Junk Mail

i'm glad there are a lot of other commentaries this frees me from telling too much about the story. it is about a postman who read the letters he's supposed to deliver and eventually even throws them away. suddenly he finds himself in the middle of a absurd and even a little dangerous story. but in my opinion just needs this story to talk about the relations between people. and what makes this movie so special is the fact that it actually not just shows pictures and sequences you've seen a hundred-times before.

it really has, i can't put it differently, respect for its personal.

this means that the persons keep their own personality for the whole absurd-tragic story of the movie.

Junk Mail is a Norweigan movie, and it is as black a comedy as I've seen. But the makers of the movie have stumbled onto a comedic truth that never fails: take an aberrant character trait, and take it to the absolute limit. The lead character is a mailman of monstrously incompetent proportions, a creepy, irredemiably snoopy individual who can't even get mugged right; he would gladly have handed over his mailbag, but he couldn't get it off his shoulder. In the process of sneaking around a deaf girl's apartment whom he fancies, he saves her life after she tries to commit suicide. For this guy, this uncharacteristically unselfish act sets off a disastrous chain of events. This weird movie will NOT work for you if you don't think it's funny. And this movie will only be funny for you to the degree that you're cynical and capricious in your affections. People of good heart, stay away.

This film depicts Oslo as a rather run-down city which, as far as I can remember, it is not; and as for the Norwegian Postal Service ...well that seems to be struggling along if we can judge by the unreliable antics of Roy (Robert Skjaerstad), one of the young postmen. He not only opens and reads private mail, but also lets himself into an apartment when he finds a key left in a mail-box. His exploration of the rooms leaves little time for delivering letters so he dumps the contents of his bag in a railway tunnel. The irony of the situation is that he is awarded a gold watch for bravery in attendance to his duties after being badly beaten up in the streets. The originality of the story is completely charming as it blends romance, suspense and comedy in which Roy seems to get involved at every turn. One scene I particularly like is the one in which a locomotive almost runs him down in the tunnel and scatters his letters high and wide like a flurry of snowflakes. It's just one of many quaint scenes. In another scene he is on the point of being gunned down in his own grungey apartment when nearby jackhammers reverberate throughout the whole building giving him the opportunity to make his get-away. There is a suspenseful moment when he slips an iron bar through the doorhandles of a public toilet imprisoning a frantic gunman. Unfortunately for Roy (always a loser it seems) his inscribed wrist watch falls off in his struggle and so the gunman is eventually able to trace his whereabouts. The film is short and sweet, well worth watching. It has a lot of originality in the script and the acting is first class. The film suggests we should look under our beds before retiring . One never knows who may be hiding there...particularly in Oslo.

A brilliant movie by Pal Sletaune! It's probably the "greyest" film I've ever seen. Disgusting in one way, but that only makes it greater. In my opinion the best Norwegian film ever, and it is absolutely worth watching. But like most movies, it is best in its original language, so people who doesn't speak Norwegian won't have the same experience, I guess... But it's still worth watching because of the depressing mood in it(!).

Once we rented this movie just to see what it was about. We were fairly impressed. It focuses on Oslo mailman Roy Amundsen, who is sort of down on his luck. Then, he gets interested in a woman and starts following her around. When she leaves her key in a mailbox, he has it copied, gets locked in her apartment, and gets a little (or a lot) more than he bargained for! Some of the world's most interesting movies have come from Scandinavia (e.g., anything by Ingmar Bergman). "Budbringeren" (called "Junk Mail" in English) is no exception. This look at some of Norway's grittier aspects is truly eye-opening. Maybe it's not any kind of masterpiece, but it's still an interesting slice-of-life tale.