My Reviews of Polish & Czech Films
So far Polish and Czech cinema have been a barren wasteland of hipsterism and aimlessness, but to be fair I've only gone through a handful of their movies so far, hence maybe I come across a good one at some point.
Listed in no particular order, except that any new additions will be placed on top.
Listed in no particular order, except that any new additions will be placed on top.
List activity
72 views
• 0 this weekCreate a new list
List your movie, TV & celebrity picks.
5 titles
- DirectorJirí MenzelStarsVáclav NeckárJosef SomrVlastimil BrodskýAn apprentice train dispatcher at a village station seeks his first sexual encounter and becomes despondent when he is unable to perform.5/10
Starts off in an "arty" way, as if the writer-director was trying hard to be "hip" and "modern", which in those days meant "being weird". Some film-makers pulled this off well, but most were dilettantes who sucked at it (as they sucked at film-making in general). The intro is too rushed, the narrator/protagonist babbling at a fast pace, as if the director was unsure if it was interesting enough.
The pace then goes back to normal, and the film itself is sort of semi-normal. An air of semi-pretentious semi-artiness still permeates the rest of the film, but it's nothing over-the-top like "Daisies" or anything like that. This is a movie with a plot. Not a huge, intricate plot, but far more "plotty" than the said movie, which is of course a totally plot-less dud. (And the only other Czech movie I know hence why I'm making this comparison - plus they're both from the same era, same year even.)
The acting seems stifled at times, unnatural, too stylized (for a comedy), the kind which can be found in hipster films as well as amateur B-movies. On occasion characters shift to a more natural discourse but generally it's obvious they were given instructions to play this in a somewhat aloof, "arty" way. Which generally kills the humour.
Still, there are a handful of amusing segments. And it help to have an attractive female cast. (This is an East European film, not a French film, and that certainly helps.)
And no, I didn't understand that SS train segment at all. The SS arrest the protagonist, for no apparent reason, then release him when they find suicide marks on his wrists. What was that all about? - DirectorVera ChytilováStarsIvana KarbanováJitka CerhováMarie CeskováAfter realizing that all world is spoiled, Marie and Marie are committed to be spoiled themselves. They rip off older men, feast in lavish meals and do all kinds of mischief. But what is all this leading to?2/10
Comedy, it says.
If you actually found anything funny in this random mess then you must be starved for humour. Perhaps you'd just escaped a Soviet gulag?
Speaking of Commies, this is - hilariously - supposedly a clandestine "critique" of the Czech communist regime. Of course, one could also claim that it's about Ancient Aliens or about 18th-century ship-building, and you wouldn't be any more closer or further from the truth than with this cockamamie anti-communist theory...
Besides, WHY are hipsters - of all people - getting all wet over this absurd anti-commie theory? I thought they liked communism. But that's hipsters for ya: never logical, rarely ideologically consistent, and perpetually confused...
I don't really know WHAT this "two dumb giggly girlies go nuts" shtick is supposed to represent, and why several "New Wave" movies chose to do them (very badly), but then I'm not someone to waste my time digging deep into non-existent layers of imaginary intellectualism in a movie devoid of a script. I leave that to hipsters and other filmbuffy nerds. If someone's ego is so downtrodden that they feel they need to pump it up artificially by treating Rohrschach movies as serious, meaningful cinema - only to afterwards "boast" in online reviews how they got it all figured out - feel free. By all means. I can use a good laugh, especially after a "comedy" that fails to provide any. If bad movies can at least provide this service to society - of making losers feel like winners - then at least there's that use for them. I can't think of any other.
This crap is a sort of precursor to the phenomenally awful "Celine and Julie Go Boating" which the French made 8 years later, and which also involves two dumb girlies being "cute" and "zany" while doing and saying random hipstery things to appease film critics, and being extremely boring. Admittedly, this Czech film turned out much better, which isn't saying much. For one thing, the two female leads are a lot better-looking than the "Celine/Julie" ones, and this film is way shorter than that French trashathon, hence far less suffering is inflicted on the intelligent film-goers.
There are several scenes that are visually appealing, such as the very good opening segment, but in terms of content, humour, plot and dialog this nonsense can't be justified, even with its short length.
The two actresses are much more appealing than "Celine and Julie Who Never Went Boating", and the movie is almost two-thirds shorter, and even this non-plot has more plot than that ultra-cretinous mega-boring French turdeaux, but at least the Czech "wavers" can be comforted that they soundly defeated the French in this sub-sub-sub-genre of girls doing stupid things... Because while "Celine" is one of the 30 Most Boring Movies Ever Made, this one only makes the 1000 Most Boring Movies Ever Made list. When comparing two craps, it's nuances that count. - DirectorWojciech HasStarsJan NowickiTadeusz KondratIrena OrskaJózef visits his dying father at a remote mental institution, where time itself doesn't seem to exist, and the line between dreams and memories becomes indistinguishable.Plays with the concept of time – by making 2 hours seem like 5 weeks.
3/10
How Mark Twain and Danilo Kis would have torn this pretentious nonsense apart in scathing reviews.
The first 15 minutes are deceitfully promising, with the mysterious mood and the excellent sets somewhat reminiscent of movies such as "Stalker". Once whassisname gets to the Sanitarium (or whatever the hell it is), HS sets itself up as a Kafkaesque drama, in which some sort of a time-warp seems to be dominating the premises. Or at least it seems to be Kafka-like. It isn't.
Soon HS disintegrates into surrealist farce – which is the same as a mainstream farce but devoid of laughs. The hero has dozens of meaningless conversations with real or imagined (irrelevant which) dullards, all of whom babble about obscure or inconsequential piffle. HS is one of those highly ambitious yet intellectually hollow art-fart Euro-trash flicks designed to please critics (and film-students who are forever enslaved by critics), while fully ignoring the needs of any sane viewer – and by that I don't mean people who seek out "Porky's" every time they pick a movie. I'm all for an intelligent story/concept, provided it really IS intelligent, and not just TRYING to appear "deep".
HS is one of many such 60s/70s European art-flicks that utilize the ultimate 20th-century art-world hoax, the "Picasso con". You know the charlatan drill: create something pointless and meaningless – yet very importantly ABSTRACT - and then sit and wait for pompous intellectual wannabes to rush into the room, injecting their subjective, ludicrous interpretations into the whole empty mess. The "Picasso con" works precisely because it preys on man's biggest enemy: his own fear. In this case, it is the fear of being thought of as stupid and/or uncultured. In a world in which status means everything (to certain people at least), few people are confident enough to speak out against pretentious drivel they don't understand. Therein lies the catch: there is nothing to understand. The movie is what it appears to be: an almost random collection of scenes and dialogues that are somehow supposed to be profound merely because they are full of fortune-cookie aphorisms, mostly superficial philosophical musings, and historical references.
So consumed was the 1974 Cannes Festival jury with this fear that they might look like jackasses for failing to make head or tails of this "grand, poetic work" that they copped out by giving HS the Grand Jury Prize – which is usually awarded to awful movies, I might add.
When it comes to those consummate liars and fakers - the movie critics – abstract imagery and endless existentialist gobbledygook is often all you need in your "allegorical" surrealist malarkey to get your thumbs up. As for the film-students, well, they simply "enjoy" whatever critics and their movie professors tell them to; they are mindless sheep, seeking to convince both themselves and their surroundings that they are high-brow intellectuals whose opinions matter and that nobody should ever dare underrate the exquisite depth of reason and imagination one needs in order to be an A-grade film student. In reality, Film Schools are low-brow, more in line with African History Studies, and the like; this explains the strong urge to prove oneself worthy of respect.
It is almost scary (but also fascinating and hilarious) to consider that so many film buffies, and other film-studenty type of human debris, have so successfully been brainwashed by the cultural movie establishment that they have actually learned to train themselves to sit through these kinds of two-hour drags and then even boast (lie) later how much they'd enjoyed them. But no amount of pseudo-intellectual BS can hide the roots of these movies, because the roots are showing from all sides.
Nor do film-students, film-buffies and film-critics differentiate between quality surrealism ("O Lucky Man!", for example) and low-grade, empty-headed nonsense (this Polish crap). It is all the same to them. It is as though the genre itself – the surrealist allegorical abstract drama (sounds "fancy", doesn't it?) – is enough by definition to give any such film the "official seal of approval for intellectual excellence" from the esteemed, confused, fearful movie community. Many vastly overrated directors (check out my "Overrated Directors" list) have built their entire careers on such obvious charlatanry. Think about it: it's much easier to write a script that has neither a structure not a plot (or at least only a vague one) and to simply glue together a bunch of scenes in which wide-eyed overactors dish out quotes from Nietzsche and Rousseau and make references to greats of literature and art.
Surely breasts are art? Nearly every actress in the movie shows her bazookas – in the name of art, naturally. One of the few good things about "surrealist" cinema: if you want tits, you'll find them here.
Going back to "Stalker"; perhaps if HS had no buffoonery, especially from its protagonist, and if it had a more eerie, mysterious mood – and a "somewhat" more finely-tuned script (or just A script as opposed to a lack of one), then perhaps this could have been a great movie. As it is, we've got great sets, nice photography, but not much else. Unless you believe that randomly injected philosophical discussions and occasional lines of pretentious poetry can ever possibly serve as a valid replacement for a story.
Believe it or not, there is one fart joke here, but in the non-skilled hands of film-critic spin-doctoring, I am sure even this basic bodily function can be interpreted as having vast layers of profundity. The world, after all, is full of false interpretations of riddles, with very few correct or sane interpretations. Trouble is, in order to interpret something you need to have a meaning to begin with, otherwise you're just indulging your own fantasies, making up things as you go along.
OK, enough of this rant. I'm off now to get a few laughs by reading the 10-star reviews here. - DirectorMarcin WronaStarsItay TiranAgnieszka ZulewskaAndrzej GrabowskiA bridegroom is possessed by an unquiet spirit in the midst of his own wedding celebration, in this clever take on the Jewish legend of the dybbuk.Why does it say "comedy drama" on my IMDb page? Must be a glitch or something...
1/10
First of all, I hate weddings. This entire movie is a wedding. If I had known this never would have I downloaded this rubbish.
(Weddings are for morons. If your fiancee insists on a lavish i.e. "proper" wedding, especially if she spends weeks searching for the "right dress", then know that you're marrying a cretin, and that you'll most likely have cretin children, especially cretin female offspring that will eventually fantasize about their own cretin weddings, perpetrating the idiocy until a meteorite finally wipes out all traces of weddings forever. And since you haven't noticed that she's a cretin then you must be a cretin too. Either that or you are OK with your future wife being a cretin - which automatically places you very close to cretin territory.)
Secondly, it's extremely boring, and I mean tedious, drab, fast-forward-beggingly dull. None of it rings true, because all I see are bad actors in shoddy roles guided by a pointless and pretentious script.
Perhaps the script is possessed? By an imbecile demon? A valid theory as any other.
There is a story in here... somewhere... but it is so buried in trivial scenes and meaningless, random dialog that it never has a chance to even properly start, let alone develop. Someone took a horror story and tried to heavily hipsterize it. He succeeded. I mean, succeeded in ruining it. The "art crowd" might be daft enough to fall for this empty drivel, but regular, intelligent film-goers must avoid this garbage because it offers literally nothing to horror fans, or just movie fans in general .
To give you an idea how pathetic the ending is, it rips off the final scene from "The Shining", the old photograph shtick. Lame. Even lamer is this "great reveal" because it was abundantly clear from the outset that the groom was killed before the wedding hence that the entity taking part in the festivities was not him but a spirit. Hardly a plot-twist. More like a middle finger.
Ironically, as dumb as the ending is, the only watchable bits are the first 10 minutes and the last 5 minutes, because they are wedding-devoid and the characters aren't behaving like drunken buffoons. Everything in-between is unbearable.
The arty, moody, "pensive" ending (the last 5-10 minutes) - which plays out in stark contrast to the proceeding hour - must have impressed people who rated this highly. (Not counting the fake reviews, obviously.) Unlike me, they are willing to let themselves be swayed by a few well-filmed (though content-wise meaningless) minutes, fully ignoring how awful the movie had been the 60 plus minutes before it.
The lead actor's increasingly over-the-top contortions/antics remind me of modern ballet, modern dance (whatever that hooey is called; I hate modern dance - or dance in general - even more than damn bloody weddings) which adds annoyance to the already existing boredom. He doesn't appear to be possessed: he appears to be begging for a movie award, because if there's anything film juries love it's horrendous overacting. He mugs his way through this like a really bad Hollywood nepotist begging for Oscar validation. (Nick Cage, Kiefer Sutherland, Joaquin Phoenix: the list is as long as it is crap.)
Much of the movie is actors pretending to have a great time at the wedding. Many such pointless, dull, repetitive scenes serve no purpose, act as padding. This story has such a thin "plot" that in order to fill the 90 minutes with SOMETHING they decided to give us NOTHING i.e. Completely pointless conversations, pompous philosophical rambling, and scenes that could very easily have been cut out without hurting the movie one bit. Quite to the contrary.
Once it becomes clear to all present that there is something really wrong with the groom, the movie is supposed to become interesting finally - but instead goes absolutely nowhere. Whatever little plot there was literally comes to a halt. Various dreary characters take over from this point on, discussing nonsense in circles. At the latest by this point, the movie becomes wholly unbearable.
Needless to say, I spent most of the movie's running time writing up this comment. I wasn't going to let this bomb win by making me spend additional time, after it ends, on writing about it. I wisely chose to wile away the excruciating boredom by writing about it rather than being tortured by it. Because that's how you beat boredom: you fight it.
The Polish-to-English language meandering was very unconvincing, unnatural, illogical. It cheapens the film.
This is the third Polish movie I've seen. All three suck. Three strikes and you're out: Polish movies are now on my no-more list. - DirectorAgnieszka SmoczynskaStarsMarta MazurekMichalina OlszanskaKinga PreisIn Warsaw, a pair of mermaid sisters are adopted into a cabaret. While one seeks love with humans the other hungers to dine on the human population of the city.Cringe-inducing mess that strives to be a cult movie.
1/10
An absolutely horrible, boring piece of trash, idiotic in a very random way. How they managed to turn a story about sirens (one of my favourite obscure horror/fantasy themes) into such unbearable trash... Kudos. It takes talent to be this bad.
Instead of handling the sirens subject in an appropriately mysterious way, they reduce the story to dumb vampire cliches, not to mention the fact that this pile of garbage is a cringe-inducing musical too.
Just to be hip enough, there is plenty of cringe-inducing Goth imagery/cliches, and several very boring, unconvincing lesbian scenes thrown in just to make this crap more "arty". You get the picture. If the Waikowski sister-brother-whatevers ever made a musical it would be something like this.
There is a spark of a good story in this, just as in the other moronic 2015 Polish movie I'd seen ("Demon"), but the choice was made not to develop the story properly, but to make a mockery of it instead. If they had stuck to the premise of a siren being cursed if she falls in love with a human, this could have been an interesting movie.
Speaking of this premise, just to give you an idea how completely non-developed the story is, one example out of many... The blonde siren is told that if her human lover marries a different girl then she (the blonde siren) must kill him before daybreak otherwise she turns to foam. In order to reach this dramatic-romantic stage of the story, the writer "forced" the plot by having her lover marry a different woman. Out of the blue. Was there any hint of this other woman earlier? No. Was there a gradual development whereby he is shown falling out of love with the siren, or at least meeting new women? No. The wedding ceremony literally jumps out onto the screen, out of nowhere without rhyme or (good) reason, simply because the writer needed this twist for his predictable "grand finale". The shoddy writer revealing zero effort, and how little he cares. Utter, inexcusable nonsense.
It's one of those pathetic cult wannabes. The director so desperately wanted to create a "Rocky Horror Picture Show" type of movie, with a cult following, but failed so abysmally. (That idiotic 70s musical is garbage too.) Whenever a film-maker (turd-maker) sets out to make a movie that will be regarded as cult, intentionally, he is doomed to failure. Cult happens spontaneously, there isn't a formula to it. You don't go PLANNING a cult movie. At least not a good one. God knows some such films do get a cult following - but consisting almost entirely of morons.
So are the two sirens at least hot? Hardly. The blonde one is OK, the brunette is an average-looking nepotist. Both roles could have been cast much better. Poland has a population of 40 million, right? Very attractive female population, right? But, of course, nepotism is the enemy, a curse, as it is everywhere else.
The plot, the characters, the dialog: way too random, too messy. If a script is a movie's foundation then this garbage is literally balancing itself on a soft rubber ball, falling over every 5 seconds like the clumsy pointless mess that it is.