rocek

When I rented this, I had no idea what to expect. In my opinion, it is a brilliant deadpan surreal comedy. Daniel Day Lewis's fierce quest to spread dental hygiene consciousness in Patagonia is utterly absurd but told as if it is the most natural and ordinary thing in the world. From his confrontation with a bandit who comes to him to have a tooth pulled to his theological debate with an elderly monk who refuses treatment, every inane adventure is told with complete conviction. After he learns that pandas have trumped dentistry, he must face despair, self-doubt, and self-loathing.

Daniel Day Lewis is an astonishing actor--he is a complete chameleon who becomes whoever he acts. He is always different; consider My Beautiful Laundrette, a Room with a View, My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, The Unbearable Lightness of Being--each role is utterly unlike the other. In Eversmile, New Jersey, you can see what Daniel Day Lewis might have been like in a Monty Python movie.

Finally, the footage of Patagonia is bleak and stunning. That alone would be enough to make the movie worth seeing.

In this reconstructed documentary, the Cimrman troupe faces absurd censors, unreasonable deadlines, and inadequate facilities as they rehearse and perform one of their masterpieces, "Visionar" (literally "Visionary"). For those who speak Czech and are somewhat familiar with Czech culture and recent history, this is a hilarious and even moving satire by two authors (Sverak and Smoljak) who repeatedly explain that they can't do satire. For those who don't have this background, let me just explain that Cimrman is a fictitious Czech genius from the turn of the last century whose plays (all written by Sverak and Smoljak) have had over 10,000 performances, who is cited by Czech politicians, and is the funniest Czech literary creation since Svejk.

This film tells the story of the family of one of the children saved from the Nazis by Nicholas Winton, a young Englishman. It tells the story simply, without embellishment. The focus of the story is the boy's warm large family, and their failure to escape while it was possible to do so. Despite the superficial similarity of the theme to "Schindler's List", this film is in a sense the direct opposite--instead describing the unbelievable but true acts of an incredible man (Oskar Schindler), it tells the story of very ordinary people, some of whom act decently and humanly, and others don't. It is unreasonable to ask why weren't there more Oskar Schindlers; one inevitably wonders why weren't there more Nicholas Wintons.