Date-kveld

Last night KE and I had a date night, for the first time in about a year. E spent the night at his aunt's house and we went out for dinner at one of the few local restaurants here on Nesodden. It turned out to be a real treat. Generally I hate going out to eat at restaurants in Norway because I usually think the food  tastes bad and it is so expensive, but this place was actually worth eating at! Last month the only restaurant within walking distance of our house changed from a more traditional pub menu to an all-Thai menu. Thai food is my absolute favorite. I'm of the mind that if you're going to pay someone else to make you food, it should at least be something better than you could make at home, and preferably much more exotic. This place had better Thai food than either of the two restaurants I've tried in Oslo, and actually better than the disappointing restaurant we tried near our hotel in San Francisco when we were there on vacation. I can't believe my luck, though it probably won't last since restaurants have a terrible time keeping afloat out here where we live.

We had borrowed a couple of movies at the library, and decided to try Mona Hoel's Salto, salmiakk og kaffe (2003) when we got home. Argh. It was so bad I hardly know where to begin. I'm sure it was supposed to be a poetic, heart-warming, smart, funny and intuitive women's film. It fails miserably. It was so bad that I'm actually angry at myself for wasting time watching it. Hoel reinforced every lame stereotype about women and men and she uses every single hackneyed plot device. Basically, the message is: women are idiots trampled on by men who are assholes, but if men just read Robin Norwood's Women Who Love Too Much and develop empathy for women, everyone will be happy. Seriously. That's it. That's the message of the film. The whole thing culminates in a hospital sequence with one woman giving birth (to a girl), one woman having sex in a back room, and one woman dying (oooh, the irony of life...). Then they all end up in church at the funeral of the woman who has died, with all the relationships repaired and the new mother connecting with the man (not her estranged husband, who is the father of the child) who helped her (intuitively, sensitively - seriously, he even rather incongruously had massage oil with him) through childbirth. This was more or less the same ending that incensed me with Thomas Vinterberg's Submarino. Somehow placing all the characters together in a church has become shorthand in Nordic film to signify that all is good and right with the world. Clearly Hoel had some kind of life changing experience after reading Women Who Love Too Much and decided that it was so important that she had to make a film about it, but the only thing worse than a self-help book is a self-help film...

Seriously, we enjoyed watching the few minutes of Hvem kan slå Aamodt og Kjus that we happened to turn on before starting the film a million times more.