Vybíjená
Directed by:
Petr NikolaevScreenplay:
Miroslav OščatkaCinematography:
David PloyharComposer:
Jiří ChlumeckýCast:
Ondřej Sokol, Michal Suchánek, Richard Genzer, Simona Krainová, Simona Babčáková, Václav Matějovský, Jakub Burýšek, Michal Šášinka, Linda Bartošová (more)Plots(1)
The film, an adaptation of a bestselling novel by author Michal Viewegh, is a comedy about friendship, fateful loves, beauty and ugliness, alcohol, and the search for human happiness. In several time lines, the film tells the story of school-friends going through various stages of life together. We find ourselves at a class reunion. This ostensibly banal situation opens the way to both sentimental memories and, above all, a balancing up of lives led to date, with their unfulfilled desires and realized dreams. The plot revolves around three friends – Jeff, Skippy and Tom – whose ups and downs and relationship breakups keep bringing them back to a shared bachelor apartment. Their counterparts in the story are two women – the class beauty Eva, who becomes the object of desire of all three guys in turn, and the ugly Hujerova, whose ironic attitude to herself and life in general gives her the ability to survive in a world that prizes beauty and to find her own path to happiness. (official distributor synopsis)
(more)Reviews (3)
You know how it goes when you attend a gala premiere in the middle of the week… your thoughts stay at work, so when watching a movie like Dodgeball, which is definitely not the most engaging film ever made (and in the first thirty minutes or so, you keep telling yourself “God, what did I get myself into again?”), you pay attention to barely every second scene. Naturally, I mean the scenes with the blond bombshells, both the young and more mature one. And as time goes by and you try and fail to understand who’s who with all the adult/teenage characters (the selection of the male cast is really strange), the music and the individual warmly human scenes make you grow strangely fond of the movie, in a guiltypleasure kind of way. Your intellect tries to stop you, but eventually you’ll succumb. And it ends up being a pleasant, undemanding movie for an evening in front of the TV. It feels like a little kitten you want to pet. Dumb but very cute.
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I’d had no idea I was going to enjoy Dodgeball this much. Maybe also because some users here gave the movie such bad reviews. And you know what? I actually don’t get it. What’s wrong with this movie? I’m not a big fan of Viewegh. I don’t like his books and I don’t actively seek out movies based on his books, but Dodgeball might be one of the best movies based on his books that I’ve seen so far. Suchánek, Genzer and Sokol do make for a pretty good crew and Babčáková can easily keep up with them. I do admit that the time jumps were sometimes difficult to follow, but it gradually settled down and things started making some sense. The only thing that could be criticized about this movie is that rather than a comedy it’s a melancholic drama the likes of which we’ve seen quite often recently and it usually involves somebody from the improv group Partička in the star role. Other than that, it was fun to watch. It’s clear that Petr Nikolaev is rightfully one of the Czech foremost film directors.
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Dodgeball is a chaotic jumble of random fragments from different time periods, it is humorous only sporadically and much more often it falls into sentiment and melancholy. Its sound and atmosphere are quite reminiscent of Snowdrops and Aces after 25 Years, but as if the first Snowdrops and Aces never existed. It doesn’t really hold together and breaks up into isolated scenes, some of which raise the level of the film thanks to capable actors, while others seem like parodies because of how terrible they are.
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