This guy has it tough, no doubt about it. An accident put Geirr (Fridtjov Såheim) in a wheelchair, literally bringing his life to a standstill. Disability insurance has made him a wealthy man, but he spends his days locked in a darkened room, watching "Apocalypse Now", listening to "Folsom Prison Blues", doing dope and booze, following the example of the Man in Black himself in nearly every way. Geirr's girlfriend Ingvild (Kirsti Torhaug) tries to grin and bear it, but it's obvious she could use some help. Well, she isn't going to get it from Tori (Kjersti Holmen), an annoying Martha Stewart type self-help guru, or her flying circus of misfits. Instead, Geirr is about to teach the group a valuable lesson and serve them a "hot dog for your brain." Great performances. Extremely refreshing. Surprisingly violent. But these clowns, they had it coming. See it with your kids.

Breien's film about handicapped people is a corrective. It mocks programs that offer false cheer, repress the need to express anger, and don't give people who need to do so the right to take things in their own hands.Things get lively as soon as Tori (Kjersti Holmen),a smug therapist who works for the Norwegian state health system, takes her group of variously dysfunctional folks in a van to the house of Geirr (Fridtjov Såheim), a wheelchair bound man who's refused to join the program. If she thinks she's going to win Geirr over, she's got another think coming. As we see before the group arrives, Geirr, who's paraplegic and impotent from a car accident, doesn't get along with his wife Ingvild (Kirsti Eline Torhaug) and likes to spend his time getting high, drinking beer, listening to Johnny Cash albums and watching war movies.Tori has brought quite a motley crew. There's Lillemor (Kari Simonsen), a middle aged divorced woman in a neck brace. Marta (Marian Saastad Ottesen) is a pretty woman. She is paraplegic too, from a mountaineering accident. Gard (Henrik Mestad) is her self-righteous, self-pitying boyfriend. Asbjorn (Per Schaaning) is an older man who is seriously damaged by a stroke and can hardly speak. Tori imposes a regime of forced cheer. It's obviously gone too far with Marta, who wears a fixed rictus smile. Lillemor is perpetually whining. She gets to voice her complaints into the knitted "shit bag," which Tori passes to people who want to say something uncheerful.Ingvild has invited the group over because she can't take Geirr's withdrawn grumpiness much longer and is desperately hoping they can get through to him. The surprise is that it's he who gets through to them. Geirr doesn't want anybody to try to tell him that things are okay for him. By shaking up the group and expelling Tori and encouraging the others to admit what's really going on inside or alternately dropping their facades of self-pity, Geirr releases a swoosh of energy in the group that flows back to him. It turns out he's a pretty together fellow. He becomes the leader--and the exponent of The Art of Negative Thinking. The group helps him by pointing out that of all of them, he's materially the best off. He lives in a big, beautiful house, while some of them are struggling to survive financially. Others also reveal what else is going on with them, that Tori's bossiness had kept from coming out. Marta stops smiling long enough to point out to Gard that his failing to tie her off is why she fell. On the other hand he needs to stop agonizing over that and move forward. Lillimor doesn't really need the neck brace. Asbjorn gets so involved in the proceedings, which involve some useful drunken revels, that he regains some of his power of speech. In time Tori is allowed back to apologize and the air has been cleared.The solutions the group, with Geirr, arrive at relate to 12-step recovery, which assumes as a given that people must help themselves and you don't know what it's like unless you've been there yourself. Nobody who hasn't dealt with the minute to minute hardships of being disabled has the right to tell handicapped people to keep their chin up. You have to acknowledge the dark side to get to the light. When being honest is the prime requisite it also comes clear who has been faking and who can get a lot better fast if they try.But this isn't some kind of instructional film. It's a somewhat theatrical happening, whose improvisational surprises at times suggest the work of Lars von Trier. The actors manage to seem real and at the same time somewhat stylized.This is a nice little film that somehow seems ideally a product of the angst-ridden world of the Scandinavian northland. But a lot of what goes on here is universal, and by no means restricted to the handicapped--or to Norwegians.Seen as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2008.

I was looking forward to this movie for months. And not because I studied in Norway, but because we are overwhelmed with American love stories, sad stories, catastrophic movies, movies that have to last at least 2 hours and make your body ache with pain. I just wanted to see a movie that has actually something to say, can say it clearly enough and be entertaining at the same time. And it all came true! This film is very much about the fact, that feeling depressed and angry can be sometimes more useful that false positive and light-hearted approach. It helps the pain go away much faster and you can finally, at this desperate and hopeless moment, start a new chapter of your life with a clean slate. Things that we all keep in our minds and are ashamed to think of or even to say aloud are spoken and discussed vividly here with all the logical consequences. And with all this said, you will rather laugh through out this movie than cry or have deep thoughts. They come later :-)

what you might expect when entering the theaters for this movie is a sad little feel-sorry movie from ice-cold Norway. I mean, how can a movie with handicapped people be any fun? well, lets start with the colourful ensemble of characters in this movie. first there's of course geirr, an impotent wheelchair bound master of the negative, that looks like he's been to Vietnam and back a dozen times, who compensates his lack of "drive" with a ridiculously large handgun. there's also a rebellious grandmother, a stroke-victim, a paralyzed woman with a grin plastered firmly on her face, and a cast of control-freak "healthy" people. mix this together, and you have a healthy dose of facades being torn down for some self-destructive letting lose. its a fresh breath of air amidst the dreary number of gangster wannabe movies thats been pouring out of norwegian cinemas.as a bonus on the DVD, you get a small movie about a thug with a bad back filmed in a documentary-style manner, which is also worth a watch.another glittering gem in Norways collection of weird little movies.