Talk:Songs from the Second Floor

The correct translation of "Sånger från andra våningen" is "Songs from the First Floor". In Sweden we start counting the floors from ground floor as the first one and that is probably why the misstake has occured. Does anyone have any information about why that title was taken for the english release? --Bjoorn 21:41, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

I just edited the main article. Sorry, I meant to post here first to discuss changing but couldn't figure out how until now. I replaced "critique of capitalist society" with "lament aspects of life in a modern industrialized capitalist society." I think the change is important b/c the movie, I think, was less a detailed critique of capitalism in general as an economic system (and was decidedly unrelated to the page that those words linked to before I removed them, which lists criticisms that are economic in nature), and was more specifically a lamentation or complaint about certain aspects of life in a modern incarnation of a capitalist, industrialist society. I think these specifics are quite important. I really liked this movie and see myself and others sharing many of the woes of the characters in it, but I do not believe the woes are inherent to a capitalist economic system; and certainly they are divorced from the economics and any economic criticisms; but rather I think they are problems with the current modern incarnation of society in capitalist, industrialized nations... The movie seems to me to have mostly to do with a loss of humanity/spirituality/etc. within these modern capitalist, industrialized societies where everyone works daily to keep up with the joneses and stay ahead and is left without time to be human and process adequately their various emotions and enjoy the simple human pleasures of life (AND I would be in favor of the inclusion of a line or two describing this in the summary). I will grant that these problems are ostensibly the result of capitalism but the director doesn't assert or even consider alternatives to capitalism in the film; he is uninterested in alternatives; rather the movie serves to just lament the modern reality, and I think that's an important distinction and suggests that "critique of capitalism" is inappropriate. And me personally I don't think the solution in the real world will come from any other macroscopic institutional shift like a shift of the economic system; but rather we will just evolve individually to be better participants of a capitalist society... We will simply learn to not worry so much about keeping up with the joneses, and we will learn to embrace our humanity and learn to process our emotions and develop our spirituality (sort of how Larry Darrell does in W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge) while the capitalist system will remain the only viable one. By the way, one criticism I might have with the movie is that one might think after seeing it that most people in capitalist societies have trouble holding a job and making ends meet (the guy gets fired after 30 years with the company; the other guy burns down his business to collect insurance; the one guy who "doesn't have a good head for business" goes insane). In fact capitalist societies are generally speaking richer than all others, and this is true at every level of society (rich and poor classes), and unemployment is the lowest in these societies. While people in these societies tend to always want more and want to "keep up with the joneses" in material possessions, virtually all can get jobs, food, and housing if they work moderately hard and can accept a modest living. But in the movie I guess it's not that the guy loses his job but it's that he's so attached to his job that he breaks down upon its loss; generally the people care too much about their income and that is a fair criticism. Another important point: Sweden is really Socialist, in which the capitalism is very mild compared to e.g. the United States. --eds2103 6:53, Feb 23 08 (EST)