The four horsemen or riders of the Apocalypse appear in the Book of Revelation. Our scourges, they are traditionally identified as Death, War, Hunger and Pestilence. And the fifth horseman, according to Zbynek Brynych’s famous Czech film, is Fear: . . . A páty jezdec je Strach. The four scenarists are Brynych, the irreplaceable Ester […]
Daily Archives: May 10, 2007
“Pity us exiles!” reads Adam Mickiewicz aloud in a dark Parisian room, signaling the shift of his nineteenth-century rhyming epic poem to cinematic prose. We are all exiles from our homeland, or some idea of it, either by distance or by time. Gerwazy (Daniel Olbrychski, capping his career with a gravelly voice and a scarred […]
Jméno kódu Rubín has nothing in common with realism; it is a thing of fantasy; spiritual, artificially created reality. All my life I have felt that film is much closer to music than to anything else. It means that I work with fantasy, imagination, tones, rhythm, harmony and feelings. Film influences the non-rational spheres of […]
Voted in 1998 the greatest Czech film of all time, František Vláčil’s thirteenth-century epic, based on Vladislav Vancura’s novel, is in fact not nearly as good as two other Czech films made the same year: Věra Chytilová’s Daisies; Jan Nemec’s A Report on the Party and the Guests. Nor is it worth the comparisons often […]
Written by John August from what I understand is a rather darker novel by Daniel Wallace, Big Fish confirms director Tim Burton’s inability to engage reality except at a preposterous remove. This latest film of his is a structural mess; it keeps returning to a mundane family soap opera in the present—a man who is […]
Dennis Grunes 