Change Your Image
sjbrook1
Reviews
Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (2006)
The pitfalls of being unpolitical
Like the butler played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1994 film "The Remains of the Day", the waiter at the centre of "I Served the King of England" (Jiri Menzel, Czech Republic, 2006) is not interested in politics. Major historical events surround him, yet these completely escape his attention. His ambition is simply to become a millionaire, like the fat cats he serves at table. In 1930s Prague, Hitler, in Berlin, is making a radio announcement about his aim to "liberate" the Sudetenland. Bored, Jan Dite, the waiter, simply turns the dial to a dance music station.
He manages to float through the Nazi invasion, first of the Sudetenland, then of Czechoslovakia. By a combination of hook and crook, he achieves his ambition of owning his own hotel through the sale of valuable stamps, stolen from a vanished Jewish family. This does not give him a moment's pause but later, when he sees a trainload of Jews in cattle-cars moving off to Auschwitz, he has a rush of compassion and chases after the train in an attempt to hand the deportees a sandwich. After the war, as a self-confessed millionaire, he is sent to prison when his hotel is nationalised. He emerges fifteen years later, older, but not much wiser. He is Schweik, but without the latter's sly intelligence.
This sketchy summary cannot do justice to a film which has been described as a near-flawless masterpiece, in which "Prague has never looked better". It is permeated with the ironic wit which marked Menzel's earlier films, such as the Academy Award winning Closely Watched Trains (1966). Dite befriends the German girl Liza, described by one reviewer as "the sweetest little Nazi in the history of the cinema". They are in bed, making love in the missionary position. Liza keeps pushing his head aside so that she can gaze at the big picture of Adolf Hitler on the opposite wall. Such was love in the Third Reich. The scene in which Dite is undergoing a racial fitness test which involves giving a sperm sample is intercut with young Czech men being unloaded from a lorry at an execution ground. Of this, Dite is blissfully unaware.
The Remains of the Day was based on a serious and perceptive novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The genesis of I Served the King of England, by contrast, was a comic novel by Bohumil Hrabal, a book I cannot wait to get my hands on. Any offers?
Paradise Now (2005)
Gives a powerful insight into Palestinian suicide bombing.
One of the main features of a highly polarized situation, such as in the Middle East right now, is that each side demonizes the other. Here, it's "the Palestinians" versus "the Israelis", or "the Moslems" versus "the Jews". To the extent that it is seen by wide audiences, this film helps break down this demonization. It mounts a powerful argument against the kind of generalization that leads to massacres of innocents. We meet Palestinians as real human beings, with the same strengths and weaknesses as we have. "Paradise Now" is not, as some have claimed, either pro-Palestinian (whatever THAT means) or anti-Israeli. It is in no way an apologia for suicide bombing, but a convincing explanation. I have heard that it played to full houses in Israel. Has it been seen on "the other side"? Certainly not in Malaysia, where it has been banned!
Portnoy's Complaint (1972)
Still looks good!
This movie was bold for its time, especially in its use of "bad" language, and it still looks good. Some modern reviewers wrote things like this: "Amazing that anyone had the nerve to attempt to translate Philip Roth's infamous novel to the screen. The neurotic Jewish boy, who has a strange relationship with his mother and an obsession with sex, should be neutered. It's worth viewing only as a curiosity." (Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, Video Movie Guide, 2002.) But the film is much more than an historical curiosity. It also throws a revealing light on the mores of only a generation ago -- what was shocking then, is no longer so, despite hypersensitive writers like Martin and Porter.
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)
A bubble-burster!
I was raised on the Goon Show, watched "Dr. Strangelove" with delight and trepidation, and saw just one of the Pink Panther series. I had to be forced to see "Being there" -- a film which I nevertheless enjoyed. But through it all I had an illusionary vision of Peter Sellers as a solid human being with whom one could empathize. The Geoffrey Rush film has burst that illusionary bubble, and brilliantly. Apart from anything else, it's an acid comment on the cinema's star system which, to borrow a metaphor, has been described as a means of dimming diamonds and polishing pebbles. (The original of this was a comment by Robert Green Ingersoll, the great 19th-century American freethinker, about universities.)