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Wonderful Movie

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

A Disappointing Continuation

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This movie was quite well constructed, if not a tad confusing. Then again, I tend to enjoy movies that aren't subscriptive to the standard Hollywood format that spoonfeeds you the plot like easy-to-digest babyfood.It beings by telling a story that is fairly simple to understand, about a disgruntled bus driver who has a bone to pick with Philips for their push to have consumers purchase widescreen television sets when presumably their old sets behave just as well for most of the available content in 2000.Then a sort of undertone sets in, very subtly, as if the movie is simply telling a matter-of-fact story that the audience is supposed to just understand. There is no mention nor even hints to help the audience put the pieces together, it is as if they are just supposed to "get it" As it continues towards the end, we/the audience is questioning exactly what is real and what is not.. Does the protagonist know the Head of Sound and Vision at Philips? Does he come over to his house with the host of The Quiz? Does he give him a handgun? None of this is explained, but as the plot comes to a close we suddenly might see it as merely the paranoid delusions of an elderly man on the edge of dementia, rather than an actual plot to infect the audience through widescreen television..? One main clue towards this argument is that apart from his initial audience with Wesselinck in his office, all the rest seem to be disjointed, as if the conversations are taking place inside his head.. The visit to the secret research facility for Pandora, even the shooting range with Astrid, which also seems to be housed in the same facility as Pandora..Either way, this is an excellent film, and I'm also surprised it has such low ratings. I'm giving this an 8, when I wish i could give it an 8.5. Some of the overall plot is a bit poorly presented, and it leaves the audience very confused at the end, and while this may have been the director/writers purpose, the level of disjointedness is quite unsettling.

I saw this film screened at the 2006 Palm Springs International film Festival and Director Peter Kuipers was on hand to introduce the film and take Q&A after. This is an interesting film with two great acting performances by John Decleir and Jeroen Krabbé. The film begins with and is based on the true story of a 59 year old bus driver who was protesting the introduction by Phillips of widescreen TV's and resisting them as unnecessary technology being forced down the consumers throats. Armed and with a bomb in his briefcase he takes hostages in a building that Phillips had only temporarily been housed in and had moved out of six months before. The film then goes on to tell the fictional tale of the events that led the hostage taker to start a consumer guerrilla war by himself. Since the film is drawn from an actual event and then becomes fictitious you don't really know what is fiction and what is fact and what is real and what is imagined from the viewpoint of the central character and since the actual company name is used throughout the film it really throws you off. The real hostage taker who was identified by the Dutch press as only John R and in this movie as John Voerman, actually sent a communique about the reason for his actions that he was resisting "manipulation by sellers of widescreen television sets who were guilty of creative nonsense." Were he around today to see this film he might indeed find it as creative nonsense. I would rate this a 6.5 to a 7.0 on a scale of 10 and hope to view it someday on a widescreen TV.

During this hostage-taking I worked at a News Broadcast station here in Amsterdam, and I remember how this was not a cut-and-dry very angry (or worried) customer thing, it was all pretty weird, and almost seemed like a setup or joke. Many things were left unclear in this hostage-case. This made me curious about what this movie would tell us that could have lead to this.Basically it seems the story is warning us about PHILIPS (or companies with similar powers), which makes it all the more strange; Would a company this huge let a movie like this hit the theaters and stores worldwide? Presuming that PHILIPS knew about the movie beforehand, does this mean at least some of the facts are actually true? Was this just a bus-driver regretting the fact that he never was anything more than a bus-driver? We are to think this is not the case, because he really loved his job. Did he or did he not know more than he should have known? The facts show that he must have been very intelligent. Would a guy like that do a thing like this for something as insignificant as widescreen TV or was there more? Are we to understand that this PHILIPS CEO was not his friend, and was not with him when he shot himself? Or did the police find out that the gun he was using was a gift from this PHILIPS man, and that he handed his (ex-)wife that other present because they had really met the way we see in this story? I can't really say how you could do this movie or tell this story any better, but the matrix-like views of flashing through time are a bit over the top, and don't do much good for the switches to and from the hostage-taking scene. The casting for the story is really outstanding though. Perfect actors for the jobs at hand. The movie leaves you with lots of unanswered questions and it is a bit unsettling because nothing is going in a satisfactory direction. There's no hope or dream to be found here. It doesn't have a happy ending in any way, shape or form, and it is almost too much like real life; Harsh, without purpose, unfair and full of coincidences that remain unexplained. Not a fun movie to watch, but one that you will remember due to all the vague references to reality.

I have seen this movie, because I was curious about the way the fact of the hostage was being filmed and about Jan Decleir and Jeroen Krabbé working together. The film tells the story behind the hostage taker John V. He is lonely man living in his own world. He is product of our society. Wesselinck is a self made top manager and can afford everything. He gets to know John by coincidence ( or not ). John is writing letters to Philips because he suspects the multimedia company of putting encoded messages in 'widescreen'tv-sets. John is no longer seeing his wife and children and is a bus driver. In his spare time he writes letters to Philips and watches recorded tapes of a popular knowledge quiz. When he meets Wesselinck the top man, they become friends because they are alike. Wesselinck lets John in on a top secret project which has to do with manipulation. The film takes the audience behind the screens and only reveals at the end. All the time you think it's like this and in the end there is a complete turnaround! Superb! I happened to have an interview with Jan Decleir in Rotterdam last February and he told me the movie had been made in three weeks. The cast worked very hard and the result is a great movie! Go and see for yourself!