Ex Drummer (2007)

hyped garbage

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

I was really disappointed by this film. The opening 10 minutes are really impressive, and had me expecting something intelligent, angry and well-crafted. Dries is great amoral protagonist, Jan is genuinely likable and Dorpe becomes a truly tragic figure. The dialogue is mostly quite economical and the cinematography is fabulous throughout.Having Koen walk around on his ceiling is a great idea but some of the other devices are just visual gags. The "transgressive" stuff is a real mixture. There are parts that a heartbreakingly sad and awful, but a lot of it is just puerile jokes about genitals.In fact Ex Drummer is much more of a straightforward comedy than I was expecting. And the humour is mostly about (a) inappropriate use of language (gosh!), (b) a young man being attracted to an overweight, older woman (eww!), (c) outsize or unpleasant genitals (woah!). It's like Driller Killer meets The Inbetweeners. The meeting is not a success.There's a fairly explicit threesome sex scene that's only there to titillate, as far as I can see, since like Driller Killer's lesbian shower scene it adds pretty much nothing to plot or characterisation. It did, though, add to a general whiff of misogyny that I felt was hanging around the film even after you looked past the deliberate attempts to offend.The story is a bit of a mess. Without wishing to post spoiler, let's just say that it sets up a lot of tensions and possibilities that it doesn't bother to explore and ends up going for a set-piece ending that doesn't really make any dramatic sense. That's OK if you're finding the penis jokes delightful and/or edgy, but if not then it's a bit frustrating.There are some great scenes of punk bands playing punk music. There are a few really bracing moments and some quite crazy ideas. The performances were compelling (I was watching with subtitles). You get a real sense of the locations. As I've mentioned above, there are other good things here too.For me, though, the film as a whole failed to live up to its promise. Don't get me wrong, I got a kick out of it, but from some of the reviews here I was expecting little short of a masterpiece. Maybe I was expecting too much. If you sit down to it with a few beers and mates for some laughs, some gross-out and some disorganised stuff to think about I imagine it'll be fine. This might be a case of the hype spoiling the movie for me, although I genuinely think there's a more serious film here struggling to get out.

There needs to be films made that have this type of shock effect to your mental and emotional system, but it took me three years to work it out. I watched it at the Gothenburg Film Festival and my immediate reaction was: "Heck, this shouldn't have been shown in public, I am now permanently damaged in my mind and in my soul. Help me." Now, however, after a few years of pondering the images and issues presented to me and how it was done, I must say that it is a masterpiece, utterly destroying previous conceptions of what the world is like. With great "wit" and "style" (I will refine these points!) the story is told in a rapid tempo and with no loose ends and no censoring. The "style" thing: I propose that this is realism taken to a new level, with the really, really shitty reality of these low-life misfits shown at its worst, both from within and from without as is should be presented, uncensored like a bad nightmare, but presented a if it were true. And this is the shocking part: the movie makes you feel like it is true. This is sort of balanced with the "wit" part; burlesque, ironic and totally black humour; to make a soup so thick it can't be swallowed without being chewed really well, and when you chew it you just want to spit it out because the taste makes you want to throw up. 9/10, would have got full points if it had actually made me throw up.

I kept waiting for this film to reveal itself in terms of satire, dark humour, social commentary - whatever. I am not overly familiar with Belgian culture, but I am left to assume this film perhaps has more relevance in its country of origin.The film is supposed to be about a band, comprised of "handicapped" men - who are looking for a handicapped drummer so that they can play at a rock festival. The handicaps of the members, as I understood it, are that one is a rapist, one is deaf, and one has an arm that he can not move because his mother caught him masturbating at a tender age. Right off, I'm a little lost. Perhaps if some of these performances had been convincing or had any depth, I would see the humour. But Ex Drummer fails to convince me that being a rapist is a handicap, or that the afflictions of a man who lives in addicted squalor while beating his coke-whore wife - both who eventually terminally neglect their infant child, are downplayed by his "handicap" of being a deaf musician. Let's move on, the band finds their drummer, a successful writer who, out of bourgeois ennui wants to submerge himself in the sordid underbelly of society and whose magical "handicap" is his inability to play the drums. He manages this with frequent trips home to his posh-toddy wife to partake of threesomes and panoramic views from their well-appointed condo. One of the bands rivals at the upcoming music festival will be fronted by a lead-man called "Big Dick". A fair amount of the film is dedicated to his big dick, including a life-sized tour of his wife's vagina, which we see two men standing in, and is referred to as her "blasted out rat". We also get to watch a rather drawn out scene of a gay man trying to put his pants back on and walk down the street after taking the 20 inch "big dick" in a toilet stall. Ridiculous? Yes. Funny? Not so much. Shocking? Maybe if you are a 12 year old. Ah, yes Big Dick is also a racist - apparently he feels bad that he has to pay for the "darkies" out of his dole allowance.For something to pass as satire, or social commentary I think the audience needs to be able to identify with the afflicted. It would be impossible to do that with the two-dimensional caricatures put forward in this film with little to no character development except the wanna-be hip try-to-shock me intro by Dries (the writer). It all just seems like misogyny, gay-bashing and racism. The plot and pacing are bad to awful. Characters, like I said, completely uninterested in each and every one of them including the dead toddler of the marginalized addict parents.Comparing this film to Trainspotting is just wrong. Clearly the obvious references - gratuitous vomiting in filthy toilet stalls, dead babies of addicts and people walking on the ceiling, all of which you'll see here - were memorable moments of that (vastly superior) film. And I guess both are book adaptations. I don't really think it's appropriate to compare one film to another when the similarities begin and end with fairly obvious mimicry.The trailers for this film make much use of "special" effects: walking on the ceiling, repeated car-hitting reminiscent of Jonathan Glazer's music video for Rabbit in your Headlights. But the movie doesn't bear this out stylistically. And anyway all this stuff is almost a decade old - hardly fresh. Sitting through this film there's no sense of stylistic innovation - like I said the production isn't bad, but it's nothing special outside of these few effects. In short, don't let the packaging fool you - this is not a cutting-edge, stylie piece.Some people have said this film isn't for the feint of heart. I've sat through many films that have earned that title, the most memorable at this point would be Noe's "Seul Contre Tous" which I watched to the end at the Toronto Festival after fully half the theatre had walked out. I don't think I'm typically prudish, queasy or easily-offended.This film is not shocking. I felt no real revulsion toward it, but I did not feel any connection to any of the characters. Nor did I appreciate it as a dispassionate survey of a marginalized sub-culture as some have implied. I think it was just poorly directed. Maybe being Belgian helps with this one - but maybe not.

While this may be uncomforting for some, this is something which draws you to a cinema (or not, for some) It might be offensive, it might be raw, but the plain stupidity depicted in this movie is not far from reality, and that is what make this movie so haunting in the first place. If you like a story about little people not making it in the big world, this movie is for you. If you like movies where things all work out in the end, stay away, not for you.Although I must admit I like the author from the novel on which this film is based upon, I was quite shocked to see a film like this, it's quite serious in some parts, quite ridiculous in others, but never falls apart, and that is very, very smart. Thank you Belgium for giving us a decent movie from Europe this year.