Plan C Reviews

Sometimes, some people wonder and ask me, since I’m such a movie buff, why I never tried my chances in the movie business. In fact, I did. Indeed, more than 10 years ago (Jezzz…. I’m getting old..) I did one year training as a production-assistant at the NFTA, the Dutch movie academy. During this training, I worked on a short student movie directed by Max Porcelijn and, just a couple of months ago, I discovered that he made his first full length feature so I was really eager to check it out. Honestly, I wonder if anyone saw it when it was released and I’m afraid it was a flop. Basically, it has the same tone, a similar main character and even the same lead actor (Ruben van der Meer) as the short feature I worked with him and it had the same qualities and defaults. Indeed, the mood was the pretty good, the cast was fine and the story must have sounded great on paper. Unfortunately, even though the end-result was not bad, especially for a Dutch production, it wasn't really much more than that, I'm afraid. Porcelijn’s inspiration was obviously the Coen brothers but he still has to work very hard to reach their level or maybe he should try to develop his own style. I don’t know, I really had a hard time to care about those characters and what they were going through. It is one thing to write such pathetic figures but they have to be entertaining and/or interesting somehow. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, I still think it is a decent black comedy and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.