Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

(Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann, Sweden, France, Germany, 2013)

This was a big hit in Sweden, but probably too quirky to find more than a small audience in America. Like the title says, this old dude escapes from the retirement home where he has been wasting his later life. He goes to the bus station, and through a series of funny events, ends up with a suitcase stuffed with money that belongs to a drug dealer. And so the chase is on. Allen is a little iffy in the memory department, and never really engages in the chase, but more unlikely events keep saving his life. He kills several people in comic ways … well, comic if you have a sense of humor like mine, one of which is putting a man into a freezer and the forgetting about him. Oops! Another man dies when an elephant sits on him.

But the real craziness is when he flashes back to his earlier life. As a boy he liked to blow things up, and he ends up being sought after by everyone from the Manhattan Project to the Soviets to the North Koreans. He is thrown into the gulag and teams up with Einstein’s non-genius brother, Herbert. And on and on, and it never tired me out, I always enjoyed the next plot twist. I liked this a lot.