Yesterday was one of those days we decided to go to the movies. We picked "Ik ook van Jou" more or less at random, but we were interested to see the state of current Dutch filmmaking.
The film is based on a book by Ronald Giphart, and I must confess straight away that he is not exactly one of my favorites. The film features actors that are best known in the netherlands for their appearances in soap-operas and/or afternoon talk shows. At least one of them (Kamerling) has done some fairly decent stuff after leaving the soap world. So we decided to give this movie the benefit of the doubt.
And what a mistake that was. This movie fails on all fronts. Bad acting (the best performance is actually by a guinea pig, which very convincingly pretends to be dead). Flat, uninteresting story with unexplained and uninteresting sidelines (Why france? Why tell the story to a girl from Uganda?) Mistakes (black people dont have to use sunscreen, as far as I know, and heating systems in the Netherlands do not produce clouds of steam like in New York, even if this looks great on film, people do not wear T-shirts outside on new years eve in northern Europe). There's one funny moment which involves two little dogs, and that's it.
So that's what I think, but more importantly, it seemed that none of the people leaving the movie theater afterwards had enjoyed it. I overheard one of them saying that he was extremely disappointed, because he liked the book so much. I did not read the book, but my advice would have to be: read the book, don't see the film.