Kill James Bond! - S4E3.5: In Order Of Disappearance [PREVIEW]

Episode Date: December 21, 2024

This week on the Kill James Bond podcast we're honouring our ironclad commitment to international cinema by checking out this film from a small indie country they're calling 'Norway'. Apparently they could afford Stellan Skarsgard, so really good for them. Helping us to unpack this tale of revenge and isolation is Berlin-based artist and writer Ari Nielsson! Ari's writing can be found at https://www.instagram.com/theoenus/, and copies of his essay collection, Urin, can be found at https://urinbook.bigcartel.com/ ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. For the past few months I've been talking to a family trapped in Gaza, working to cover their daily living costs amidst repeated displacements in the Genocide. Their names are Ahmed and Layla, and their 4 kids are Jana, Malik, Lana and Amir. Anything you can contribute would mean the world to me. They deserve to live. Attached is their gofundme, as well as three others that I can vouch for the authenticity of. https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-and-my-family-to-find-a-safe-place https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-maher-and-my-family-to-leave-gaza-to-belgium https://www.gofundme.com/f/htdcj-evacuating-my-family-from-gaza https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly, I am joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello! Hello. And we have a guest, we have a person of Nordic experience to talk about our Nordic movie. It's our friend Ari. Ari, how's it going? No, it's great. It's great. It's pitch black outside, No, it's great. It's pitch black outside, sun-tone levels plummeting somewhere through the sub-basement, and I'm here to have a great time. Oh, so you're living in London too? Yeah, I was gonna say, it's sunset at 5.30 here, I think you might be the one person who has a worse time of the sunset than us.

If London becomes a Scandinavian city before Glasgow does, I think the entire nation of Scotland's liberals might go fully Joker mode. We tried so hard to make Scotland into a kind of Nordic country, plus one. They did, and all the Nordic countries were like, well, that's... no. It's like Estonia, it's like, no, you're not in the club, pal. Increase welfare state, but also cut taxes, just like Norway. The entire nation of Norway just sort of shaking its head and going, eugh. Just kind of embarrassed to hang with us.

But, so yeah, this is a bonus episode, but it's kind of a special bonus episode, in that it's sort of Nate, our producer's pick, by proxy. It was a movie that he mentioned having watched and I went, oh I saw that years ago and I remember really liking it, and that spiraled into us stealing Abbie's bonus slot. So Abbie, colonized. Yes, I've now been overruled. The Supreme Court of Kil James Bond has handed down a decision saying that my choice, me and my doctor's decision to put a bonus episode of Crocodile Dundee or some shit has been

overruled. It's not even the Brussels bureaucrats, it's like a bunch of suits in the EEA. Now we have to watch Stellan Skarsgård beat a bunch of people up against a snowplow. I'm very sorry, but the good news is that you do get the first bonus episode of 2025, assuming there is a 2025, there is still time, but there may not be. But yeah, this is In Order of Disappearance, which as I say is a film that I saw ages and ages ago and I remember fondly. And I was curious to see if it held up, and on the re-watch I really fucking didn't like it.

Oh, interesting. This is my first watch and I really enjoyed it. Yeah, it's like a thinking man's taken. Sort of uninteresting, I'll try not to be too much the guy who's like, oh those subtitles are awful. But the Norwegian title of this film is Kraftidioten, which just means like the big fucking idiot. And I think- It's a better title. See that's better. That's much better.

Like In Order of Disappearance is a perfectly good title for like a revenge thriller, but I think in terms of some of the things that I like about this film and kind of the observations that it makes quite definitely about Norwegian society, like I think the big idiot is far more telling. ALICE Yes. This same director remade it in the US as like an American thriller, and the title there was Cold Pursuit. NICOLA That was Liam Neeson, right? ALICE Yes. And specifically that was the Liam Neeson movie where in the press tour beforehand

he said, oh yeah I was trying to do like racial hate crimes, and got the Liam Neeson movie where in the press tour beforehand he said oh yeah I was trying to do like racial hate crimes and got the premiere cancelled. I remember! Yes! That was the movie that Liam Neeson sabotaged. I guess you're Liam Neeson, you do like fifteen of these kind of movies, you know, you gotta think of something to talk about in the press circuit. I like to think the number of interviews I could do before admitting to planning a hate

crime would be pretty high on account of never having planned a hate crime. I wasn't talking about me, I was just talking about all the horribly racist characters in all the films that I do. It was a bit, Your Honour. Was the Liam Neeson one a comedy? Because this one is kind of comedic. This one is very funny. Oh yeah, absolutely.

It is very funny, I will say that for it. I saw the trailer for Cold Pursuit, I thought maybe I'd watch it as a point of comparison, because I don't really know. Again, it makes some fairly incisive, or at least well-observed comments about stuff in Norway, and I was a bit curious to see how they'd translate that in Minnesota, or wherever the fuck they put these things. RILEY Yeah. Colorado, it seems. ALICE Oh god.

RILEY Yeah, this is strange. RILEY They're murdered by a Denver drug cartel I'm seeing here. Sorry, I'm just reading this out loud, this isn't fun. Nels, by the way, and this Nels Coxman. ALICE See, I guess the thing is, if you're trying to do a thing about American, Scandinavian immigrant descendants that keep some of the same tone and weirdness of this, that's just Fargo, right?

And Fargo already exists, notably. ALICE It is, and I mean, it's also, there is this big kind of Scandi drama to US drama gravy train that everyone wants to get on. And I was thinking about how they remade the bridge on the US Mexico border. Oh, good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think these things kind of, they vanish almost entirely, you know, it's not shameless. It's not the office.

And I started wondering if maybe there's a thing about like, wanting to identify with Scandinavian coolness on a surface level and then you put in the US and it's actually just, you lose that. These were definitely the years for it. So this is the original European film, and I love a European film because, and I said this with the diabolics, right, at the start you get a solid 40 seconds of logos of different film funds. This is no exception.

Fuck I miss the EU. SWEDISH FILM INSTITUTE, FILM INSTITUTE, NORTHFILM INSTITUTE, NORTHFILM INSTITUTE, the dank film institute, nice. Hell yeah! Checking that one out. They're like, the association for Swedish noble houses, bracket, scar-score dynasty. Yeah, if you want to make a film in the EU, you just go, yeah, it's got like a snowplow in it.

And so aside from the regular EU film fund and your country's film fund and the three neighboring countries film funds, there's also a special EU fund for like legitimizing the use of snowplows that will kick in like $10 million into your movie. And so all they ask is a credit at the front. Special charitable organization where you can pay five pounds a month to feed one of Stalin's many starving kids. I don't think they're starving, they're working more than I am!

But so, we begin with snow plowing in Norway. And for future listeners, you know, listeners in the 2030s, 2040s, a snow plow was a machine that was used to move snow. Oh no. They'll know in Britain when the fucking current breaks down. So snow was like, when it gets cold... Okay, so cold is like when air conditioning is on, but too much. It's sort of like a lack of heat. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

And it used to be... Water crucially becomes a solid. It used to be the case that this happened, you know, I would say a quarter of the year minimum. Consistently. The important thing is that when water reaches a temperature below zero degrees, it becomes a metaphor? Yeah.

True. Which this movie fucking hammers again and again and again. It's dismal. It's cold. It's like the wilderness and it is like the edge of civilization and snow ploughing is like you're carving a line through the wilderness and you're maintaining civilization with the snowplow. That's what it means. It's going to tell you that a million times. He says this as much even. Yeah, yeah.

It just features a star. A snowplow is also something that might've been useful in the UK, y'know, every winter when there's like half an inch of sleet, everyone goes insane and all trains stop working and they're like, how could this happen? Oh no, no, we don't go insane, we're already insane. One day of snow, black ice for the next three weeks. One day of snow, black ice for the next three weeks. That's it baby, Britain. So we're in Norway, we're in a small town that can only be reached by snowplough,

like a snowplough carving out the road every morning, and that snowplough is being driven by the original Skarsgård, Stellan. Before he had the like- STELLAN Not a Norwegian man! ALICE No! Crucially. A Swedish man. STELLAN This will come up, bud. And he drives this snowplow, and also, one morning he dresses up quite smart in a shirt and tie and his wife helps him. I like how uncomfortable he is in the suit. I love that too.

It's a real, like, because we know, spoilers ahead of time, this is a revenge movie. Fundamentally like reactionary thing, but also depends on establishing the blue colonists of it. Like Charles Bronson in Death Wish, right? So it's an eloquent way of doing that, to be like, oh, he's uncomfortable wearing a suit and tie. Yeah, he's just one top bloke of the year. Yeah. This is very much a sort of like, town and country film, and I have some notes on that later. He wins Citizen of the Year, and he gives a little speech and says, well, I'm not very

good at speaking, unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, but thank you, snow is a metaphor in this movie, I find a path through the wilderness which is represented by snow, and the line between civilisation and violent anarchy is very very thin. Yeah, he says, I'm just a guy who keeps a strip of civilization open through the wilderness, and then compares himself to an African-American. RILEY But I think interestingly he also remarks that he's a pathfinder, even if it's only the same path again and again. RILEY Yeah, fair enough. ALICE Just, like, heavily lampshading the idea of

cycles of violence, and everyone's like, man, we just wanted to give you a certificate.