Radu_A I know one shouldn't mix reviews with personal experiences, but when watching this film I couldn't help but constantly remember an anecdote that happened to me one New Year's morning in Brussels: trying to cure my party hangover with some friends in a bar, we observed a guy trying to cross the street with a crate of beer. Now the streets were all frozen over and the king had advised in his New Year's address to stay at home. Plus the roads in Brussels are caved in by traffic. So the weight of the crate kept the guy sliding towards the middle of the street. He could make it to either side without, but not with the crate. Nevertheless, he kept trying for over an hour to pull, shove or otherwise move the crate from where it was stuck - until he found the ingenious solution: He drank six bottles of beer on the spot, thereby sufficiently reducing the weight to pull the crate over - only that he got so drunk and spaced out in the process that he slipped and broke all of the bottles, so his whole effort came to naught.This little story has nothing and everything to do with 'Misfortunates' which is chock full of incidents like this one. And as abundant films about losers and social misfits may be in Belgian/ Dutch cinema (like Aaltra, The Sexual Life of Belgians, Flodders, Spetters), this one takes the cake in every respect: the autobiographical story is perfectly adapted and wonderfully played. Its provides tons of utterly irrelevant, but amusing add-ons like when the Strubbes invite themselves over to an exiled Iranian couple to force them into watching a Roy Orbison concert because their TV's been repossessed. Like in my little story, one cannot help but somewhat admire the persistence of the Strubbe family to make their lives as dysfunctional as humanly possible, while one cannot ignore the destructiveness of it all.If you like painfully real social dramedy, this one is for you; if your threshold for witnessing the lower recesses of human behavior isn't very high, you're likely to find 'Misfortunates' an extremely tasteless affair.

Benoît A. Racine (benoit-3) ... you can always count on tears, blood, placenta and spilt beer.Having said this, this film uses all of them to good effect. This brutal confrontation with the Flanders of Pieter Brueghel and Jacques Brel, is not without its pathetic and touching moments. It reminded me a lot of Quebec's "C.R.A.Z.Y" in its enthusiasms for its subject but with, of course, much more squalor.The actors are all convincing and attractive in their own way and the direction is transparent and unobtrusive. The viewer should be warned that the opus is generously peppered with scenes of fornication, sometimes public, pissing, sometimes public, defecation, sometimes public, vomiting, sometimes public, public male nudity and transvestism, not to mention lots and lots of binge drinking.I liked the anecdote in the "making of" documentary telling how one of the father's fake moustaches was fashioned from the male actors' and crew's pubic hair. It seemed fitting somehow.

ino mart I don't know what to think of this movie. It was one of the best movies I have ever seen, but also one of the most gross.Many scenes are just gross (eg: when the neglected house cat eats the puke of father, when father is pissing in his pants while he is sitting on a chair during a beer drinking game, when some of the brothers shoot a pigeon when it shits on the bedsheets, ...) But it is also a sympathizing movie. Almost everything is filmed in the eyes of a 13 year boy who lives together with his beer drinking asocial, ill-mannered family. It are actually his father, some uncles and his grandmother. The grandmother is very tiny, has nothing to say and is not in position to change house rules nor the way of life. The boy is raised by those men and unaware of his marginal life. He just follows his uncles in their tracks (and begins to drink, smoke, ... and joins all those nasty events with his uncles).The beauty of the movie is: you just get pity with the boy.

vitaleralphlouis Four or five uncles living together have only one real interest in life --- drinking beer, beer and more beer. Not the best environment for a young teenage boy, particularly since the family name bonds them all together, while also serving like a spiderweb to keep anyone from breaking away to better themselves.There are virtually no meaningful interactions between men and women. RElationships impose on time critically needed for drinking beer. There are a few s....ing scenes, nothing like "having sex" or "making love" --- just short fast paced humping, of the let's-get-it-over-with variety. The men never rise to the level of sexual acts with women they necessarily like, so when the women get pregnant the men get annoyed.One need not travel to Belgium to encounter this kind of dysfunctional living, as most of us found it in our own lives. The lucky ones, with ambition and tenacity, break away (as does the boy in this film) with the damned ones trying to drag us back, if we let them.An interesting film, no doubt; but overpraised by other reviewers. Plan on a bath or shower when you get home. 6 of 10.