It has been now two weeks since my last entry. Too many things happen during this beautiful summer, so updating the blog is not really possible.

After being in Montreal, Canada for a week of work I went down to New York where I spent a week of holiday. The good thing about New York is, that everything intelligent about it has been said already hundreds of times and as I do not want to add something stupid to it, I can happily stay silent.

The weather in NY was extremely hot. I am not a friend of too high temperatures. 25 degress Celcius is the border, after which my mood starts to change. Now I am back in Finland since a week and here everything is perfect, besides my inability to adjust myself to the local timezone.

But no complaints - my holidays just started. This might lead to further silence on these pages for one or two weeks. Let's see.

So for the moment I go on wishing you a happy summer.

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• Black&White Picutres from New York (Flickr)
  
• Colour Pictures from New York (Flickr)

Here are some impressions from the 21st Midnight Sun Film Festival. The festival takes place every year around midsummer in Sodankylä, which is located 120 kilometers North of the Arctic Circle.

View across the River

Impressions from the Midnight Sun Film Festival

The library and an old wooden building

The old wooden church and the new church

Sodankylä Graveyard

Land of the Midnight Sun

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• Sodankylä Information Page
• Sodankylä in the English Wikipedia (very short)
• Sodankylä in the German Wikipedia (detailed)
• Midnight Sun Film Festival
• All my pictures from the Midnight Sun Film Festival 2006 in Sodankylä

To those of you who are interested in Finnish Architecture I'd like to recommend the new Flickr Group on Alvar Aalto. It just started and will for sure collect a lot interesting pictures of Aaltos buildings.

Alvar Aalto was one of the most influencial modern architects in Finland. You can find more about him at Wikipedia and also Lewis has several articles on him.



If you are interested in pictures from Finland in general, then I can recommend you these flickr photo groups:
- Finland, Finland, Finland
- Helsinki
- Finland Season: Spring (Kevyt)
- Finland Season: Summer (Kesä)
- Finland Season: Autumn (Syksy)
- Finland Season: Winter (Talvi)

But best is still to come here and see it all by yourself.

Steven Spielberg’s "Artificial Intelligence AI" is one of the worst movies I have seen so far. The most impressive thing about this film is how it can get more worse and worse with every minute. There is no end to it - after half of the tragedy one thinks that there could be an end to it, but Spielberg just adds more unrealistic things to it. It's a Sci-Fi movie, but that does not mean that it doesn't need to explain anything. It is also a fairy tale, but still the director could have tried to entertain at least some of the grown ups sitting in the audience.

Humans are the cruel ones, the first build up artificial intelligence and then they kill the machines, who all seem to be very nice and full of feelings - although they do not have, only the little boy has. Still these robots talk and act as if their primary mission in "life" would be the protection of the weak and forgiving their destroyers. Oh please Steven, tell us about the Christians in ancient Rome if you want to bring tears in our eyes, but don't come up with a miserable idea that you manage to develop into a great failure.

And then, at the very end of the whole mess, when the aliens hang around and the story has long crossed the point of no return, Spielberg gives the child, that has gone through suffering and pain, a single day of happiness. That's it. I assume this should tell us something about being human and life in general. But it doesn’t. It only tries to induce some sentimental feelings in the audience – without succeeding.

The issue of the machine that wants to be human was treated much better by other films, foremost of all "Blade Runner" but also "Bicentennial Man" was an acceptable movie, that is also suitable for younger audiences. Watch those, but avoid AI. (0/10)

Keane by Lodge H. Kerrigan leads from the first moment into the world of a mentally disturbed person. A man looking for his kidnapped daughter. He is nervous, he is insecure, he tries to think and the more the movie follows him, the less it is clear, how much this person can be trusted. Was the daughter really kidnapped? Does he have a daughter at all? Did he maybe kidnap a girl?

William Keane appears to be a drug addict and a mad man – but is he really or is he just a person that needs help? The movie does not gives answers to this – it just leaves us with William, of whom one gets more and more afraid. When a woman, who lives next to him, starts trusting him and asks him to care for her daughter for a while, the audience just waits for the inevitable tragedy to happen. Every situation that Keane is confronted with offers a possible mistake to be made, a crime to be committed.

Kerrigans movie offers a look into the instability of the mind without giving explanations. It shows a hopeless world and a short flickering of a light at the end of the tunnel – without being pathetic. It takes the audience from a different angle and leaves no other opportunity than to let us be guided by our feelings, as no reason is visible – truth and background are missing. Keane does not need to commit any crime; we do that for him in our fearful minds, while watching the movie.

An extraordinary different movie. (9/10)