The best Jiří Schmitzer’s comedy movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Jiří Schmitzer’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Jiří Schmitzer.
My Sweet Little Village
7.8/10
The movie's main storyline follows the life of Otík, a mentally retarded young man, in a tight-knit village community. The sweet-tempered Otík works as an assistant truck driver with Mr. Pávek, his older colleague and practical-minded neighbor. Pávek's family takes care of Otík, whose parents are dead. However, the two coworkers become at odds over Otík's inability to perform even the simplest tasks. Pávek demands that Otík be transferred to assist another driver, who happens to be a choleric and suspicious man named Turek (Turk in Czech). Rather than work with Turek, Otík decides to accept an offer of employment in Prague, but finds he does not fit in to the city life. After discovering that the transfer of Otík to Prague was a trick by a crooked politician to get a deal on Otík's large inherited house, Pávek agrees to give Otík a second chance and retrieves him from the city to resume their work together.
The Snowdrop Festival
7.5/10
This movie is based on texts of Bohumil Hrabal, world-known Czech prosaic. It's a story (in a form of a mosaic of short episodes and pictures) about the sadness and happiness of inhabitants of Kersko (Kersko is a small woody area full of cottages and roods). These people are both simple and sensitive, they have their own pleasures (e.g. Leli is a collector of cheap, but inutile things) and the greatest delight of all of them is a hunting. Crude poetics of amateur hunting is screened by dreamy pictures of this area. Menzel mixes sentimental lyricism and rough (but not vulgar!) humor and the outcome is the never-ending landscape of continuous life in the proximate nearness of nature. The performances of actors are brilliant. Both Rudolf Hrusinsky as a Franz and Jaromír Hanzlik as a Leli have nonrecurring charm bottomed on a pain and inebriation. Only the music is not perfect: Jiri Sust usually assembled his film music from his older works and in this movie there is many quotations.
Marecek, Pass Me the Pen!
8.1/10
This comedy is about one average family. The father works as master in the factory and his son is studying on high school. One day father must start to visit the evening school. It's the same school as his son visiting. The lives both students are connecting together. The son must teach the math and physics his own father. The father getting to know, that the life of the students is not simple as he supposed.
Wild Flowers
7.1/10
Seven seemingly unconnected fairy tales - glued together only by folklore, mood, color and light - make up this Czech collection of visual poetry. The original piece of literature, written by Karel Jaromír Erben in 1853, contained twelve tales.
Cutting It Short
7.6/10
Francin, manager of a small-town brewery, has a charming wife whose abundant blonde locks are an adornment to the town. Maryska looks ethereal but loves meat and beer, while Francin is an ascetic. The strict members of the brewery board of directors come to audit the accounts, but are diverted from concentrating on Francin's detailed reports by Maryska, who has organized a pig-killing feast and is ably assisting the butcher. When she invites the old curmudgeons on the board to enjoy the fresh pork, they are too happy to agree. Francin doesn't know whether he is going to get a permanent contract. To make things worse his brother Pepin - eccentric, noisy and garrulous - turns up on an indefinite visit.
Cerni baroni
7.6/10
Life of Czechoslovak soldiers in a military unit for the so called "politically unreliable" - the Technical auxiliary battalions, aka "the black barons". Although it might seem like a political satire and it's mostly funny, it shows the reality and the absurdity of military service under the communist regime. Based on a novel by Miloslav Svandrlik.
The Quartette
4.9/10
In a small Czech town, mother dependent Robert, his attractive girlfriend Simona, histrionic Tomas and extremely reserved History freak Funes, all dissatisfied with their lives, are members of the same string Quartet. As they rehearse for their next concert, they will get into a circle of eccentric situations and misunderstandings.
Chasing Fifty
5.2/10
What happens in the mountains, stay in the mountains. Giant Mountains are truly the spice of local highlanders who live here, whether any season. Skier with one leg, the legendary womanizer adorned with infertility, the bartender with a penchant for divination... And Pavka, the oldest living member of a traditional cross-country Bulán family.
The Wonderful Years That Sucked
7.1/10
Capturing the dark humor of Czech author Michal Viewegh's chronicle of life after the Velvet Revolution, this black comedy chronicles three decades in the life of a small Czech family. While the original novel centered on the protagonist Kvido from his conception through his adulthood, first time director Petr Nikolaev and screenwriter Jan Novak changed the focus to his parents Milena, an extremely self-effacing lawyer who acts on stage in her spare time, and Ales, a rather aimless government worker who tends to drift wherever the wind takes him. The lives of Ales and Milena change dramatically following the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968.
Coal Tower
6.1/10
Jakub, a young, small time drug dealer, wakes up to find the police storming the apartment building while his parents are both away on holiday. After flushing all of his "secret stashes" in the toilet, he finds out they are actually there to investigate the death of the girl upstairs, a close childhood friend of his and the family. He slowly retraces the past week that she has been lying dead in her flat and remembers that he asked her to "receive a package" unbeknownst to her from his drug dealer, Pexeso.
Beauty in Trouble
6.8/10
Marcela can't bear Jarda any longer, so she threatens divorce and takes the kids to her mom's, whose husband is a creep. While Marcela is there, Jarda is jailed, because he is part of a gang steeling cars and they get caught in the act. Benes, the urbane man whose car got stolen by Jarda and his gang, befriends Marcela. Soon she feels drawn to Benes and all of a sudden she must make up her mind: Jarda is still sexually attractive to her, but Benes offers security, and her own body and mind may not pull at the same strand.
I'm All Good
6.4/10
This Hrebejk’s comedy is set in Prague, four years after the democratic “Velvet revolution” of 1989. This was an era of sudden freedom, transition and confusion. Most people got carried away, quickly abandoning the old values and uncritically accepting the new. Some people just took a break…
To the Woods
6.2/10
Honza Marak has long since abandoned a career in IT and has bought a cottage on the outskirts of a small village, where he’s settled in with his wife Marketa, daughter Anyna and son Sayen. He works in the woods as a forest labourer repairing roads and enclosures, cutting wood to sell and assisting the foresters. Marketa earns a living as a masseuse and alternative healer, making use of various mind-altering plants and mushrooms, which leads to conflict with the old inhabitants and eventually with drug enforcement. Daughter Anyna attends a distant school where her grades deteriorate as she wanders the woods learning from nature rather than from her textbooks.
Three Men Travelling
4.7/10
Three Men Travelling is billed as a loosely related sequel to Tri chlapi v chalupe (1963), sending our country protagonists set out from their family nests in the village of Ouplavice into the big wide world. Grandpa Potucek, (Lubomír Lipský) and his son Václav (Jan Skopecek) take part in the cooperative's excursion to spa town Karlovy Vary, a Pilsen brewery and some agricultural enterprises in western Bohemia. During the course of a series of misunderstandings and merrymaking, grandfather Potucek decides he will not let problems with sick calves unsettle him, and that he will persevere in his role as the leader of the cooperative.
