Kobry a uzovky

I felt empathy and fear with a sense of unavoidable collisions as the film follows the lives of two brothers in the Czech Republic. The adult siblings carry the scars of their upbringing by a mother who gave up on providing any emotional support.

The story unfolds in a mid size Czech town where the brothers are well known in the working class community as they drift aimlessly. The younger brother suffers from a mental illness, moving from one theft to another to feed his drug addiction. His older brother usually bails him out but there is a fine line between unconditional love and loathing. They make instinctive choices and you just have the feeling that they are heading towards trouble. When confronted with a calamity, you don't know if they will affirm the principles of a family sticking together.

The gritty acting is excellent, with a realistic dialog and subtle touches that really convey the atmosphere. It is a comedy, a love story, a social drama that exposes many emotions, moral dilemmas and provokes many questions.

Well worth watching.

All aspects of this movie are average at best, which sends the effort of seasoned authors into the realms of desperate mediocrity. The outcome is a bundle of rather incoherent sketches, that leave a mild smile on your face that soon vaporises along with a rather hazy memory of the movie as a whole. And in a week's time you might be asking yourself, what was it all about? Where your chum might remind you of an entertaining front-seat self-abuse scene. Indeed a quality farce for medieval peasants it is. If you hope for more, you could be disappointed. To make my review eligible, I am asked to pad the text with junk words. I am sure the authors meant well. But I also believe, the thought or the intended absence of the same lies at the heart of any art piece. Usually this thought serves as a building ground for the story. Trying to make a story, though entertaining, in hope that the absence of the ground will not be palpable or the audience will make up one of their own, is quite naive and a sure recipe for a disaster. Also one would expect this kind of approach in a prepubescent author, rather than a mature experienced one. Let us hope their next endeavor will be better prepared and exercised. For their own benefit, as uncanny support of mass-media can help only so much