Djöflaeyjan

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.

Poor families In the barrack district in Reykjavik in 50's. Mother who gets married and moves to America leaving her children. Grown-up boy sticking around with his gang and violence. His younger brother with bad self-confidence and the tragedy, which wakes up his wild brother to consider of his own life. The film is full of tragedies, miserable and disparate people. But, so amazing, the film ends peacefully with "Charles Chaplin" and the opera singing boy. This ending doesn't however let the audiences forget what happened with the family before, and even though, you get hope of bright future of the family. Very unique film with any possible elements of life. The Icelandic language spies the film too with its beautiful sounds.

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.

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.

This movie is a good, 'gritty' film, about a lower class family going through major cultural shock. Chances are you don't speak icelandic (I don't) but subtitled it flowed very well. It's not hollywood like, it goes a bit slower than your average film, but they use that time to develop the characters and to get you emotionally involved.