It’s that time of the year again – festival time! The week where we’re at shady downtown cinemas almost every day, sometimes twice a day, a lot of beer is drank, a lot of asses are being frozen in the Norwegian cold. So far, I have to say, it hasn’t been disappointing.

We started the festival by discussing  Jeremy’s goodbye party and Jeremy’s goodbye pre-party on Friday over a few beers at Politiken. A place which, for some mysterious reason, we only ever enter when it’s cold. Somehow the good cinemas have all the good stuff during summertime and the crappy cinemas during wintertime. Go figure.

The Town is Ben Affleck galore – starring Ben, directed by Ben, written by Ben. Hmm, scratch that last one, it’s adapted from “Prince of Thieves” – an apparently good novel. With an  obviously better-sounding name. Anyway, The Town is Charlestown,  a neighbourhood of Boston, where apparently everyone is Irish and a seasoned criminal. There’s many a film that try to make Boston look a much cooler place than it really is (Boston is lame, ok?) and this is one of them. Someone like Boston and wants to pay for a lot of those. Okay, the white man likes them, so we’ll play along.

The film  itself is spectacular. It’s not the usual yet-another-bank-job motion picture and you really can’t go wrong with that. It does feature elaborate large-cash robberies , with reasonably perfect execution. It does feature ‘something went terribly wrong’ scenes. It does all that, but in a surprisingly down-to earth way, making you believe that this is exactly how this would happen. It’s a fantastically realistic representation of the plot, without your usual movie industry sparkle added on top.

There’s no nonsense happy-ending bullshit either. At one point I was terribly afraid that this will end in one of two really cheesy ways, but thankfully, it all went perfectly. And it took me 5 days to figure out what the fuck does the tangerine mean. All in all, one of the best films this year, at least in the group of films with a slightly more serious tone overall. The reviews about the even better and definitely a lot less serious ‘movie of the year’ are pending, as I write this.