I held down a job as a bona fide movie critic for five years.

It was an excellent fit, since I was at the movie theater a couple times a week anyway, fattening up on cutting-edge movie fare like "The Transporter" (more on that later) and blathering incessantly about whatever I'd just seen.

Then I moved to Norway for the summer.

Continuing to review films for Boulder wasn't an option, since the only flicks released early there are, well, Norwegian.

But whether or not I was getting paid to write about them, going to the movies is about as essential to me as breathing and Guinness, so I hit the Norge theaters immediately.

Unfortunately, I couldn't read the Oslo version of Moviefone, so I had to stick to titles that translated easily into English or maintained their English titles.

For example, "Up" was called, "Opp," and that icky Sandra Bullock/Ryan Reynolds movie, "The Proposal," was called... "The Proposal." Since "Opp" didn't open in Oslo until the end of September, I paid to see the icky romcom.

The upshot, of course, is that in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday nobody else wanted to see it either, so I was the only one in the theater. And because I was late, and Norwegians are nice, the ticket gal called the projection dude and he started it over for me so I wouldn't miss a thing.

Had I known better, I might have savored the moment more.

The NEXT time I went to the movies, a small posse of us headed downtown to the Nationaltheatret district to check out "Inglourious Basterds."

Sitting in the dark, drinking champagne-flavored soda (yep), I suddenly realized I had absolutely no idea what was going on in the movie. This is an especially weird sensation when you've been paid good money to follow plotlines. It WAS Tarantino, but something else was going on here.

Half the movie was in languages besides English and the freakin' subtitles were in Norsk.

Luckily, my boyfriend had no problem whispering translations into my ear. But it wasn't the same and I'm sure stuff got lost in translation.

I soon realized I would either have to master Norsk overnight, or go to films made only in English.

Turns out, kiddie fare is dubbed in Norsk (no "Opp" for me, no matter when it came out), the foreign films are subtitled in Norsk (forget watching "Coco et Chanel") and everything else I'd been excited to see was months away from hitting theaters.

I could watch "The Hangover" again and again, or I could watch every American romcom available. Even though I tend to despise romcoms, I paid top kroner to see all two of them.

But the toughest hardship was the lack of materials to create the second-most sickeningly shameful movie fare in the world -- handed down to the masses by the same geniuses that brought you Tee & Cakes' bacon chocolate cupcake -- "The Transporter."

Sure, the Norskis have popcorn, but the nacho dipped in cheese with which to transport the popcorn into your mouth was nowhere to be found.

The horror!

Jeanine Fritz is still recovering from her Norwegian summer. She writes about stuff every Friday in the Colorado Daily.