Heavy Trip (5 Stars)

Best. FinnishFilm. Ever.

This is an incredible film that won me over immediately when I saw it the Stuttgart Fantasy Film Festival in 2018. I like it because I'm a fan of heavy metal music, but I can recommend it to anyone, whatever their music tastes might be. It's a hilarious comedy about a young man struggling to survive in a world that's against him.

Turo Moilanen is a man in his late 20's who lives in Oulu, Finland. If you've never heard of the town, you're not alone. I doubt it sounds familiar to anyone who doesn't live close. It's a university town in northern Finland. Turo doesn't even live in the centre of the town, he lives on the outskirts, near the sea (the Gulf of Bothnia). It's a beautiful place to live, but it's just about as far as any European can live from civilisation.

Turo loves heavy metal, and he sings in a band that's been practising in the basement of a slaughterhouse for the last 12 years. Practising for what? Will they ever come out of the basement and let anyone else hear them? They haven't even played local gigs, so their dreams of international success are far away.

This is the slaughterhouse basement. The perfect place for practising.

And this is the slaughterhouse from the outside.

What do they slaughter? Reindeer, of course! Early in the film the band members complain that they have to eat reindeer every day after practising. It could be worse. I've only ever eaten reindeer once in my life, about 30 years ago, but I still remember the taste. It's spicier than the usual central European meats, chicken, beef and pork. I wouldn't mind eating it every day.

But let's get onto a different topic. Windows 10 sucks. Really, it does. I have two computers, my desktop PC and a laptop. The desktop, that I'm sitting at now, uses Windows 8.1, while my laptop uses Windows 10. I watched the film on my laptop and made a few screenshots to use in this post. Then I sat down to write the post (on my laptop) and ugh! All the screenshots were black.

It's not possible to make screenshots from Netflix with Windows 10. I've known that for a long time. They call it a feature. I call it a bug. That's a good reason to stick with Windows 8.1 when using Netflix. I've already asked for help in forums, and everybody says the same: there's no way around it, except for using an older operating system.

However, the problem is even trickier. As soon as Netflix is loaded in Windows 10, whether it's in your browser or in the standalone Netflix app, it turns off the screenshot function completely. What I mean is, if you open Netflix, then minimise it, then try to make a screenshot of a different window, it won't work. Netflix blacks out screenshots for the whole computer.

That's what I did wrong today. I forgot that I had the Netflix homepage open in another window, so my screenshots of "Heavy Trip", which I watched with Amazon Prime, failed. After the film was over I had to close Netflix, then go back and make some new screenshots.

I really hope that Windows 8.1 will remain available for a long time. It's useful having Windows 10 on my laptop for comparison, but I don't want to be stuck with it when I have to buy a new computer.

	Order from Amazon.com
	Order from Amazon.co.uk
	Order from Amazon.de