filthy_morphine

First of all - I absolutely love this movie. However I don't view it as a thriller as much as a deep psychological drama dealing with a wide range of issues faced in ANY human relationship. It's just dressed as a "mystery/thriller" which in its own way is a master pun as well.

I have heard many of my friends dismissing this movie as a little above average mystery thriller evaluating it along the lines of slow and predictable, yet usually entertaining. I think this is a huge misconception of this work of art, the thriller/mystery thing is just the outer layer, there are many more layers underneath in each and every scene and I'm very surprised people miss it. We are reminded about it at the very beginning by the first scene. The movie deals with the 3 simple questions posed at the opening scene. It actually is trying to unspool the brains of the main couple and get to the bottom of human relationships, not necessarily a marriage.

If you try and watch the movie through this prism, which is I think what the creators intended, you'll find a deep, thought provoking probe into the peculiar and intertwined web of little human actions of which human relations are made.

I don't want to go into any details here but I think everything (and I mean everything from camera angles through cats to the colors) has it's own purpose and meaning along the above mentioned lines.

Yes, human relationships, marriage, friendship, fleeting love affairs are in fact thrillers because we are always a mystery to each other. And that's what this movie is about.

p.s. and the workmanship is awesome - directing, music, acting ... everything fits, one of the rare cases where deep substance is met with perfect form.

I think this movie is a shameless Christian propaganda. It has Vatican written all over it, or maybe some US Christian organisation paid for it. Unfortunately - or actually rather - thank God the authors did a very poor job wrapping the message. They ripped of a western theme - lonely cowboy doing good deeds on his journey to the west. He meets evil in the form of bad sheriff of a poor town. There's a fight, final shootout and peaceful ending. All spiced up with post-apocalyptic stage set - which I suspect is supposed to add volume to the leitmotiv of the movie. And of course it had a side effect as well ... very simple and cheap CGI (which was eye striking the whole movie). There's no sense in finding holes or say little errors in the story - there's no real story. If you go to your closest church on Sunday you'll most probably get the same story. I think some of the acting wasn't very bad but as the directing was quite poor it didn't show. All in all - terrible faith propaganda bordering zealotry with poor craftsmanship.

Czech comedy after 1989 got into a trap of losing themes. Suddenly the movie makers and mostly screenwriters couldn't find a platform on which they could make fun of ourselves. One of the few exceptions was for a long time the movie Dedictvi and now Okresni prebor is in my opinion the second one. It found the ground on which it can stand a mirror and gently in a hilariously funny way show us who we are. Without mocking us! Prusinovsky (writer/director) obviously knows the environment of village football club and very skilfully and accurately depicted the scene. All the characters are very believable in their ordinariness and we can rely to them. The movie paints them with poetic colors and brings us laughs through ordinary situations which we know from our lives yet when we see them on the screen we can laugh heartily as knowing observers.

I don't know whether people from other countries can appreciate this movie but I guess that's a characteristic of all good Czech comedies (they're very specific). I think it's not necessary to know the series that preceded the movie but in my opinion the viewer will have more from the movie when he'll know the series. On the other hand it can also be vice versa.

I definitely recommend this movie to everyone and I personally rank it among such classics as Dedictvi a Vesnicko ma strediskova. It has the same poetry and approach to Czech nature.