Krásno

The Lake reminded me a lot of the Danish crime comedy Old Men in New Cars: In China They Eat Dogs. It’s a pity that Martin Finger and Ondřej Sokol are at times more theatrical than authentic. Often, they turn the film into a farce, when it is definitely not supposed to be that. The atmosphere is excellent, the story has a good pace, the city of Šumperk is appropriately gloomy and the dialogues are sometimes truly excellent. Sokol really shines through the movie. However, for his next project I wish he would be more honest as an actor and wasn’t aiming for so much drama, which was often excessive in his character. Way too often I saw his own personality as we know it from Partička and that affected the movie quite significantly. Other than that, the actors like Ondřej Malý, Jaroslav Plesl, Karel Roden or Zuzana Stavná prove that this movie is not that bad and is definitely worth watching. (2014.09.21)

A classic local shapeless mess, which squints at "rougher paragons" (I would call it a Czech attempt to create a black comedy drama like Terribly Happy), but then it dissolves into inconsistent templates. Here we find typical techniques from the bad comedy (Sokol's hero, his self-deprecating and self-pitying humor), certain signs of reflection on family crisis and alienation (Finger's cold declamation), an extravagant thriller (mechanical smearing of various glaring signs on familiar acting faces - gay, undertaker and assassin Roden), a clever effort to create an absurd fateful chaining of events (the dog in the car)... instead of a dense, cynical and exciting spectacle, but The Lake is more reminiscent of ambitiously framed scenes from ribbons, which last an unreasonably long time, are cheesy and without a good point. A typical goulash from the local film station, sparse, full of flavorings and boiled ambitions. In addition, it disguises its dramaturgical helplessness as "genre openness", the impotence of which is best reflected in the indecisive soundtrack by Jan P. Muchow, who languidly irons possible emotional organs into an indifferent badge (the music cannot be described as instructive because it leads nowhere). One then notices a thoughtless series that reveals how persistently the individual situations are mashed together so that the screenwriters can get them to some sort of point. However, it smells of typical post-revolutionary exploitation, which stems from pure clumsiness rather than thoughtfulness / foresight. [40%] (2014.01.22)

It is an attempt at a rough, but comedic crime plot, but it doesn't really work. It is very drawn-out, the acting performances are not great, and above all, it is not as funny as one would think. Some characters are clearly given certain scenes at the expense of the story just to amuse. However, I probably don't regret contributing to the campaign anyway. Nobody will notice my name in the credits anyway. (2015.02.12)