Wow! Such a good movie.

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Songs From The Second Floor, is the second feature from director Roy Andersson, whose spent his career making according to fellow Swedish director and legend Ingmar Bergman, "The best commercials in the world"(Youtube his name for proff of this). Anderson takes an advertisers eye to this film and inverts it, into around 40 or 50 short vignettes, some with recurring characters, like the man seen on the cover who has burned down his business to collect the insurance but bumbled the job, while most include walkons, and many characters drift in an out of scenes before the movie ends. These short vignettes are nearly all deadpan and absurdist tragi-comic advertisements for peoples lives broken or on the verge of breaking. The antagonist, if there must be one, is capitalism(a subject which the commercial making Anderson is very much aware), and it's de-humaizing effects on all its touches. As bleak as all this sounds, the material is played more often than not for laughs. There's a traffic jam which has clogged the city as if everyone were leaving at the same time, a girl who is blindfolded and lead of a cliff by her village elders, a man accidentally sawed in half by poor magician, men and women in business suits walk down streets in parade's flailing themselves as an act of penance to God so he will prevent the further falling of stocks, and a man followed around by ghosts of friends and strangers. If that weren't enough each scene is composed with a static non moving camera, giving each vignette the detailed composition of a photograph or a painting. The movie could be considered a tragi-comic funeral song for western capitalism and modernity(the film takes place just before the new millennium I think), but a tag like that really doesn't communicate how humane, clever, funny, and accessible this movie really is. It's like a lyrical Monty Python film, or a an absurdist Ingmar Bergman, and yet again it's a film all it's own, structurally, conceptually, and aesthetically, if your interested in where film-making may be going in the future and right now, Songs From The Second floor, is the movie to see, and one of the best of the new millennium

This is an on-the-mark masterpiece that keeps getting better every time I see it. It's about the very essence of being human, about guilt and betrayal, about invoking higher powers and making ends meet. How to get bread and butter for the dinner table. Some of the scenes are just madly humorous, others really heavily sad. There are some rather disgusting scenes as well, but together with Benny Andersson's sharply fine-tuned music, this film becomes a masterly experience. Purchase it, append a digit to the retail price, and resell it to your best friend! Songs is more coherent and less dreamlike than "You the Living". My grading: 9.67

OVERALL: It's not really a 2/10. I'm just being exceptionally brutal because this film had so much potential, but it lost itself in a swamp of modernist absurdism which doesn't have a point. This is yet another film where the director chooses style over substance. The result is two hrs of gimmicky schlock which will intrigue the film school teachers, but those of us who are looking for a fulfilling literary experience (poetry, plot, theme, etc) will be highly disappointed.SCRIPT: There are basically 10 lines of dialogue which are repeated a dozen times each. Count how many times someone says, "Beloved is the man who sits down." Literally about 12. Well, that's one Swedish phrase that's been etched into my brain for no good reason. Honestly I haven't heard so much repetition since the last time I sang "99 bottle of beer on the wall" round the campfire.VISUALS: The entire film has a very drab, bleached white appearance which makes you want to smack the side of your VCR a few times. Yes, this is just another gimmick which is initially novel, but it gets old after 45 minutes of the same thing. Also, each scene was filmed entirely in one shot. Usually I consider that to be a huge plus (e.g. Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope", Bela Tarr's "Werckmeister Harmoniak"). But in this case it was too obvious and excruciatingly dull. "Rope" and "Werckmeister" worked well with the continuous shot because the camera was dynamic and fluid, much like the human eye. But in this film the camera only moves once in the entire picture, so there are no dynamics at all. Combine this with the aforementioned bleached-white lack of contrast and shadow, and the result makes you feel like you're a security guard watching a video monitor at the mall. For 2 hours.MUSIC: To all you ABBA fans, don't get your hopes up. It's true that Benny did the soundtrack for this film, but that only consists of about 4 chords and 12 notes played on a cheap synthesizer. It ain't no "Dancing Queen" that's for sure.HUMOUR: This movie is so thick with situational sarcasm that I couldn't tell where the gags were. In that sense it is indeed like Monty Python (which others have pointed out), but--make no mistake!--this refers to the mood only. There are no funny lines in this film. So just imagine watching a Monty Python flick with the sound turned down, and there you have it. Not exactly a laugh riot anymore, is it?HIGHLIGHTS: So what's left to like about it? I'll tell you what: it's just plain different. It's so different that it managed to hold my attention all the way through, as I was hoping that there would be some sort of payoff. In that sense, it may be refreshing to some of you. If you've been gorging yourself on Hollywood action flicks, this might be just what you need to cleanse the palate (just remember to spit it out afterward as wine connaisseurs do!). Doubtlessly, that is why Cannes showered it with awards--it's not good; it's just plain different.But don't get me started on Cannes.The sets are nice--very grand and oppressive like in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil". I should also add that that the final scene is somewhat impressive (visually), so if you do make the mistake of renting this film, don't chuck it out the window without fast forwarding to the end.MY RATING: I would give this a 1/10, but that rating is generally reserved only for films with animal cruelty in them. Aside from a few gawd-awful nude scenes with old pasty fat people, there isn't anything personally offensive. So I'll give this film a 2.

Wonderful existential cynicism!!! This movie dissects human traits and human patterns of behavior with a lovely dispassionate humor. The filmmaker holds up his mirror and in it we see the business world as a serious and entropy-laden failure, organized religion as artifice--literally the manufacture and selling of different-sized and styled crucifixes --- a failing business of another color, the human collective as very much out of sync with itself and the organic realm--another form of failure, and through everything a touch of sadness.I loved the sanity of this. At least I thought the film sane. It reveals a flawed and inept society of men and women, most of whom have some, if little, insight to their predicament. That life is a series of miscues, that no one can lay claim to being error-free, and that those who are more skilled -"professional"- are merely making mistakes at a more involved level is the humbling message we see repeated in mostly every vignette.The film is shot, as others have remarked, with a still camera, and the actors constitute the movement, usually very constrained and staged. So the film is by no means verite, yet through its dark cynical humor, it reveals the chafed and tender areas that everyone knows yet few will admit and fewer will proffer for public discussion. His actors are caught in a world in which escape is desirable but no one knows how. Or where to begin. They are trapped and much like the characters in Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" the irony is in learning to accept the trapped state without questioning too deeply the nature of the trap. Rumination is destructive. Anderson's characters are unable to find peace or contentment in their lot.