acres can be worthless, but hey, TV.
The older kids, both the farmer's and our girl's, are messing around with drugs, and one of them gets into hot water with the local drug kingpin over a missing $30K. Because nobody is talking to the police it takes forever to find this out.
Our girl is a single mom. Her son is a real jerk, I mean typical teenager, and she ends up having to arrest him for murder. Needless to say, this puts an additional strain on their relationship. Did he do it? In a way he is responsible, but no, he didn't actually kill anyone.
Funny that nobody knows the name of the actor who plays the major villain. P. S. Just remembered that the blacksmith looked familiar, but he doesn't show up in the cast either. Bah.
The New Force - Official Clip (as Trailer) | Netflix
The New Force (Original title Skiftet, translates to 'The Shift' in English). Stockholm gets their first female police officers circa 1958. Our hero, Carin manages to get herself into hot (nay, boiling) water in the first episode and stays there for the duration. We get to see the other cop's attitudes are along with society's attitudes about women coppers. We get to see a bit of what life and typical police work were like in the fifties. As a special bonus we get to listen to modern rap 'music'. Mostly we were busy following the story (shit's happenin' man) and the music was just background noise so we didn't notice it. There were a couple of instances when I did notice it enough that it became annoying. Complicated characters, very entertaining.
The Glass Dome | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Small town in rural Sweden. Our girl was kidnapped 20 years and somehow managed to escaped her captor. She returns home to Granas for her adoptive mother's funeral. While she is there, an old female friend of hers is murdered and her friend's daughter is kidnapped.
There is mine operating nearby and there is vociferous opposition to it in the town. The mine's opponents are apparently justified when an alarm goes off in the middle of night, an alarm like an air raid siren. There's been a leak at the mine and apparently the air and ground water are now poisonous.
The murdered woman's husband is a furriner and works at the mine, so he gets a lot of grief from the anti-mine folks. Now we find that the same someone who kidnapped his daughter also paid some dude to sabotage the mine. Plus this same someone is also an artist, a second story man, and he might be the same guy who kidnapped our girl 20 years ago.
Lot's of red herrings. All kinds of clues point to the wrong guy, not once, but twice. And when we finally get to the culprit, it's the guy you would never expect. Hard to believe that he was able to get away with so much for so long and no one ever realized that there was something wrong with him.
The Åre Murders | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix Nordic
Small town murder mystery that takes place in Åre, Sweden, a ski resort right in the middle of the country about 30 miles from the border with Norway. This is a short series, only five episodes, with two distinct stories. We've got the usual mix of Netflix characters including a woman detective, a woman coroner, a woman police chief, a brown cop, a gay cop and a brown suspect.
The first story (3 episodes) begins when a ski lift is turned on in the morning and a frozen body is found on one of the chairs. The villain turns out to be exploiting immigrant labor in his home cleaning business.
The second series starts with the discovery of a dismembered body on the frozen river right next to the railroad bridge. Evidently the man was run over by a train. Our main suspect is an fundamentalist Christian preacher. Turns out that although he is a bad man, he isn't the culprit. It was a kid in the garage with a shovel.
The news stories about Trump and Musk are making me very happy. The destruction of USAID is wonderful. Note that the total budget for USAID is like a drop in the bucket of entire Federal budget and its destruction is not going to have a significant impact on inflation, which is our biggest enemy. But this action is a huge moral boost for anyone who pays taxes. At least it is for me. I read recently that 'entitlements' (whatever they are) are (is?) the elephant in the budget. Remind me to take a look in six months are see how things are going.
Came across three stories this morning that weren't about the fireworks in D. C.
The Breakthrough - Official Clip (as Trailer) | Netflix
MVSRS
True story. Kind of slow going, but not as slow as the investigation, which took 16 years. They managed to compress it into four episodes that might add up to three hours. The show spends time on the victim's families and the police. The lead investigator becomes so obsessed with the case he loses his wife.
On the morning of Oct. 19, 2004, the small city of Linköping was shaken by an unthinkable act of violence. Eight-year-old Mohammed Ammouri was walking to school when he was brutally attacked and stabbed by a masked assailant. Anna-Lena Svensson, a 56-year-old woman who happened to witness the attack, tried to intervene but was also fatally stabbed. . . .
In 2020, forensic genealogy, a relatively new investigative technique, became the key to solving the case. This method, which had already gained prominence in the United States, uses DNA samples to trace a suspect’s family tree through publicly available genealogical databases.
The turning point in the Linköping case came when genealogist Peter Sjölund joined the investigation. By analyzing the DNA evidence, Sjölund traced the killer’s ancestry back over 200 years, constructing an intricate family tree that eventually led to the suspect: Daniel Nyqvist.
Nyqvist, 37 years old at the time, making him in his early 20s when the crime occurred, was arrested in June 2020. His DNA matched the evidence from the crime scene, and he quickly confessed to the murders. In court, Nyqvist claimed he had acted under the influence of voices in his head, describing the attacks as unprovoked. He was found guilty and sentenced to indefinite psychiatric care.
A Nearly Normal Family | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Swedish murder mystery but it's more of a family drama. Daughter Stella gets arrested for killing her boyfriend, a rich guy ten years older than her. No gun play, no car chases, at least not yet, but for some reason it completely sucked us in.
Part of it, I think, is that we like puzzles, and this show is very puzzling. There are little clues all over the place, but you never know if they are real clues or just red herrings designed to lead us down the garden path.
Now it could be that we just have a couple of teenagers being stupid, but there is an undercurrent of something not-quite-right with some of the players. We're halfway through the six episodes so we should have our answers shortly.
This show is a little bit different. We have a young immigrant woman trying to break into the big leagues with a fancy software program, but she lives in the projects which is rife with gangsters, drug dealers and shootings, and she has relatives operating in the drug business. So far it's pretty good. There are like four main characters and dozen or so people from each of the worlds she operates in: the money world of high stakes venture capital, the restaurant where she works and the gangsters. We shall see if any of them make it through season one alive.
Near as I can tell, the gangsters in this show are involved in mid level distribution, they sell to guys who sell on the street. They in turn get their drugs from a higher level distributor who gets them from an importer. The are a wild bunch as you might expect, and obsessed with real security, as in who can you trust.
P. S. Midway through season one our Leya does something inexplicable which leads to a cascading series of disasters. The disasters are almost predictable, but the reason for her action is still missing. Did she just temporarily lose her mind? Given her situation that seems the most logical conclusion. Or maybe the writers just needed a trigger to set off this cascading series of disasters. It's a puzzlement.
Kalmar Nyckel was a Swedish ship built by the Dutch to carry Swedish settlers to North America. It was built around 1625. It made four successful round trips from Sweden to North America. The replica of the ship (above) was launched at Wilmington, Delaware, in 1997. - excerpted from Wikipedia
The Saab 37 Viggen was built from 1970 to 1990. It was the first canard design produced in quantity. The Viggen was also the most advanced fighter jet in Europe until the introduction of the Panavia Tornadointo operational service in 1981.
Viggen has two major meanings in Swedish. The first meaning translates as "thunderbolt". Traditionally the word refers to prehistoric stone axes found in the ground during the viking age. The scandinavian people of this period thought that these axes had been sent down to earth by the lightning strikes of the god Thor when he hunted giants with his war hammer Mjölnir. The second meaning refers to "vigg", the Swedish word for the tufted duck. This is in reference to its canard configuration as "canard" is French for duck.
The Saab 35 Draken(Dragon) wasmanufactured between 1955 and 1974. It was the first fully supersonic aircraft to be deployed in Western Europe and the first aircraft to do the Cobra maneuver.
Production of the Saab JAS 39 Gripen (Griffin) started in 1987 and is ongoing. The aircraft has a top speed of Mach 2.0.
Young Wallander | Official Trailer | Netflix Netflix
A handsome young Swede playing an earlier version of the crusty old Wallander. Sure, why not? Our hero is living in one of these urban renewal projects populated with immigrants and overrun with gangs and drugs. No real explanation of why he's living there, but it puts him on the scene when a horrific murder happens on his doorstep, which leads to taking a look at a wealthy family and eventually leads to the culprit, but we have no evidence so you will have to wait for season two for justice to prevail.
The dialog is all in English, not dubbed, though it does sound a little strange, but maybe that's just the way these characters sound.
When I first saw this I thought it might have been native American Indians from the Northwest USA, then I thought maybe from the Southwest, but these paintings look like they were deliberately crudely painted, something you don't see in any public display of American Indian art.
I don't quite understand this tendency towards ugly. I ran into some exceptionally ugly paintings in a brew pub in downtown Portland last week. If that is the best you can do, well, okay, I guess, but why would anyone put it on public display? I suspect limousine Bolsheviks, people who are well ensconced by a thick wad of money, but have no appreciation for any real beauty or talent. It reminds me of Inland Empire, a horrible, pointless idiotic film by David Lynch. I've seen several other of his films and I thought they were pretty great.
Maybe this is the low end of class warfare. Some people are exceptionally talented, and they are celebrated and praised. Then we have our average folks who go about their jobs, raise their families and drink their beer. Then we have people who got short changed in the valuable skill department, but are still doing their bit without much in the way of recognition, so they do things like this.
Just finished watching the last episode of Wallander on Netflix. We watched the whole series over the last month. The first three seasons were pretty much standard murder mysteries, but the last season took a left turn off into the boonies. The last episode (S4:E3) with the CIA and the cold war was just nuts. There were a couple of lines in there that just sent me over the edge.
Synopsis: Hakan, an aged, retired, Swedish submarine commander, has disappeared and his wife has died, an apparent suicide.
1:11:00 Kurt Wallander and Steven Wilson, an American, probably CIA. Kurt walks in the front door of Hakan's house carrying something wrapped in a tarp. CIA: Hello, Kurt.CIA sits down, Kurt pours and brings him a drink. Kurt: There you are. CIA: Ah, that's mighty kind of you. CIA: To your health. Kurt: So what are you doing here? CIA: (SIGHS) I guess I didn't make my flight. . . . I've been trying to think of some piece of information that might help figure out what's happened. Kurt: And did you think of something? CIA: A friend of mine and I, we were colleagues . . . And I had this deal with him that he would help me. And if ever he became troubled by any consequences, then he would let me know and I would help him, in return. And the way that he would let know would be that he would disappear. Kurt: And how would you help him? CIA: I'd find him, take him elsewhere. Kurt: (opens tarp) It's an American device. Those submarines weren't Russian, they were American, and Hakan was working for you. CIA: (nods) At that time, it was considered a priority to destabilise the government here. It was perceived as being Communist. It worked. After the fake Russian subs, support for the East dwindled away to almost nothing. Which was another border made safe, another front closed down. Kurt: And Louise? Louise? So, was it always part of the rescue plan that she would die? That he would arrange a suicide, leave evidence to blame her?CIA: I liked Louise. Kurt: Where is he? CIA: Waiting for me. But I won't go fetch him. It would be inadvisable for us to become involved. Far better for someone else. Someone with an interest to make him face up to his responsibilities. To what he's done. Kurt: What about your responsibilities? You wouldn't be here if you weren't afraid to face them. If I confront Hakan with what he's done, I'll make sure I do the same for you. CIA: You're not in the best of health. You have a family. Are you sure you want to make that threat? Kurt: Where is he?
