SWEDISH FILM FESTIVAL TO HYPNOTIZE AUDIENCE

Last year, Sweden’s Goteborg Film Festival stranded one lucky filmgoer on a remote island in the North Sea for 7 days to watch all the festival’s films alone. The year before that, they shut viewers inside large coffins and projected the film inside. This year, the festival is experimenting with mass hypnosis. Before the screening of three films, a hypnotist will perform mass hypnosis on the audience to, they hope, “transform the audience’s state of mind in accordance with the mood and theme of the film.” The hypnotist will break the spell after the screening. According to the festival’s artistic director Jonas Holmberg, the experiment is meant to “raise questions about submission, transgression and control.”
* Yeah, HE’S not into bondage much.
* Every few minutes, someone stands up and clucks like a chicken.
* You ever seen a Swedish film? It’s not that hard to put people to sleep.
* Imagine if this works. AMC will hire hypnotists at every theater to go, “When you hear this bell ring, you will proceed to the snack bar and order a large popcorn.”
* I was just at a movie where the audience was hypnotized. I went to see that “House of Gucci” with Lady Gaga. The entire audience? Out cold.
* When asked whatever happened to that guy they stranded on the island last year, Mr. Holmberg screamed, “Oh, my God!