Djöflaeyjan

This movie is really good. At least it's better than the book although many people would disagree with me there. To enjoy this film more than some have been doing you'll have to know what situation the people are in. The movie is based on the Icelandic lives at that time. I think it's a great movie but not the best Icelandic movie i've seen.

If I would see some film that is identical to this one from another country with another culture I would not enjoy it as much. For example if there were a movie about someone in Britain and I would not know the situation the people would be in I wouldn't understand the story in the film.

I recommend to everybody who can read the book to read it before or after you see this film. In the book you can see the storyline much better and you'll know why this is a really good movie.

I saw this movie in a university class. First, I felt it was somewhat loose in storyline and editing, and it took me a while to get me into the story. but then I got accustomed with the characters and was fine after all.

The story is about a family that lives in some come-down US-barrack-shelters in the early 1950ies. It covers a couple of years of time. It's built up like a classic Icelandic saga - about a family in Iceland, with one character, Baddi that is, in the middle, and the problems Baddi causes. But that might also make the story a bit boring.

Characters are odd and funny. Cinematography is excellent. If you like Scandinavian cinema and and story lines you can't predict, this is a movie you should watch.

See this film. It is well-filmed, spoken in a funny language, and simply catches you from the beginning to the end. See how the American Dream is dreamt in a desolate place under different circumstances. All filming perspectives here are pieces of art.

I go out of my way to view foreign/independent film (I know, we're a vanishing breed) and rented this video at a neighborhood store that has a pretty good foreign selection mostly on the power of having seen COLD FEVER, which I enjoyed.

While I appreciate "dark comedies" as much as the next person -- and am a huge fan of Aki Kurasmaki (so I have some familiarity of Scandinavian film sensibility) -- it was a mistake to have placed so much of the film's success around a character as thoroughly unlikable as Baddi.

While he dominates the screen with charmless, witless and appalling behavior that knows no bounds (premised on his contact with "America"), most of the other characters are used as props and are nobly antithetical, i.e., they have a conscience. But for the most part, as a whole they cannot counterbalance the effect that the Baddi character has on the film.

That is a shame because there appeared to be some good potential character driven aspects to the story that were wasted.

This film features a lot of drinking, a lot of shouting and a lot of fighting! But this isn't enough to make it a good film. I never cared about the people in the story.