Film Excess - Free Ukraine - Stop Putin - End the war NOW!!: Teddy Bear/10 Timer til Paradis (2012) - Matthiesen's little gem of intercontinental romance

11/19/2016

Teddy Bear/10 Timer til Paradis (2012) - Matthiesen's little gem of intercontinental romance

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The original Danish poster for Mads Matthiesen's Teddy Bear has a lovely photo from a beach in Thailand

Lonely bodybuilder Dennis of age 35 leaves his mother, whom he lives with in Rødovre, Denmark, to go on a trip by himself to Thailand to find himself a girlfriend.

Kim Kold (Fast & Furious 6 (2013)) is deeply sympathetic as Dennis, and Elsebeth Steentoft (Klown/Klovn: The Movie (2010)) and Lamaiporn Sangmanee Hougaard as his mother and new-found love are also very good.

Teddy Bear is a finely observed, underplayed, pleasant film. Its more poetic and better original title translates to '10 hours till paradise'. The depiction of the tyrannical mother opposite the good Dennis is a bit one-sided but it doesn't hurt the film much overall. It is written by Martin Zandvliet (The Model (2016)) and co-writer-director Mads Matthiesen (The Model) as his auspicious feature debut, based on his short Dennis (2007), also starring Kold as Dennis.

Matthiesen and Kold give an interview about the film at Sundance here

Cost: Unknown

Box office: Unknown

= Unknown (but likely a huge flop)

[Teddy Bear premiered January 22 (Sundance) and runs 93 minutes. It was filmed in Denmark and Thailand. The film was released for 3 weeks in North America, where it topped at #76 in 2 theaters and grossed 16k $. Its only other publicized gross is in Poland, where it made 5k $. In its native Denmark, it sold 27,077 tickets, equal to approximately 270k $. These numbers together make it likely that the film should count as a huge flop theatrically at least. The film won the World Cinema - Drama directing award at Sundance. Teddy Bear is fresh at 93 % with a 7.6 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Teddy Bear?

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Film Excess - Free Ukraine - Stop Putin - End the war NOW!!

Eagerly anticipating this week ... (5-24)