thelittleother 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.

knut194 I don't have problems with nudity on film, nor do I have problems with watching actual intercourse on film. But I do have a problem when this intercourse is not actually real! If you are going to actually show intercourse with penetration and claim the reason for it was that "it happens in real life" (which the director said in a Q/A), then it should be real. Don't hire porn stars and insert their privates into the scene. I give it 8 because I truly enjoyed watching the film. The director aims to shock you, and that he will with laughter and disgust. I perceive this film as a political statement to wake up the world to the Flemish people, something the book did before it was banned in Belgium.

ruud-35 The discussion about this movie is wide. Some people hate the movie, some people adore it. Probably it will be a movie which will be much more popular in time. For me it was one roller-coaster of laughing and an experience i wont forget for a long time. At the same time i saw people leaving the cinema because of the rough, unpolished use of language. I have been living in Belgium for a few years, which is an advantage to understand the humor of the used dialect. The brilliant thing about the movie is that it is a one on one translation of the writer Herman Brusselmans. I saw the movie and asked myself the question, how would i have directed this book differently. I couldn't find an answer. This is Belgina cinema on his best. A fabulous devastating trip.

Pascal Zinken (LazySod) Three handicapped people want to perform at a rock show. They are missing a drummer though. This drummer must be handicapped too. They find one, and he's got a handicap alright: he can't drum. When the four combine and start practicing their song the relations between the players start to get stressed.Ex Drummer starts as a pretty normal film where people get together to make music but quickly turns into a psychedelic shock fest. This could have worked out very well, but I think in this case it fails pretty hard as none of the things delivered as shockers actually work - a shock moment doesn't do its job if it is brought without a valid emotion and that is just what happens in this film: most scenes and sketches are just brought out, word for word, as if reading a newspaper.The film isn't altogether bad though. Some bits are put together pretty nicely and give the idea the filmmaker really wanted to make a Flemish version of Trainspotting. That comparison doesn't hold though - while that film doesn't slip up every other scene, this one does pretty often.So, all in all, nice try, no cigar.5 out of 10 psyched out people