En underbar jävla jul

I'm a christian and a big fan of Christmas so in November and December I watch a lot of Christmas movies. There aren't many Swedish Christmas movies except for Sagan om Karl-Bertil Jonssons julafton and Tomten är far till alla barnen (also known as In Bed With Santa), the last one being one of my favorites. When I heard of En underbar jävla jul I thought "Finally! Another Swedish Christmas movie! That was about time!" But after watching it, I got very disappointed! There is no Christmas spirit whatsoever in this movie, there's not even any humor. It's seems to me, the only purpose with En underbar jävla jul was to make a movie as politically correct as possible. I hate politically correctness and this is movie isn't even close to depicting the Swedish Christmas celebration.

A good test of a "comedic" film is the laughter engendered in an audience. I have endured too many supposed comedies, where I have continually thought, "This isn't at all funny." I saw this film at a festival showing with about 900 people in the audience. Although the laughter was not constant, there were many, many occasions during the film, when one could not hear the lines of the actors, because there was such prolonged uproarious laughter in response to the preceding dialogue. I personally haven't laughed so much at film in a very long time.

It is a very charming Christmas story, featuring a very unusual (to an American) Christmas celebration involving extended families of two young gay men meeting for the first time. The acting is of the highest caliber. There are some pratfalls, but if they are humorous, it is not because someone slipped on a banana peel, but the circumstances leading up to the slip. Most of the humor is from the lines of the actors. Although the ending is predictable and perhaps formulaic, no audience would expect it to end a tragically, and comedy continues to the end.

I first saw this movie in Lund, Sweden. Me and my friend had planned to see something else but that sold out, so we picked this one instead. To be honest, we didn't have high hopes for it.

From the first scene, however, I was impressed with the excellent acting and how quickly and efficiently the backdrop of the story was being put together, without it seeming forced. We ended up laughing our faces off in the theatre, which has never happened to me before or after. This movie has it all - it's funny, it's touching, it's a little sad, and a very nice and unconventional Christmas story. What I especially love is how you sympathize with EVERY character, even though none of them can behave themselves. And again - the acting is really, really impressive.

My only point of criticism would be that the music is sometimes a touch sentimental, and that it's put under the images without much hindsight to its appropriateness. However, this is a very minor thing and I only noticed it while re-watching the movie in detail (I'm working on Dutch subtitles). By the way, the second, third and fourth time around, this movie does not disappoint :-)

This movie is absolutely horrendous. From a critic point of view I'd say the movie belongs between an IMDb rating of 4 - 5, but the fact that it has such a rating as 6.3(as I'm writing this), I felt the need to over exaggerate on my score in order to lower its overall rating, because this really isn't a movie that you'd want to stumble across by accident.

To start it all of, I would say the major flaw of this movie comes down to its script and story development.

It's said to be a comedy, although that's among what it lacks the most. Overall it doesn't bring anything new or interesting, and on top of that, it has some serious "cringy"(as the teens call it) moments, in fact all to many. Its so called "humor" for the most part consists of someone making a clumsy entrance, saying something awkward about someone while they're sitting next to him or her, or just making it as simple as strictly riping off ideas that has worked in the past from other better movies. Before I watched it I had my expectations set to a standard B-movie, unfortunately for me that wasn't the case. There were multiple occasions where the movie just tried so hard to make it funny, that you couldn't but smile at how they thought people would laugh at someone stumble over an object and crashing a lamp. In other words I wouldn't recommend this movie, it has its clutch moments and occasionally good scenes, but simply doesn't make it to be even a B-tier movie.

To summarise briefly I'll give some key-words; Cringe, forced, uninteresting, abysmal.

Just a typical swedish christmas movie. You have your politically correct story involving a family get-together consisting of your usual ensamble of half bad actors/actresses and bad attempts at something that I presume is supposed to be "humor". I don't know why they keep making the same movie with slight variations over and over. Very boring, predictable and frankly just embarrassing in-your-face political correctness. It seems sweden stopped even trying to make good movies around the year 2000. After that, it's all just clones of either this movie or Beck/Wallander/Salander/whatever.