Jitters

Jitters is okay; I didn't hate it, but I can't say I like it; it's just too unbelievable to react to in much of any way at all.

Atli Oskar Fjalarsson is very cute, and although it's completely unbelievable that every girl he knows has the hots for him, I'd believe it in an instant if they were boys (but they're not).

In any other movie, a boy like him - a sweet, gentle, graceful, sympathetic, six-foot, 90-pound sylph-like pretty boy with flawless skin - would constantly be having to prove he's not gay, and constantly be bullied by gangs of straight boys and ridiculed by gangs of straight girls; but evidently it's not like that in Iceland. Everybody in this movie, of every age, male and female, seems to see Matthew McConaughey in him instead of Audrey Hepburn. It's a great mystery.

Unfortunately, Atli Oscar's cuteness is about all this silly movie has going for it. I never believed in anybody, so I never cared what happened to anybody. What's obviously supposed to be the great tragedy is simply ludicrous, but no more ludicrous than anything else that happens.

This is my first Icelandic movie, so it may be a cultural thing; although I have loved and related deeply to movies from all the other Scandinavian countries, Iceland is very different, and very much smaller. But it's a little hard to believe - even as isolated as that country is and always has been - that teenagers and even adults are as naive, as clueless, as simpleminded, almost, as they are in this movie.

I'm pretty sure Iceland is a modern, advanced country, but these people seem more out of touch than the Amish. Maybe it's true that Icelanders are extraordinarily simple, naive, backward people; if so, I can understand why the world isn't swarming with Icelandic movies. But for now I'm going to assume that Iceland is a great country and Icelanders are smart, interesting people and that this is just a dumb movie.