Change Your Image
pietterbeek
Reviews
Saint Ange (2004)
Enough to make an angel weep.
This could have been a good movie. If a good actress was chosen for the main part and if the story was more tied. Ledoyen's acting is so insecure, so weak, almost everything she does makes clear that she is looking for a way to fill the part. But too late, the work has been done as one starts watching the movie.
The story takes place in a summer, but what in fact is taken place? I did not find the clue, or it is a weak one I have to set my mind upon. Of course, the bad acting of Viginie Ledoyen is partly due to herself, so what the hell did the director during the time her scenes were shot? It is the man's job to direct, not to look how an actress is acting. The editor could have done a good job by shortening the scenes, but did the contrary. However, the storytelling can be edited, not the story itself. About the rest of the film making I am positive. Well done, cameraman, hat off. The sound was good, the scenery in the end even amazing. But too late, a good end does not make a good story. One may wonder if there is one.
Zomerhitte (2008)
One of the worst I ever saw.
This film should have never been made. Honestly, I must admit that before I saw it I had some serious doubts. The director is not a great actress, though she did a lot of movies in Holland, and the young woman who took the main part is a TV-personality with a constant smile on the face and not much self-criticism. The actor who played the other main part I recently saw in Bride Flight and although that film is better, he did not convince me than. To start with the the story, I have not read the novel it is based upon, but the script that underlays the film is something that might have been done with in mind kids having a birthday party on a rainy Sunday afternoon, not someone of the same age as the director who likes to watch a good movie. Something really disturbing were the overdubbed dialogues, it was most of the time spoken out loud. My regards go to the cameraman, at least he tried to make something out of it. It is a pity that the film is edited lousy, if not, some scenes were certainly more credible.
Bride Flight (2008)
Disappointing, but worthwhile.
The first twenty minutes I wondered which way this film was going, in more than one sense. The acting was not great, the dialogues where not convincing, the scenes in the plane where clumsy and Dutch international movie star Rutger Hauer's character died not long after the beginning. Honestly, with a few exceptions I am not very impressed by the Dutch cinema, was this another Dutch movie? Then the story started to roll and got me more in its grip. The acting was getting better, sometimes real good. What I think is a pity, is that the storyline is filled with flash forwards that do not add much to the story, which is all about the life of Dutch immigrants in New Zealand in 1953 and farther. The film could have been much better if the story was told chronologically and ended somewhere in the 70's or 80's. Now there are two actors for each character, and for me, also knowing the old respectable actors from the old days, this was sometimes quite disturbing. I found it hard to intermingle a character, I saw Willeke van Ammelrooy, not the character that grew old and looked little alike with the younger woman she once had been in the film. I had strongly the impression that the known actors where mostly used to put known names on the billboards. Their parts are relatively small and of little importance for the basic line of the story.
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Well dressed but weak story based on a number of historical events
Lately on Belgian TV I first saw this movie and than a French documentary on Marie Antoinette. What a relief to see the documentary after this glamorous but boring impression of Sofia Coppola. The movie is mostly entertainment and has little to do with 18th century Versailles. It is rather a compilation of moving pictures, that repeat themselves for most of the time, than the moving story that should have been told based on the same historical events. A story that could have entertained me a lot more than this film that is lost in clichés and superfluous details. Certainly not my way to approach history and in this context to portray an idiosyncratic woman like Marie Antoinette.