jb-filmmusicfan Reviews

Man in Suit (2012)

Has a semi-funny plot, but distracts from the plot for several reasons

[1/10 · 17 March 2013]

While the film starts the opening theme of P.T. Anderson's Punch Drunk Love can be heard. At this moment I ask myself: Will this be yet another public broadcaster short TV-film glued together with music from well known films? It turns out to be so. Dutch film producers who make a film for TV can use basically any music they like, as standard licenses are paid for by the public broadcaster. This means there is no limit to what music can be used at all, and one could argue that this mechanism steals a large number of potential jobs from Dutch film composers.

The plot doesn't have much depth. A mother takes her two kids to a theme park, secretly desiring to be with the guy in the cartoon character suit walking around and taking pictures with kids visiting the theme park. While the mother is bored, another piece of music ripped from a film, Yumeji's theme from In the Mood for Love and the same titled Japanese film Yumeji plays. It feels out of place with the bored passive aggressive mother. When the mother decides she wants to take the guy in the suit home, an uplifting track from Forrest Gump plays, making the musical accompaniment to the storytelling incoherent and somewhat bizarre. It seems this film suffers from needing the recognition of a well written piece of music to get across the storytelling at all. As a lover of film music, this film was a pain to watch.

Met donker thuis (2011)

Attempts to tell a story with all the wrong tools.

[1/10 · 9 December 2011]

During the opening of the film I encountered a piece of music by Alexandre Desplat, which had somehow made it into the film. I can hardly understand why the director chose to use an existing piece of music which is this powerfully linked and originally composed for the film Syriana.

In this fictional work the filmmaker attempts to capture the coming home of a soldier. Bearing the coffin of his lost friend and fellow platoon member Diederick, Johnny visits the grieving family. All of this is surrounded by a majority of long scenes with awkwardly written dialogues and uninteresting sound design (read: silence). The pacing of the edit is beyond slow, which makes me feel like the maker was required to meet a certain running time.

Awkward seems to be the general keyword in this film. We are supposed to sympathize and emote with the characters, but we do not learn much about the dead soldier at all. What we do get is horrible musical numbers like Johnny's mother singing very badly in a bar at a coming home party and a group of soldiers lip syncing to a cover song while doing a cheesy dance in the desert. And out of nowhere the Syriana piece from Desplat comes in again randomly. A flashback used in one of the scenes contains no diegetic sound, but as the German expressionist filmmakers knew as early as in the late 20's, the horror and emotion is in the sound. Shouts, gunfire and atmospheric sound are all withheld from the viewer. This could've been a bold choice however, if the filmmaker had chosen to feature a bit more of it.

The music recycling early in the film sadly seems to be an ongoing trend in the unimportant and self indulgent subsidized cinema of the Netherlands. This obvious Amsterdam Film Academy style work is definitely of that category.

4 out of 10, because of Kyteman's performance.