CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Haven Kaycee It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Armand a travel with many dimensions. short history of Central Europe in XX century, charming trip across the life of a little man and his dreams, ironic, sarcastic, testimony and word of Ecclesiast, it is charming and seductive. and that is not a surprise. a great director and a nice novel are basis of expected success. but this success is, in fact, result of spices. melancholia, regrets, innocence as instrument to resist against gray world, humor as perfect option to describe a kind of Forrest Gump and his steps. for viewer from East Europe , it is a support for not forgive the past traces. for the others, it can be a comedy or a salt-sweet film. it is , like each film, only a window. and that is enough.

jotix100 Jan Dite, a resourceful waiter at a Prague restaurant, likes to play tricks on the wealthy patrons of the establishment where he starts his career by throwing coins on the floor. It never fails, even the richest men cannot pass the occasion of getting down to pick up a coin, something that fills Dite's soul with contentment. Jan Dite also starts his own sentimental education at the hand of a beautiful blond who sends the older gentlemen in the restaurant to a state of bliss. But the only one that really gets to her heart, and her bed is Jan.The picaresque ascent and downfall of Jan Dite is told in flashbacks by the older Dite, who at the beginning of the story is released from jail for something that is not revealed until almost the end. Jan goes from Prague into a country hotel where the privileged rich love to go to be secluded with attractive young women. In a delicious sequence Jan Dite comes upon what really goes on in a private room upstairs where a lovely young lady rotates on a 'lazy Susan' kind of device while the men around the table have great views of her. Even this woman seem to prefer Jan to most of the old goats that can really pay for her.The next adventure involving young Dite involves his stay at one of the most beautiful restaurants in all of Prage, the great Paris Hotel, where the art of food is the most refined in the city. There Jan makes the acquaintance of the head waiter, Skrivanek, a suave and debonair man who can speak several languages and who takes a liking for the young Dite. His waiters love to perform a sort of balletic dance around the restaurant where they balance the many platters on their tray. One waiter in particular, resents Jan Dite, who gets his revenge when he makes his rival trip causing him to go into a melt down of huge proportions. One of Jan's best achievements was his role during the dinner the Emperor of Ethiopia offers at the hotel. Being a short man, the monarch wants to offer a medal to one of the staff, but not being tall, he bestows the sash with the jewel to Dite, who treasures it forever. His big love comes in the way of Liza, a German woman who arrives in the country after part of it is taken over by Germany. The Nazis are seen arriving all over town. Some Czech youths begin beating Germans, but Jan's intervention gains her admiration that will turn into love. The only problem is the question of whether Jan Dite's blood is fit to blend with Liza's who is pure Aryan. It is not too long before the invading Germans are all over the place. Jan Dite's sees his older friend and mentor being sent away to a death camp, but he is helpless to do much. The old man had suggested to put his money into stamps because he feels the money will be useless. Jan, not heeding the advice ends up with nothing, until Liza returns from the war loaded with stamps, which are sold in order for Dite to buy the old Paris hotel, but alas, his happiness is short lived because the Communists take over. The hotel goes to the state and they send Jan Dite to prison for having paid 15 million for the establishment that merits him fifteen years away.This wonderful film by Jiri Menzel, a director much admired for his earlier projects, is a satire about life before WWII and its aftermath. The most interesting aspect of the story involves the young Jan because of the great possibilities Mr. Menzel saw in the ascent of the entrepreneurial Dite, whereas the latter part with the older Jan only serves to recall parts of his interesting life. The director had actually worked with novelist Bohumil Hrabal, but his take on the book shows a director at the top of his craft as a creator. The irony of the story is that after the country is invaded by the Germans, the people become slaves by the Communist regime that will last more than forty years by the hardliners that took over.The best thing in this film is the wonderful Bulgarian actor Ivan Barnev, who steals the picture. He is one of the most remarkable actors working in Eastern Europe today. It is a joy to watch this man work. He is never obnoxious. In addition, he possesses one of the most expressive faces that works great in the film. Oldrich Kaiser, is seen as the older Dite. He too, bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Barnev, but alas, his role is not as important in the context of the film. Julia Jentsch, a German actress, plays the role of Liza, who becomes Dite's love. Martin Huba, another distinguished actor is marvelous as the head waiter Skrivanek. The supporting cast includes Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, in a cameo.The film is a triumph for Jiri Menzel, who was blessed with the magic performance of Ivan Barnev in an unforgettable film that will live forever.

philipdavies Menzel, faithful to Hrabal, shows the Fall of Czech Man - and Sudeten German Woman - and their expulsion from their respective Middle-European idylls: They tragically fall into each other's arms just as global issue is joined that soon disillusions our Romeo and destroys his (now unfortunately rampantly Nazi) Juliet.Neither the quiet life of getting rich and enjoying all the pleasures money can bring, nor the stirring Wagnerian strains of Germanic supremacist idealism, can survive, but our opportunistic anti-hero, Ditie (a name which can translate as 'little man') is more adaptable, because his ideals are more pliant to the accidents of fate than his German wife's rigid Hitlerite fanaticism, and consequently he is eventually able to emerge from a sort of Communist Purgatory with a keen appreciation of life's real and much simpler necessities.With profound irony, it is in a smashed and ethnically cleansed Sudeten German village that an older and a wiser Ditie's rehabilitation is completed. And it is from this sobering perspective that he can finally both regret the excesses and errors of his life, and yet also take nostalgic pleasure from what was, after all, the wonderful, glittering, profoundly human spectacle of folly and grandeur which his life has been! Far from tragic or depressing, therefore, this film of the 20th century debacle of a nation ruined remarkably concludes with a very Czech endorsement of the simple, inoffensive pleasure in life which will always console this patient people at the troubled heart of darkest Europe: Ditie allows himself to enjoy a tankard of Pilsener beer - and Menzel's camera seems to gild the moment with as much gloriously sensuous golden dreaminess and spiritual fulfillment as ever bloated millionaire or romantically excessive idealist knew.At last, the little man has found his fulfillment where it always lay: in the little things. At last, old, disillusioned and unseduced any longer by the world's headier attractions, Ditie finds himself at home and happy.Here, the film seems to be saying, is the real idyll to which the Czech person should retire for refreshment of the soul, and not those false - though fabulous - ones we have been forced to discard.Just as Ditie observes that his own career of accidents always turned out well, so in this perspective the Czech experience seems, on the whole, to have turned out for the best. This optimistic fatalism seems typical of the Czech way of seeing things, and is as characteristic of this film of Menzel's old age as it was of his early masterpiece, 'Closely observed trains.' On this view, it would be churlish to condemn the film for self-indulgence, as many Western critics have done. Frankly, they haven't suffered so much, so what do they know of ethical conundrums and the moral paradoxes of survival? This meditation on the more inglorious struggles of the insignificant and friendless to survive deserves our respect, not an easy and priggish contempt. This must especially be true in the country which lies behind the heavily loaded title 'I served the King of England,' for this heavy hint must surely prick that particular national conscience with its role in one of history's most blatant acts of betrayal. The title practically dares any English commentator to judge Ditie in his historical predicament!(There is also considerable satisfaction to be had by the viewer from the sheer technical finesse of the film's production, on every level. Jiri Menzel's craft is also hugely impressive in scene after scene, which are turned with complete mastery of tragi-comic effect. But this is a study for another occasion.)

Steve Brook 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?