Tag: Czech movies

Men in Hope (Muži v naději) – Jiří Vejdělek, 2011

As Ronan Keating, that perennial purveyor of pop pap, once sang: “Life is a rollercoaster, just gotta ride it” – that’s the happy-go-lucky ethos of Men in Hope‘s Rudolf (Bolek Polívka), an ageing lothario and Prague cabbie with 138 extra-marital affairs under his belt. He even had a very movie-land former career as an international rollercoaster designer, providing him ample opportunity to cheat on his wife, and gives us a handy metaphor for his attitude towards relationships. As a man who spent his life building fairground thrill rides, he knows all about the twists, turns, ups, downs and loop-the-loops that only an adulterous lifestyle can offer.

Rudolf reasons that a well-timed affair can save a relationship. He prides himself on never getting caught in over 35 years of marriage to his wife, Marta (Simona Stašová), and she benefits too. Having a series of flings with much younger women gives him a little extra energy when it’s time to perform his husbandly duties at home.

This philosophy is met with mild disapproval by Ondřej (Jiří Macháček), Rudolf’s downcast, browbeaten son-in-law, a former accountant who runs a failing restaurant with his frosty wife Alice (Petra Hřebíčková). Their marriage is stuck in a loveless rut, but Alice wants another baby and times their intimate moments accordingly. This puts pressure on Ondřej to come up with the goods as he worries about his fertility.

Things change when Ondřej meets Rudolf’s latest date, Šarlota (Vica Kerekes), a curvy red-headed bombshell who has been doing community service as penitence for dancing naked in a fountain. She has a special way of putting a smile on a guy’s face, and despite his misgivings, Ondřej can’t help but brighten up in her presence.

Before we know it, Šarlota tracks Ondřej down to his customer-free restaurant and starts an affair with him. Cheating on his wife peps Ondra up – he suddenly starts taking pride in his business, showing a little flair in the kitchen, as well as finding a bit more va-va-voom in the bedroom. Rudolf’s philosophy seems to be paying dividends when a sudden tragic event changes his point of view…

Continue reading “Men in Hope (Muži v naději) – Jiří Vejdělek, 2011”

Insect (Hmyz) – Jan Švankmajer, 2018

Once on a family holiday, we were walking around the side streets of a small Welsh town when we stumbled upon an old bric-a-brac shop that was closed for many years. Among the dusty collection of forlorn objects in the window display sat a vintage doll with braided hair, a straw hat, and a yellowed cotton dress. Her cheeks were webbed with tiny cracks and one of her eyes was missing. With her remaining eye, she gazed out across the universe like a martyr in a medieval painting. A huge dead spider lay curled up in her lap.

That image really troubled my childhood imagination, filled me with a terrible sense of nausea. It is the same feeling I got years later when I first saw Jan Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. His use of musty found objects in his animation, including dolls like the one sitting in that shop window years ago, disturbs me to this day.

Strangely I consider this a good thing, and with this in mind, I thought I’d check out Švankmajer’s final film, Insects. The blurb states that it is based on the play Pictures from the Insects’ Life by Karel and Josef Čapek, although that is a little misleading. The film finds Švankmajer in a playful mood, seemingly determined to do everything apart from shoot a straightforward adaptation of the satirical work.

After a cold open where we see a middle-aged man dressed in bug wings and goggles hurrying along the street, Švankmajer appears before the camera himself to provide a foreword for his new feature. The brothers Čapek wrote the play in 1924 while Hitler was sitting in a pub scheming his terrible schemes and Lenin was building his first gulags. Meanwhile, the Czechs and Slovaks were enjoying their newly founded republic, and people found the Čapek’s play a bit too pessimistic for the times. It was sheer youthful misanthropy, he tells us, and only gained greater relevance as the momentous events of the 20th century unfolded. 

All very interesting, you might think, and this foreword certainly whetted my appetite for the adaptation that was to follow. However, that is when Švankmajer goes deliberately off-script, flunking his lines and warning us of the chaos to follow…

Continue reading “Insect (Hmyz) – Jan Švankmajer, 2018”

Spindl (Špindl) – Milan Cieslar, 2017

You can watch Spindl HERE with our VOD partners Eyelet.

I’ve reviewed quite a few older classics recently, so this week I decided to play Random Czech Movie Roulette with some of the newer content on Netflix. I landed on Milan Cieslar’s “romantic comedy” Špindl…

Oh dear.

Well, I said from the beginning that my blog would cover all Czech movies, including the bad ones, so here goes…

Anna Polívková stars as Katka, a sad sack singleton in her mid-thirties (something of a recurring role for her) who hates her job and dreams of one day finding Mr Right. I feel a bit sorry for Polívková. Firstly, she is following in the footsteps of her father, Bolek Polívka, one of the greatest living Czech actors. Secondly, she keeps finding herself in lame sex comedies like Špindl and Holiday Makers, or playing second banana to her illustrious dad in terrible sequels like The Inheritance 2. I’m still getting over the scene in Holiday Makers where she lets a 13-year-old boy grope her breasts to help “cure” him of his suspected homosexuality.

Anyway, Katka is down in the dumps and sharing her woes with her two sisters – worldly, tattooed artist Magda (Anita Krausová) and happy-go-lucky model Eliška (Kateřina Klausová). Eliška has a surprise to cheer her up. She has paid for three all-inclusive tickets to the mountain resort of Špindlerův Mlýn for a week of skiing, boozing and picking up guys. Who knows? Maybe one of them could be the Mr Right Katka is hoping for…

Also on his way to the mountains is Tonda (David Gránský), a young musician joining the resort’s resident band headed by Mrkvička, a slovenly middle-aged rocker played by Jakub Kohák, the Czech Republic’s hairiest living celebrity. Tonda hopes that the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle will improve his chances with the ladies, and his new bandmates are all too happy to help out.

On arrival in the resort, the girls meet Lukáš (Roman Blumaier), supposedly the hotel owner whose welcoming spiel announces “Americans have Las Vegas; Czechs have Špindl” – promising a week of fun and frolics that they won’t need to take home with them unless they really want to. Straight away, things take a turn for the worst. The swanky ski lodge Eliška reserved has double-booked, so they have to stay at the shabby Three Mountains hotel nearby instead.


It’s a creaky old place with peeling wallpaper, paper-thin walls and nudie photos on the shared bathroom wall. Despite the setback, they decide to make a go of it and find that they must share the lodgings with the cheerfully inappropriate older couple in the next room and Tonda’s raucous band.


The next hour creeps by with a mixture of pitiful slapstick (Katka has about 700 skiing accidents), awkward gross-out humour (Eliška walks in on an old man masturbating to some vintage porn) and cringe-inducing sexual liaisons (Katka’s ill-advised date with slimy Lukáš had me watching through my fingers like it was a horror movie).

It’s all so painfully weak. It makes the unholy trinity of Michal Viewegh adaptations – Holiday Makers, From Subway with Love, and Angels of Everyday – seem like comedy classics in comparison. At least those movies had a little energy and were strangely entertaining despite their crass sexual politics. Špindl starts weak, with Polívková’s half-hearted Bridget Jones-style voice-over and Chinaski’s weak pop-rock tunes on the soundtrack, and gets progressively weaker as it goes along.

To make matters worse, it is also one of those films that thinks it’s clever by making copious references to much better movies. It has the unfortunate effect of making you wish you were watching those movies instead. Marek Vašut pops up for a scene to quote his sleazy role in From Subway with Love. The cutesy earworm “Sladké mámení” from the snowbound family classic I Enjoy the World with You gets two renditions in the space of five minutes. Later, we get a bizarre Jurassic Park reference when Tonda is chased through a hotel kitchen by a sexually frustrated older woman.

More depressing still is the film’s attitude towards sexual relationships. Like those Viewegh movies, neither sex comes off well. Špindl depicts blokes as scoundrels and cheats who are only after one thing, modern cavemen who can’t make it through five minutes without crudely hitting on a member of the opposite sex. The women are always desperate singles whose brains can’t function properly without a man’s attention, and are willing to sink to their level in the dwindling hope of finding “Mr Right”. When Mr Right finally shows up for Katka, the romantic element comes as an afterthought, in the mid-credit scenes, just before a short skit where a man sprinkles his crab-infested pubes on another guy’s head (spoiler alert). It’s all so tawdry and cynical. 

The film’s saving grace is the three performances by Polívková, Krausová and Klausová, who gamely struggle with the unfunny material and somehow emerge with a little dignity intact. Polívková seems like she could be good with a decent script, but so far, I’ve only seen her in terrible movies. I can’t figure out whether she is a genuinely sympathetic screen presence or a screen presence in need of genuine sympathy.

I usually avoid saying people shouldn’t watch a movie because everyone should make up their own minds. Yet Špindl is a romantic comedy so totally lacking both romance and laughs, leaving you with a big empty nihilistic void of a movie. So I’ll conclude by saying this: watch it if you want, but it might put you off sex, skiing and human interactions for a few months at least.

***

Still want to watch Spindl? Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you… you can see it HERE with out VOD partners Eyelet.

This article was first published by the Prague Daily Monitor.

Joseph Kilian (Postava k podpírání) – Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt, 1963

Sometimes a film just doesn’t grab me at all and then I’m sat looking at a blank document thinking, “I don’t know if I can be bothered to write anything about this”. It is extra frustrating when I can see the film’s qualities, but feel so neutral towards it that I struggle to muster any enthusiasm.

One such film is Juráček & Schmidt’s Joseph Kilian, a paranoid short drama from the Czechoslovak New Wave. Knowing that the review is going to be a battle, I face a dilemma. Do I –

a) Give up on the movie and watch something else, then maybe come back another time when a change of mood or circumstances might make it chime differently.

b) Plough ahead regardless and eke out 700-800 words on it, going through the motions and stating the obvious, like the clear influence of Franz Kafka and blah blah blah.

Or

c) Find a hook, a way to approach the film that will entertain me and, in turn, hopefully make the article more entertaining for the reader. My first instinct with Joseph Kilian is to go with option C, but what is the hook?

Continue reading “Joseph Kilian (Postava k podpírání) – Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt, 1963”

Honeymoon (Líbánky) – Jan Hřebejk, 2013

Can someone’s dark secrets ever stay truly buried? That’s the question at the heart of Honeymoon, a dark psychological thriller where director Jan Hřebejk seems to takes a few cues from Lars von Trier in studied, beautifully-acted, elegantly-shot misanthropy.

Much like Trier’s Melancholia from a few years earlier, Honeymoon centres around a wedding party and a bride with her own past psychological issues. Then, much like the former film’s titular planet that ruins festivities by colliding with Earth, a wedding crasher who knows too many inconvenient secrets threatens to destroy the marriage before the ink is dry on the certificate.

We meet Tereza (Anna Geislerová) and Radim (Stanislav Majer), an attractive couple on their big day, taking their vows in a picturesque church before heading out to a sprawling country house for the reception. Before entering the church, Dominik (Matěj Zikán), Radim’s son from a previous marriage, has a mishap with his glasses. Radim takes the boy to the optician across the road to get them fixed. The man behind the counter (Jiří Černý) seems to recognise the groom, but Radim doesn’t appear to notice…

Continue reading “Honeymoon (Líbánky) – Jan Hřebejk, 2013”

National Street (Národní třída) – Štěpán Altrichter, 2019

Never drink in a pub with a flat roof, or so the joke goes back in the UK. It refers to the type of dismal drinking establishments that sprang up on post-war housing estates, where you might encounter all sorts of dodgy characters, addicts and psychos. The same goes in the Czech Republic, too – you might run into a nutter like Vandam (Hynek Čermák) in Štěpán Altrichter’s National Street.

Vandam is the resident hard man of the drab Severka pub in a southern Prague project. They call him Vandam because he can do 200 push-ups, just like his VHS hero, Jean-Claude Van Damme. With his skinhead, stocky build and menacing brow, it’s no surprise to find out he has racist and homophobic views and doesn’t mind sharing them. He wants everyone to know he’s a proper fighter. “Peace is just the intermission between wars,” he growls on his voice over, with the attitude of a man who views life as a long series of battles.  He is also known to the other denizens of the pub as a national hero, the man who sparked the Velvet Revolution by throwing the first punch…

Continue reading “National Street (Národní třída) – Štěpán Altrichter, 2019”

Top 25 Czech Films So Far…

Phew! I’ve finally made it to 100 posts! It has been quite a ride with plenty of great movies along the way, but it wasn’t always a smooth one. This time last year the blog was languishing at around 25 reviews and I was struggling to find the enthusiasm to carry on with it.

Firstly, I hadn’t seen enough films to fully eradicate the more negative preconceptions I had about Czech movies at that point. Secondly, I realised that I’d picked a topic so niche that almost no-one was visiting the site, which was a little disheartening.

So to celebrate reaching the 100th post I’ve decided to create a top 25 list of my favourite Czech movies so far. It was a tough task with plenty of soul searching involved, and you will see that there are some notable exclusions. This is partly because I have tried to capture the sheer diversity of the films I’ve seen to date, which means some very good movies got the chop!

From the beginning, this project was intended as my personal exploration of Czech cinema, trying to get a handle on it from the perspective of a knowledgeable outsider. Therefore I have also tried to make a list that might be handy for someone who wants to get into Czech movies but isn’t sure where to start.

Trying to make a list packed with great picks for other people while also staying true to both my personal taste and critical pretension wasn’t always easy. Take for example Jiří Menzel. I have some misgivings about his films – many of them are basically the same – but he is such a huge presence in Czech cinema that I still ended up with four on my list. It will be interesting to see if they get whittled down as I see more movies in the future.

Also, I have tried to give modern Czech movies a fair shout. I know there is a common belief that Czech cinema isn’t a patch on its heyday in the 60s and 70s, and that is probably true. However, there are some very solid movies from this century out there – films like Zelary, The Snake Brothers, and The Teacher wouldn’t look out of place on the Best Foreign Language ballot at the Oscars. Nevertheless, they still lack the magic of the classic stuff and it is a reflection of this that none of my top 10 is less than 40 years old.

Speaking of which, it is crazy when you look at the quality of the stuff being made in this country during the Czechoslovak New Wave. Talk about troubled times producing great art. The cinematic movement was already well underway before the Prague Spring, yet the sheer explosion of gobsmacking films concentrated around that historic time is simply dazzling.

Before we get into the list, I also want to mention that I would still be some way off the 100 mark without the terrific contributions of Kai-Ming, Jakub, Jack and Catherine. Although I originally intended this as a purely personal blog, I did accept a little help to bulk out the content. Otherwise, with my rate of production, it would only be useful as a resource sometime around the dawn of the next epoch. Thanks guys!

So let’s get cracking! I’ll update the list on a semi-regular basis, every 25 or 50 films or so. I might also do a Bottom 10 at some point as well…

First up:

#25. Invention for Destruction (Vynález zkázy) – Karel Zeman, 1958

I grew up loving Ray Harryhausen monster movies and the fantastic tales of Jules Verne, so it is no wonder I was quickly smitten with the films of Czech animation genius Karel Zeman. Popping up on Netflix, Invention for Destruction came as a tonic during a shitty lockdown period. It a lighthearted ripping yarn involving a secret weapon, a fabulous steam-powered submarine, a dashing hero, a master criminal in his volcano lair. Zeman’s inventions and the mastery of his craft are a constant delight, and it is great entertainment for kids, too.

“Shooting in crisp black and white, Zeman employs an astonishing array of special effects and camera trickery to recreate the look and feel of the engravings from the Jules Verne novels. Live-action footage is frequently sandwiched between several panes of foreground and background to make it look like the characters are moving within an illustration. Zeman laboriously added a cross-hatched pattern to almost everything to complete the illusion.”

Read the full review HERE

#24. My Sweet Little Village (Vesničko má středisková) – Jiří Menzel, 1985

Jiří Menzel, who sadly passed away last year, was a massive figure in Czech cinema. I tried to limit the number of his films I included in this list but despite my best efforts, I still ended up with four. I have difficulty ranking his work because as entertaining as they undoubtedly are, all the ones I’ve seen so far has basically been the same, and you could argue a case for the inclusion of any of them. The Oscar-nominated My Sweet Little Village is a charming, heart-warming comedy about the relationship between a disabled young man and his long-suffering neighbour and work colleague. Menzel regular Rudolf Hrušínský also appears as a gruff doctor.

“Menzel never misses an opportunity to extol the virtues of rural living over life in the big city. To this end, Hrušínský serves as a spokesperson, delivering lengthy passages of verse about the beauteous countryside, and reminding his fellow village folk that life isn’t so bad while they have beer, woodland, and gorgeous girls following the city trend of wearing no bra. The film basically says: chill out, grab a cold one and enjoy your lot in life, because it’s all pretty sweet.”

Read the full review HERE

#23. Beauty and the Beast (Panna a netvor) – Juraj Herz, 1978

The tale may be as old as time but there are few more gruesome versions than Herz’s intensely dark and atmospheric adaptation. The Beauty part might just be the weakest aspect of the film but The Beast is truly frightening and psychotic creation. From the scary opening attack to the Beast’s fog-shrouded mansion, Herz takes the story deep into horror territory, and I loved it.

“Herz’s vision is definitely not for kids, striking a gloomy pop gothic tone that’s somewhere between Hammer horror pea-soupers and Andrew Lloyd Webber – it’s hard to listen to Petr Hapka’s hyperbolically ominous organ score without thinking of Webber’s megahit stage production The Phantom of the Opera that arrived several years later.

The film opens with a caravan of merchant carriages lost in a bewitched forest in dense fog…”

Read the full review HERE

#22. Those Wonderful Years that Sucked (Báječná léta pod psa) – Petr Nikolaev,1997

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a general loathing of Michael Viewegh adaptations, so just to show it’s no irrational beef I also have one in my Top 25. Those Wonderful Years that Sucked is a genuinely touching coming-of-age tale that spans three decades in the life of a regular family, from the Prague Spring to just after the Velvet Revolution. Despite a few typically queasy Vieweghian moments, I would still say it makes a great introduction to Czech movies and films about life under Communism.

“Much of the charm of Those Wonderful Years That Sucked is the skilful way Nikolaev spans such a long period of time, never losing focus of the dangers facing the family while maintaining an upbeat, comic tone. Even the final third, where the father is driven to the verge of a mental breakdown by the constant fear of surveillance, is treated with a featherlight touch and is all the more effective for it.  So many comedy-dramas grind to a halt when things get serious, an obstacle Nikolaev’s film hurdles with bagfuls of good grace.”

Read the full review HERE

#21. Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu) –  Jan Švankmajer, 1983

Legendary surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer is such a huge figure that I had to include at least one of his works. I was originally going with Alice, thinking it would be a safe introduction because almost everyone is familiar with the source material. The trouble is, Švankmajer’s style is often so aggressive and unsettling that it becomes a little arduous when drawn out to feature-length. Dimensions of Dialogue has all the best things about his visionary work packed into a very manageable 14-minutes – tactile stop-motion animation, a mordant sense of humour and a riot of ideas. 

“While it may be short, Dimensions of Dialogue is vivid, vulgar, gross, funny, and best of all, thought-provoking. If you like movies to give you something to think about, you should delve deeper into the weird world of Jan Švankmajer.”

Read the full review HERE

#20. Sun, Hay, Strawberries (Slunce, seno, jahody) – Zdeněk Troška, 1983

I know a few people will think I’ve lost my mind by including this movie on my list! People either really love Troška’s bawdy comedy or they really, really, really hate it. I think what that boils down to is that it portrays rural Czechs a little too accurately for some people’s taste and they feel embarrassed by it. It is definitely no great work of art, but my aim from the beginning of the blog was to review all Czech movies, not just the classics. Despite how lowbrow Sun, Hay, Strawberries obviously is, I think it is a genuinely important cultural item. It’s a little like the Carry On movies in Britain, reflecting a certain aspect of the people and their country.  Plus it made me laugh more than some of the more well-respected comedy classics!

“Make no mistake, Slunce, Seno, Jahody is extremely loud, crude and stupid. To give an example of the level of humour, one scene features a senile old lady trying to hide a turd from her overbearing daughter. That’s it, that’s the whole joke. However, the film has a directness that I appreciated, unlike the ponderous pace of so many Czech movies I’ve seen so far. It bounces along nicely with goofy energy that I found genuinely charming.”

Read the full review HERE

Continue reading “Top 25 Czech Films So Far…”

Hastrman – Ondřej Havelka, 2018

Hastrman 2018

One of my favourite folk tales from back home is the Wild Man of Orford, a small coastal village not far from where I grew up. In the 12th Century, a group of local fishermen hauled their nets to discover they’d caught a strange naked man covered in greenish hair. He was taken to the nearby castle for interrogation, but after six months his torturers realised he wasn’t able to speak. 

After that they let him exercise in the sea, stringing nets across the harbour so he couldn’t escape. The Wild Man easily swam under them, but each time he returned willingly to the castle. Eventually, he tired of life on the land, slipped under the nets one last time and vanished out to sea.

A similar water-dwelling character from the landlocked Czech Republic is the vodník, or hastrman, a water goblin popular in fairytales and made famous by folklorist Karel Jaromir Erben in his collection of ballads, Kytice. The creature lives in bodies of water and is capable of drowning the unwary if he’s in a bad mood, or providing bumper catches of fish for the locals if kept happy with sacrifices and offerings…

Continue reading “Hastrman – Ondřej Havelka, 2018”

On the Roof (Na střeše) – Jiří Mádl, 2019

Na střeše 2019

You can watch On the Roof (Na střeše) right HERE with our View on Demand partner Eyelet

There was a time when every pub and restaurant in Brno seemed to be competing for the title of the city’s best burger. Everyone I knew had an opinion on whose was top, and my own pick wasn’t too popular with pub-owner friends who prided themselves on their homemade patties. 

A new craze put paid to all that nonsense, and we partially have the country’s burgeoning Vietnamese community to thank for that – suddenly everyone was head-over-heels for Bún bò Nam Bô and Bánh mì sandwiches.

Vietnamese immigrants began settling in Czechoslovakia during the Communist era, arriving as guest workers invited by the government. Nowadays Vietnamese people make up the Czech Republic’s third-largest ethnic minority, after Slovaks and Ukrainians.

The first Czech film I’ve seen so far that touches upon the Vietnamese-Czech experience is Jiří Mádl’s On the Roof, a comedy-drama that focuses on the growing friendship between a lonely old man and a desperate young immigrant…

Alois Švehlík plays Antonín Rypar, a cantankerous retired professor living alone in his top floor apartment in Prague. He doesn’t have much time for people, and people aren’t too keen on him either – especially when they find out he was a communist during the soviet era. His wife left him a long time ago, taking their son with her, and he hasn’t heard from them in years – he’s isolated and regretful.

One day he pops up to the roof for a smoke and finds a distraught young Vietnamese guy, Song (Duy Anh Tran) getting ready to jump. Song has escaped from the marijuana farm where he was forced to work before it was raided by the police. Now homeless and on the run, Song is about to end it all. 

Antonín talks Song down and gives the hungry and frightened young man some food while treating him to his bigoted ideas. The old man is angry at the state of the world and thinks the answer to the country’s problems is to close the borders and prevent illegal immigrants from getting in, a view that will strike a topical nerve with audience members on both sides of the argument.

Despite this, Antonín begrudgingly enjoys Song’s company and offers him his spare room, in exchange for some free cleaning. He strikes upon the idea of finding Song a Czech bride so he can stay in the country legally, and the pair secretively turn their attention to the attractive young woman living across the hall…

On the Roof takes a bunch of modern social issues and lightly squeezes them into the shape of an odd-couple movie, which hits all the comedic and dramatic beats you’d expect. The pair are distrustful at first but soon start to benefit from each other – Antonín helps Song learn Czech, while Song teaches the old man how to use Facebook to woo their pretty neighbour. You see, friendship isn’t bound by age, race or language…

Then, just when I was about to write off On the Roof as an entertaining but formulaic movie, it pulled out a genuinely surprising and touching plot turn in the final act that left me grinning. I won’t give it away but if I was the type of reviewer to give star ratings, that one thing would be enough to upgrade this from a three-star movie to a four-star one.

On the Roof was originally intended as a vehicle for Jan Tříska (The Elementary School), who sadly died just before shooting began. Alois Svehlík stepped into the role of Antonín and he’s terrific. Irritable and defiant, Antonín is a man who knows his time is coming slowly to an end and isn’t happy about it all. While he’s a redoubtable character, his loneliness makes him strangely vulnerable and regret haunts his eyes. Svehlík plays him sternly without ever trying to make him seem like a loveable old gent.

Duy Anh Tran makes an interesting foil for Svehlík’s crotchety old-timer, giving an emotional, unguarded performance as Song. He’s scared and alone until his friendship with Antonín encourages him to slowly come out of his shell. 

The pair work off each other well and they manage to sell the film’s unlikelier elements, especially during the scenes when they’re trying to flirt with the neighbour without letting her know who’s doing the flirting. Together, the two actors make their character’s budding bromance worth rooting for – they are so good that I just wish they were in a better movie.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing bad about On The Roof. In fact, it’s a perfectly enjoyable evening’s entertainment. It’s a decent watch, just be prepared to feel a little undernourished afterwards.

***

This article was first published by the Prague Daily Monitor.

If you enjoyed the review and now want to check out the movie, you can watch it HERE with our VOD partner Eyelet.

Bathory: Countess of Blood – Juraj Jakubisko, 2008

Bathory bathing in virgin blood (allegedly)

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most prolific female murderer of all time was Elizabeth Báthory, a 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman. She is said to have murdered over 600 young women, practising vampirism and bathing in their blood to preserve her own youth and beauty.

Now I don’t know what the verification process is for the Guinness Book of records (it’s been a long time since my own unsuccessful attempt to build the world’s largest pyramid out of empty beer cans) but this seems like an iffy one to me. Many of the testimonies were based on hearsay from superstitious bumpkins or extracted from “witnesses” by torture. The exact kill count is thought to be greatly exaggerated.

Buy your copy of Bathory: Countess of Blood from Amazon HERE

Going to bat for poor old Elizabeth is veteran Slovak director Juraj Jakubisko with Bathory: Countess of Blood, an expensively mounted Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and British co-production. Setting out its stall as a revisionist historical epic, the movie veers wildly between horror, political intrigue and bodice-ripping romance, with some wacky comic touches thrown in for good measure – monks on clockwork rollerskates, for example.

In short, it’s a pretty kooky way to try clearing someone’s name, as Jakubisko attempts to rescue Báthory from the naughty step of history by spinning his own unreliable yarn…

Continue reading “Bathory: Countess of Blood – Juraj Jakubisko, 2008”