Czech – The Movie Gourmet

OWNERS: a sharp and very funny observation of human foibles

March 3, 2020March 1, 2020 by movie gourmet

The very dark Czech comedy Owners sharply observes the foibles of the human personality. It’s the regular business meeting of the apartment owners association – but their deliberations about building improvements are anything but mundane, and things quickly get personal.

It’s a rich cast of characters, including:

the insufferable auditor who finds every nit and insists on picking it;
the couple that are self-selected officers, but are too disorganized to ever make a meeting on time; (this time their excuse is that the babysitter was late – yet they come in with their kids!) ; and
two slickster smoothies who are back in the Czech Republic after having made their way in the swashbuckling world of American finance.

It’s all a vortex of past neighborly grievances and self-interest. From the outset, one owner offers his services (I have a little company“) for everything from locksmithing to boiler repair – but his game is only the most naked. Everyone, it turns out, has an agenda. But most hold their cards close to their vests in this poker game of a negotiation.

It all results in multiple epic meltdowns.

It’s unexpected that this comes to mind from an Eastern European film, but Owners’ jaundiced view of human nature matches that of America’s greatest author – Mark Twain. As if Twain were time-traveled to the modern Czech Republic. One of the owner sagely avers that a “conflict of Pinterest” exists.

One element of human nature seems to be that it is easier to accept and trust the unfamiliar than it is the same folks you’ve been squabbling with for years.

Owners also comments on the post-Communist Czech Republic, with the gripes of the old commie holdovers and the onslaught of the new American-style capitalists. The old system didn’t work for everybody, and neither does the new one.

Owners is adapted from a play, and kinda like a funny 12 Angry Men, has a claustrophobic feeling from its containment in the conference room.

Owners has been recognized at this year’s best Czech film. Cinequest hosts the North American premiere of Owners. Make sure that you stay through the closing credits.

Stream of the Week: THE TEACHER – a peek into communist dread

July 10, 2018 by movie gourmet

In the superb drama The Teacher, it’s the mid-1980s and the Iron Curtain is still defining Czechoslovakia; (The Teacher is a Czech movie in the Slovak language). The title character’s position as a high school teacher makes her a gatekeeper to the children’s futures, and she’s unaccountable because she’s a minor Communist Party functionary. Wielding blatant academic favoritism and even overt blackmail, she uses the advantage of her political status for her own petty benefit – coercing shopping errands, car rides, pastries and other favors from the parents of her students. Finally, she causes so much harm to one student that some of the parents rebel and seek her ouster.

Will the other parents support them? What of the parents who benefit from the regime? And what of the majority of the parents who must decide whether to risk their own futures? The risk is real: the regime has already reassigned one parent, a scientist, to a menial job after his wife had defected.

The Teacher benefits from a brilliant, award-winning performance from Zuzana Mauréry in the title role. What makes this character especially loathsome is that she’s not just heavy-handed, but grossly manipulative. Mauréry is a master at delivering reasonable words with both sweet civility and the unmistakable menace of the unspoken “or else”.

The acting from the entire company is exceptional, especially from Csongor Kassai, Martin Havelka and the Slovak director Peter Bebjak as aggrieved parents. Writer Petr Jarchovský has created textured, authentic characters. Director Jan Hrebejk not only keeps the story alive but adds some clever filmmaking fluorishes as he moves the story between flashbacks and the present.

The Teacher was the best foreign film at the 2017 Cinequest. It can now be streamed on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE FIREMEN’S BALL

April 24, 2018 by movie gourmet

As a tribute to the great director Miloš Forman, who just died at age 86, this week’s video pick is Forman’s 1967 Czech comedy The Firemen’s Ball. Forman came of age in Communist Czechoslovakia, and the prevalent thread in his films was the challenging, even mocking, of authority. That’s what The Firemen’s Ball is all about.

It’s a comedy of errors set during the annual ball of a small town fire brigade. It’s an obligatory occasion, and everyone is just going through the motions. No one is willing or able to do what they are supposed to be doing, whether it is protecting the raffle prizes or even putting out fires. The film eviscerated the moral bankruptcy of the Communist society.

The bumbling old farts on the ball committee try to put on a beauty contest, and they shanghai a bunch of young women in attendance and parade them around the committee room to prep them for the pageant. The Wife was offended by the sexism of the scene, but she didn’t stick around to see the committee get their comeuppance when the contestants themselves blow up the Big Announcement and turn the committee members into objects of ridicule. Stick with it – the whole movie is only 73 minutes long.

In his youth, Forman lived through the Nazis, who he described as evil, and the Communists, who he described as absurd. Indeed, the Czech ruling Politburo did recognizer themselves in The Firemen’s Ball’s bumbling firemen’s ball committee, and they concocted a pretext to ban the film in Czechoslovakia.

The Firemen’s Ball (which is also sometimes listed as The Fireman’s Ball) can be streamed from Amazon Prime and rented on DVD from Netflix. It’s only one hour, thirteen minutes long, and it’s a hoot.

Cinequest: BAREFOOT

May 13, 2018March 11, 2018 by movie gourmet

The excellent Czech historical drama Barefoot is from director Jan Sverák, who won an Oscar for Kolya. It’s the coming of age story of a small boy named Eda and is set during World War II. The local puppets collaborating with the Nazis make it impossible for Eda’s father to stay in the city, so he moves his family to his rural home village.

In the countryside, Eda develops a gang of buddies and meets his mysterious uncle Wolf. In the city, Eda’s father had been courageous – even risking his life – to undermine the Nazis; but, in the village, the father is completely submissive to his own father and the rural extended family.

The war is in the background, occasionally protruding into the forefront. The Germans are on their heels and a Russian victory is inevitable, but the Germans are still in control and dangerous.

We follow the story through the boy’s lens, and there’s an effective balance of humor and drama. Whether in wartime or peacetime, a boy must grow and learn life lessons and form his character.

I saw Barefoot at Cinequest, where Director of Programming Mike Rabehl secured the rare black-and-white director’s cut. The black-and-white is splendid, and there’s a sleigh ride scene that is magical.

Barefoot, which is way better than the Oscar winner Kolya, is another gem from Cinequest’s international film scout Charlie Cockey. It doesn’t yet have distribution in the US, but I’ll let you know when it’s available to US audiences.

Cinequest: THE TEACHER

February 26, 2017 by movie gourmet

The Teacher is one of the highlights of Cinequest 2017.

Cinequest: LOST IN MUNICH

March 3, 2016 by movie gourmet

Ah, those nutty Czechs. Here, we think we’re watching a political spoof. Then, a third of the way in, Lost in Munich becomes a mockumentary on the “making of” the movie we thought we were watching. The joke is on us and on the incompetent and unlucky fillmmaker characters and on the Czechs themselves.

There’s a particular dry deadpan in some Czech cinema, and the best example may be a Cinequest film from two years ago, Polski Film. The Czechs are happy to make fun of themselves and their European neighbors (in this case the French). The movie-within-a-movie centers on Czech hard feelings from French Prime Minister Edoaurd Daladier selling out the Czechs in the 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler. A dim French diplomat tries to smooth things over by bringing Daladier’s 80-year-old pet parrot, but the parrot turns out to be counterproductively politically incorrect, the parrot is parrotnapped, and the comic absurdity of Lost in Munich goes on from there.

Lost in Munich is pretty successful when it mocks the making of a snake-bitten movie where everything that CAN go wrong…You’ll probably like this movie if you have a taste for absurdist cinema. Lost in Munich plays Cinequest again on March 11 and 12.

Cinequest’s Charlie Cockey: The Man Who Goes to Film Festivals

March 1, 2014 by movie gourmet

Charlie Cockey (photo courtesy Around the World in 14 Films)

Charlie Cockey is at a film festival. (Actually, right now he’s probably traveling between the Berlin International Film Festival and Cinequest.) But, whenever you read this, the odds are that he’s sampling cinema at a film fest somewhere.

Cockey, the international film programmer for San Jose’s Cinequest, attends twelve or more international film festivals each year. He never misses the great Berlin and Venice fests, and also makes the rounds of the European national film showcases in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and other countries.

Cockey is Cinequest’s film scout extraordinaire and responsible for the most singular films on Cinequest’s program, the movies unlike any you have seen before. In my recent Why Cinequest is essential, I highlighted three of his gems from last year’s Cinequest: the German dark comedy Oh Boy (the debut from talented writer-director Jan Ole Gerster), the absurdist Czech comedy Polski Film and the offbeat The Dead Man and Being Happy, with its gloriously wacky road trip through the backwaters of Argentina. (My favorite Charlie Cockey selection is the unsettling 2011 Slovak Visible World – which is creepy even for a voyeur film.) Cockey found 12 of the films in last year’s Cinequest, and has brought as many as 17.

Cockey, who lives in the Czech Republic’s second city Brno, speaks English, Czech, German, French, Italian and Romanian. That’s helpful, but the national film festivals usually have English-subtitled “festival version” screenings for distributors and festival programmers (plus non-subtitled screenings for the local public).

How did an American guy come to live in Brno? “A Czech woman tied my shoelaces together,” Cockey replies. Before he had acquired his Czech language fluency, he was sitting in a darkened Czech theater and was surprised to see no subtitles on the film. Needing to ask the woman next to him for help with the translation, he touched her hand and sparks flew, or at least one literal spark from static electricity. Fourteen years later, the two are still partners.

What are Charlie Cockey’s tips for sampling movies at a festival? Like any festival-goer, he chooses screenings based on the buzz, the director and sometimes a gut feeling. He doesn’t mind bad movies because “if a film’s not working, I leave”. He adds, “The mediocre ones are tough because you need to stick it out”.

First and foremost, Charlie Cockey is a man who devours culture in any form – books, music, cinema, food – with a voracious but discerning appetite. Cockey’s journey brought him from the East Coast and Idaho to 1960s San Francisco as a musician and as a road manager for a band. He opened San Francisco’s first science fiction bookstore (Fantasy, Etc) and ran it for the last quarter of the 20th Century. “There are no accidents,” he says. “Only surprises.”

Extremely generous with his knowledge and taste, Cockey loves to share the most precisely individual recommendations of books and movies. He relishes the memory of helping a boy – dragged into Fantasy, Etc by his parents – discover a genre of literature (in this case fantasy) that spawned a new love of reading. And he couldn’t resist quizzing me about my interests and then recommending an extremely obscure collection of letters from a German intelligence official in WWII – a book that I NEVER would have otherwise considered but which turned out to be a great read.

Here’s how to experience Cinequest the Charlie Cockey way: “Find films as you live life – by being open, prepared, ready, flexible and friendly”.

Follow The Movie Gourmet on Twitter for my continuing coverage of the 2014 Cinequest.

Cinequest: Polski Film

February 25, 2014March 9, 2013 by movie gourmet

You’ve never seen a film like the absurd Czech comedy Polski Film, in which four Czech actors play themselves banding together to make an ill-fated movie with Polish financing. Think of a film-within-a-film mockumentary made by Christopher Guest’s repertory company with the actors in their own personae – and with a touch of Bunuel; then flavor the whole thing with the Czech Republic’s own unique humor. Of course, there are also comments on the Poles and a very funny German joke.

A Czech tabloid concocts a false story that one of the actors is dying of cancer; he uses the lie to gain the sympathy of a beautiful Polish actress and then must continue the charade. Another actor enjoys getting reactions from friends and even passersby by acting outrageously; we never quite know whether his meltdowns with his colleagues are real or performance art. And then there’s the Czech GPS system that berates drivers for not following directions – actually voiced by one of the stars of Polski Film.

This movie is not for anyone who needs to understand what’s going on at all times, but those who will just let it unfold will be rewarded. Unfortunately, the trailer is in Czech without subtitles, so we non-Czech speakers miss out on the deadpan humor.

Cinequest: In The Shadow (Ve Stinu)

February 24, 2013 by movie gourmet

The Czech paranoid thriller In The Shadow (Ve Stinu) follows a police detective in 1953 Prague. The Communist government credits him with solving a case – but he figures out that the crime was committed by different perpetrator with a different motive. Unfortunately, the truth is not politically convenient, and he must navigate through the criminal underground, Commie thugs, a former Nazi and Cold War show trials or he’ll become yet another film noir tragic ending.

The cop is played by the Czech actor Ivan Trojan, whose performance I admired so much in the creepy voyeur film Visible World. In Visible Word, Trojan got to play a seriously twisted guy. Trojan’s role in In the Shadow is not as showy, but he creates a hard-boiled character of uncommon determination and devotion to the truth.

In the Shadow is a well-crafted cop movie with added intensity from a nefarious Big Brother. In the Shadow won Best Film at the Czech Film Critics’ Awards and was the Czech submission to the Academy Awards. It plays at Cinequest on February 28, March 6 and March 8. The trailer is in Czech without English subtitles.

Cinequest – Visible World: creepy, even for a voyeur movie

March 1, 2014March 17, 2012 by movie gourmet

In the unsettling Slovak film Visible World (Vidite ny Svet), the protagonist Oliver lives by himself in a high-rise apartment building and trains his binoculars on unsuspecting people in the high-rise across the street. The tag line is “There’s a man with binoculars at the window, watching the people across the street. And he’s definitely not James Stewart.”

It’s an uncommon voyeur film. First, the voyeur isn’t looking at any bad behavior by the people across the street. Second, although he is compelled to spy, he isn’t getting any apparent sexual kick out of what he sees. Instead – and this is the really, really disturbing aspect – he is using what he sees to interfere with their lives – and to insinuate himself into their lives.

Most women like a guy who makes that extra effort to find out what she likes. But going through a woman’s garbage to see what products she uses – before he has met her – that’s pretty high up on the Creep-O-Meter. “I like Chilean Carmenere. You do, too? Imagine that!”

Oliver is played by Ivan Trojan as an extremely terse and focused guy, but one who can surprise the audience by putting on an act of affability to get what he wants. He is an odd duck, for sure – often rudely abrupt with people who wander between him and his obsessions. But he is that unusually high functioning crazy who can hide how very, very sick he is.

I saw Visible World at its North American premiere at Cinequest 22.