Director: Geir Henning Hopland
Writer: Geir Henning Hopland
Stars: Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen, Rikke Lylloff and Chad Coleman
Original title: ‘Buzz Aldrin, hvor ble det av deg i alt mylderet’.
ThorNews can strongly recommend this intelligent 4-episode Norwegian TV series based upon a novel by Johan Harstad.
In Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, viewers follow Mattias, a man who wished not to be followed, a man who, after a series of personal and professional disasters, finds himself lying on a rain-soaked road in the desolate, treeless Faroe Islands, population only a few thousand, a wad of money in his pocket and no memory of how he had come to be there. Mattias is a thirty-something gardener living in Stavanger, Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin: the man who was willing to stand in Neil Armstrong’s shadow in order to work, diligently and humbly, for the success of the Apollo 11 mission.
Through Harstad’s “delectably light but nonetheless impactful prose (…) the novel’s finest moments wrap you up in communion with Mattias, as if you are spending a quiet afternoon with an old friend, chatting but mostly thinking” (extract by Three Percent). The series is surrounded by a vivid and memorable cast of characters, aspiring pop musicians, a Caribbean-obsessed psychologist, death-haunted photographers, girls who dream of anonymous men falling in love with them on bus trips, and even Buzz Aldrin himself. “Harstad combines formal play and linguistic ferocity with a searing emotional directness” (Dedi Felman, Words Without Borders) to bring Mattias to the realization that he cannot always blend into the background.
See a beautiful clip from the TV series here (Willian Hut – Hunting High and Low ‘Buzz Aldrin’, NRK1)
Text by: Thor Bugge Lanesskog, ThorNews
Sources: IMDb, Sevenstories.com
Photo: NRK
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