Á köldum klaka

Hirata, a japanese businessman, is forced to visit Iceland instead of Hawaii based on family matters.

At several occations I found this film very amusing and charming, especially Hirata and the strange icelandic people that he meets, asking; "How do you like Iceland ?" - As Hirata is tricked into buying a deep-frozen car, he uses this to travel across Iceland. The radio play terrible folk music, but can't be turned off.. And when he picks up two american hitchers Lili Taylor and Fisher Stevens, naturally the music drives them mad.. Hence the exclaim: "It's an icelandic torture chamber"...Great! With Masatoshi Nagase from "Mystery Train" as Hirata, thoughts go to Jim Jarmusch though mostly for the directing of the film.. A great, cold, atmospheric vision, strange and beautiful.

This film is indeed a beautiful film showing Iceland's many attractions as the previous reviewer mentioned, but it also draws very interesting parallels between the native beliefs of Icelanders, which in fact are quite similar to what prevailed across Europe before Christianity came(Iceland was settled by Vikings and was among the last places Europeans held to their pagan religion), and the Shinto practices in Japan. One accompanies the main character, a shallow, immature corporate executive from his comfortable Tokyo life to Iceland: where layer by layer he is stripped of comfort, certainty, even rationality, until he is brought to a place where he realizes a simple and profound humanity.

This film is funny, the cinematography is amazing, and it is spiritually enriching. How many films can you say all that about?

The first time I saw Cold Fever was May of last year. It was in a time when I was lost in life. That's when Cold Fever was coming on HBO. I sat there for 90 mins and I found the film very funny and quite moving. The way everyone keeps asking Atsushi, "So how do you like Iceland?" or the characters he runs into. Some of them include Laura, a woman who likes to "collect" funerals or American tourists Jack and Jill, who bicker all the time because they disagree on taking a vacation to Iceland. Atsushi first finds this trip as a burden because he was looking forward to going to Hawaii to play golf. Instead, he has to go to Iceland to perform a ritual by the river where his parents drowned. Then, throughout this journey he learns more about himself. He finds some of the strangest people you will meet...a cab driver performing a strange ritual, a girl who restarts his car with a sonic scream, and my favorites, the Islandic Cowboys. When he finally gets his mission accomplished of performing the ritual, he learns that sometimes a journey can take you places that aren't on any map. That is so true. I wanted this movie so bad that I finally received it from Amazon today. It is still as great as when I saw it a year ago. Check this out because it is brilliant.

I saw Cold Fever when it was first released in the U.S. and have been (unsuccessfully so far) looking for it for about 5 years to see it again.

Some of the other comments have pointed to the way the Japanese and Icelandic elements--of folklore and spirituality, principally--weave together. I have always thought it was a beautiful homage to Kurosawa and perhaps other Japanese filmmakers, not just in the plot (which others have correctly seen as a "road movie") but in the whole pacing and look of the film--the colors, the composition of scenes, the attention to the characters. It's really too bad more people haven't seen it.

Hirata's enlightenment through his contacts with other characters who may be real, delusional (he is, in fact, fevered), or actual ghosts or spirits is compelling and thought-provoking for the viewer, who must also question what is "real," as well as what it means.

Masatoshi Nagase (best known for his role in Jarmusch's Mystery Train, and also the Japanese films Suicide Club, The Hidden Blade and Electric Dragon 80.000V) stars as a Japanese man whose grandfather (cult director Seijun Suzuki, who appears for a couple of minutes) insists he spend his vacation performing traditional burial rites of his parents, who died while living in Iceland. Nagase flies to Reykjavik and proceeds to drive across the country in the middle of the winter to the remote spot where they passed. Though they don't go into any details on his parents' death, Iceland seems like a very likely place to die, since it's full of dangerous, unpopulated terrain. This is basically a road movie, where Nagase meets various odd people along his way. It's maybe a bit weirder than most - I'd say it's kind of one of those weird-for-the-sake-of-weird type movies. But Fridriksson does a great job of making his home country look like a world of wonder. "Iceland is very strange country" Nagase always says when someone asks him what he thinks of it, in English of course, since it's the common language between him and most Icelanders (I'd say about 80% of the dialogue is in English). The film doesn't really go anywhere plot-wise, and some of the episodes are more successful than others. The most notable flop is the long sequence where Nagase picks up a couple of stranded American tourists, Fisher Stevens and Lili Taylor. Those two are painfully annoying, especially when they talk to each other via their sock puppets. That's really some needless quirk. Overall, though, I was intrigued.