Zakázané uvolnění

El encanto de Rubí en la densa obra de teatro se disipó un poco en la versión cinematográfica. Recuerdo que me divertí y reí desde el principio hasta el final, en la película ya esperaba y conocía algunas bromas, además de que había momentos poéticos pero también parcialmente sordos. Y definitivamente no me molesta la inclusión del elenco masculino y la excelente actuación de Norbert Lichý en la versión cinematográfica. Entiendo que a Jana Hřebejk le interesara esta obra y en general estoy contento con esta adaptación, pero por lo general, el teatro siempre gana antes que la película, especialmente si lo veo en el orden de obra de teatro - película. Y recuerdo bien que el director personalmente estuvo presente en aquella función de Rubí, así que tal vez fue en ese momento que tuvo la idea de hacer la película. En resumen, Rubí se merece tres estrellas mejores y definitivamente más del 44 por ciento que se muestra aquí. (02.01.2015)

The director Hřebejk is capable of shooting an ultimate trove of psychology called Honeymoon and then shooting a dialogue window into the world of gossiping hens all within a single year. I have nothing against those actresses, I’d even like to see Hana Vagnerová in proper movies more often. But what they were capable of once they got together was too much for me. When I see bimbos like this in a pub, I usually get up and leave because they’ve spoiled my entire evening at that point. Here at least I was only sitting on my sofa, that’s their only luck. I’m just hoping I won’t ever get to see it a second time. (11.07.2016)

Péťa and Honza are thinking about what girls probably do when men are not around. So it's clear that they immediately mature together, of course, they also cry a lot. And they can't handle alcohol. It is also absolutely natural that there can't be something like friendship between a man and a woman, and if someone thinks that these two are just friends and not sleeping together, then they are really incurable naive. I couldn't help but sadistically enjoy how those girls try to act in this chauvinistic narrative (although unnecessarily, because they are stage actresses and you can't explain to the creators here that acting is different in theater and in film) with the vision of Sokol coming for them on a white horse. I know from the time when Hřebejk was still cinematically relevant that he is not an evil person; he brought refreshing revisions and progressiveness to many social topics, but for the past decade, he has probably been shut away somewhere, watching theater recordings and grandiosely wondering how those people below function. And for this reason, I am also sadistically looking forward to his "relevant" trilogy Gardening, which apparently will be a luxurious romp. (22.08.2022)

I have a rather futile feeling about the simple fact that in essence, Michal Hrůza's eponymous video clip is a better watch. However, some of the sub-elements contained in this work are worthy of attention. This means that even Hřebejk's theatrical diary serves only half the purpose. But it's still a much better experience when I think of the dysfunctional Garbage, the City and Death. (25.07.2016)

A guy’s idea of what a girls’ comedy should look like. The women behave like frivolous, hysterical bitches without a sense of humour. They are incompetent with technical things or the film makes fun of their possible technical competence. They lie, pretend and manipulate others. Their only topic of conversation is men, from whom they derive happiness in their lives. One of them is interested in hockey only because she bet on the outcome of a match – an irrationally large amount of money on an irrationally high score. Just like in porn and other male fantasies, the women have no inhibitions when it comes to indulging in lesbian sex. The male storyline is more believable and funnier (though Sokol, with good timing and a well-chosen tone of voice, sometimes forgets that he isn’t doing improv and goes farther over the line than the film’s stylisation can bear), but it is also much shorter and mostly unnecessary. It’s nice that the men deal with similar issues as the ladies, but that shouldn’t be such an obvious screenwriting construct (like a lot of other situations in the film) and should be better combined with the women’s storyline. Together with the flashbacks and the actors’ Brechtian utterances directly to the camera, the dual narrative creates the impression of a sophisticated, layered work in which multiple parallel motifs could intersect in the ending and bring about some kind of catharsis. But nothing of that sort happens. A few people make fools of themselves and long-withheld information is revealed, but it doesn’t seem that anyone learned any moral lessons from what they have experienced (the film somewhat chauvinistically implies that rotten women are to blame for relationship conflicts, not rotten men). The attempt at depth only draws attention away from the sitcom shallowness of the whole film, which is basically just a kind of extended episode of a series like How I Met Your Mother that accidentally got released to cinemas, but with lower-quality actors and rythmisation and far less intelligent humour. 50% (05.06.2014)