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Devil's Island
Devil's Island is a bitter sweet tale of Iceland in the fifties. Life is rough in Reykjavik's post-war slum of Camp Thule, where the abandoned US military barracks have been turned into makeshift homes. Struggling wives and their hard-working husbands try to make ends meet. The younger generation dreams of dollars, Rock'n'Roll and the American way of life. To celebrate or to drown their misery - they're never short of a good reason to booze. Devil's Island vividly depicts the everyday life of a wacky family, their neighbours and friends and shows how some of their dreams come true and others don't.
| Release : | 1996 |
| Rating : | 7.2 |
| Studio : | Zentropa Entertainments, Peter Rommel Productions, ZDF/Arte, |
| Crew : | Production Design, Director of Photography, |
| Cast : | Baltasar Kormákur Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir Ingvar E. Sigurðsson |
| Genre : | Drama Comedy |
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Reviews
Thanks for the memories!
As Good As It Gets
A waste of 90 minutes of my life
Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
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.
Alright so I may be biased since I played "Dick" in the movie (2 lines, Woo Hoo!!) but I definitely liked it. Although the characters sometimes seemed like caricatures you have to remember that they were trying to distill an entire nation's attitudes down into a few people. The movie is not exactly uplifting but it is well done. The acting is quality and Fridrik Thor's directing is on par with his Oscar nominated "Children of Nature."
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.
