HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

pointyfilippa The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

swedeandsour I was surprised by the level of brutality in this film, both physical and psychological. The psychological abuse was even more of a weight than the physical - mind games, blame, isolation, collective responsibility and punishments, shaming, repeated shows of system's strength and of the children's weakness and helplessness - it felt like a mix of a nightmarish boarding school, a kind of cult or Nazi camp for brainwashing and a slave-labor camp for prisoners of war, not of young offenders, many of whom sent for petty crimes.The kids don't have any visitors from family, they don't seem to have any kind of free time for any leisure whatsoever - there is no escape from the drudgery, yet despite being putting their heads down and accepting their lives as slaves, the corrections officers still abused the prisoner-laborers physically, mentally and sexually.Yet it's the hope that sometimes kills you. The location of the island, so close to the mainland yet so far from everyone, makes it worse. Unlike Siberian prisons where there really is no hope of escape, this one is close enough to freedom that kids get the idea that they could make it. The guards have no dogs, no fences, no barbed wire, so there's hope for escape, but winter and hunger will catch up with you.The soundtrack is haunting and fits perfectly with the desolate, hopeless environment. The movie really sucks you in and you empathize with the kids in it, getting enraged at the injustice of it all.It's difficult to watch, but it's a must watch for fans of film.

grantss Good Norwegian drama, but could have been great. Good plot, well developed. The set up and build up to the inevitable climax was great, and set the scene for a fantastic conclusion. Character development is also good.However, the final scenes isn't as satisfactory as the build up. There are a few scenes and events which just don't gel, and which make the last quarter or so of the movie feel a bit contrived. Credibility is restored somewhat by the moving ending, however.Good performances all round. The only known actor (to us non-Norwegians, at least) in the cast is Stellan Skarsgard, who seems to appear in every Scandinavian movie. He is excellent, as always, as the governor of the prison.

secondtake King of Devil's Island (2010)A very straight forward, hard hitting, well acted account based on a true story of a boy's penal colony on a Norwegian Island early in the 20th Century.That says it all. It is what it is, and there is the almost inevitable rebel and leader among the boys against the sometimes evil, sometimes indifferent adults who rule the group with false benevolence. You know who is right and who is wrong, and you follow the plot with a mixture of expectation and outrage. It's dramatic great stuff. Yes, been there and seen that somehow before, but it's severe and beautiful in its setting and intense and provocative within.It might be interesting to compare this to more famous prison movies (the dubious "Shawshank" and earlier classics like "Birdman from Alcatraz") to realize how much this one is holding to a line of truth. As much as the events are extreme (eventually), the filmmaking is filled with restraint. Compare further to a movie like "Shutter Island" and you know that this one is practically a grey, subdued documentary.And this is to its advantage. It's not a mind-blowing experience in cinema terms--it's just a really well done, focused, sensitive telling of a forgotten story of repression and survival and maybe, in the end, the every lifting human spirit.

OJT Kongen av Bastøy is based on actual events happening on the Bastøy correctional facility for difficult boys, back in 1915. The Norwegian island Bastøy is located in the Oslo fjord, between Horten and Moss, about an hours drive south of Norway's capitol, what until 1919 was called Christiania before changing name back to original Oslo.Marius Holst has made another good film about young boys coping with coming of age. This time he has gone to the core of coping with misplaced childhoods. Well acted, and very true to it's time frame, Kongen of Bastøy, is very believable story made with a 10 million dollar budget. Stellan Skarsgård, Kristoffer Joner, Benjamin Helstad and Trond Nilssen does the very best of method acting of their characters.The story is both sore, dramatic and tragic, as well as true. It tries to both tell Norwegian history back when the country was poor, and when it was likely to be sent on a whaling ship, being a youngster from difficult background. So why is this film not a 10 out of 10. so many of these heart-wrenching stories easily make you get tears in your eyes.Well, I'm afraid to say that this is a true story's dilemma. Making the best possible story come out in a film, you have to love of eel for the characters. The young boys on this facility is not the ones easy to love. They are brutal, uneducated, cheeky, unable to show affection and victims of a difficult past. Though Marius Holst tries to make us understand and feel affection for both the kids and the "wardens" in this boys home, I simply can't really start to like any of the characters.Well acted, well written, but does director Holst really make us care? He has shown he know how to do this in the great story of "Cross my heart and hope to die", In Norwegian: "Ti kniver i hjertet" and "Mirsush" or "Blodsbånd", and succeeded well there. In Kongen av Bastøy which is a story of 10 years in progress, the trouble is that he had to face reality.Telling a story on difficult boys, obviously has to show the boys how they are. And Marius Holst is no "tears-seeker". Neither is his leading actor in this. He obviously has felt this story has to be told. And as a historic manuscript on how one solved this cases of difficult boys back then, it functions very well. Just don't expect to really care. Maybe this makes the film even better. It should, but I'm afraid I still feel it lacks this. To really be able to touch a movie-goer, the fictional adding would have done the trick. making the film an even better story, but less true. That's the dilemma of telling a true story. If you want the story to be loved, you gotta add the elements of heart and soul, even if it would be untrue to the story told.So for this cold bastard, I'm afraid this is just a good told story, and not a classic as I'd like it to be, and maybe also therefore not the possible box office hit it would have been, if made as a heart wrenching story.Making a film like this loved, really need us to identify. This is the only true trouble with an otherwise great film.Bastøy correctional facility was closed down in the fifties, when Norway was recovering from the 2nd World war. Now there's a prison out there. I'm sure a lot of kids was growing up hating Bastøy. Bastøy still have a negative sound for Norwegians, well deserved.