piet-vandenbrande

This movie is excellent because of the photography, the storyline and its humanism. The relation between son and father is very well depicted and really moving. The battle scenes are great. The ritual for the killing is majestic! This is the first time I see a movie which is going so quickly, with its slow moments and with its accelerations. This is not really a horrific movie, the cruelty stays between the limits of human understanding. It is true that Maya's had also their offering rituals just like the Aztecs, but the Maya's took slaves for their offerings just as shown in the film. The costumes of the priests are really well done. so the movie is historically correct.

The soundtrack of the movie is good, some dialogues are good too, but the humour does not break away, it remains on the surface as everything in this movie. The actors just read loudly their lines, they even are not capable of "introspection". When Van Dorpe looses his daughter and when he goes into a sanitarium this does not appear real, it is just some fiction. He has sorrow, but just how? The homosexuals in the movie are laughable. Dikke Lul (Jan Hammenecker) is good and the mother of Jan Verbeke (Bernadette Daman) with her whig is also good. The locations are good, this is really Ostend.

One of the boys, Koen De Geyter, is a rapist and a woman hater but I did not understand while there was blood in his room and why he saw the world upside down (we seem him that way). The rally could have been better. Not all people speak Ostend dialect! It is more a fusion of Brugs and the region. Dries Vanhegen is not really an opponent of these boys, he is more like one of them! When he wants to stand up against them then he is just brawling his text without personality. When he quarrels with the mother of Verbeek he is just nothing and she plays much better. In fact he is nothing more than a strange mixture of Arno and Herman Brusselmans himself.

At the end one feels that the director did not know how to bring a finish to the movie and the ending is just catastrophically bad. The other film in Ostend dialect "Friday Fishday" by Jan Bucquoy has more people in it speaking good Ostend dialect. By the way: Jan Bucquoy was the director who had an option for ex-drummer 10 years ago. ("Camping Cosmos" (1996) is also in Middelkerke and Ostend). The smell of rotten fish is current in both movies! As "ex-drummer" has no message, it could never become a "cult movie": the emptiness of life of those losers is not a reason to avoid every setting off of the characters.

Michael Curtiz made this movie as a propaganda movie. Bogart is playing well, but the weak script does not give him the ability for a good performance. The scene on the boat where he is shooting at the German pilots and navigators is a shame: shoot at people without defense! At war, it happened, so it is realistic that it is in the film. It is also true that some crew members were loyal to the London government (which had to be build up) and that they refused to give their ships to the Vichy government. The dispute between the commanders (army, navy an air) is realistic and well done. The shooting of the plane is a remarkable battle scene. The end with the Handley-Page planes coming back is moving.