I Served the King of England (2008)

Very disappointing...

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Great movie, with plenty of political, brilliant jokes and black humor, interesting stories, like a parody of the war and to life itself. Someone get lucky in life and that is so.

a travel with many dimensions. short history of Central Europe in XX century, charming trip across the life of a little man and his dreams, ironic, sarcastic, testimony and word of Ecclesiast, it is charming and seductive. and that is not a surprise. a great director and a nice novel are basis of expected success. but this success is, in fact, result of spices. melancholia, regrets, innocence as instrument to resist against gray world, humor as perfect option to describe a kind of Forrest Gump and his steps. for viewer from East Europe , it is a support for not forgive the past traces. for the others, it can be a comedy or a salt-sweet film. it is , like each film, only a window. and that is enough.

The time period of this film is from 1938 to about 20 or so years later.In fact 2 actors play the lead''Jan.Ivan Barnev is Jan as a young man,Uhlrich Kaiser as the older Jan Both are excellent. In fact all the acting is excellent.Juri Menzol directed & wrote the screenplay taken from a novel by Bohumil HrabaiIt is extremely well made & directed.Then why have I given this only a 7 rating?I could not tell what type of film this was, The time period is from when Hitler invaded Czechlosvakia in 1938 & ends about 19 years later. There were very dramatic earth shaking times,.The entire film is made in a light vein almost comedic.I knew what was happening, I did not find in amusing/I may have missed something,BUT what was it.I did like what I saw, I just do not know what I saw,.Someone please tell me if this was a satire or a comic look at a tragic time.Ratings ***(out of 4) 83 points (out of 100) IMDb 7 (out of 20)

Like the butler played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1994 film "The Remains of the Day", the waiter at the centre of "I Served the King of England" (Jiri Menzel, Czech Republic, 2006) is not interested in politics. Major historical events surround him, yet these completely escape his attention. His ambition is simply to become a millionaire, like the fat cats he serves at table. In 1930s Prague, Hitler, in Berlin, is making a radio announcement about his aim to "liberate" the Sudetenland. Bored, Jan Dite, the waiter, simply turns the dial to a dance music station.He manages to float through the Nazi invasion, first of the Sudetenland, then of Czechoslovakia. By a combination of hook and crook, he achieves his ambition of owning his own hotel through the sale of valuable stamps, stolen from a vanished Jewish family. This does not give him a moment's pause but later, when he sees a trainload of Jews in cattle-cars moving off to Auschwitz, he has a rush of compassion and chases after the train in an attempt to hand the deportees a sandwich. After the war, as a self-confessed millionaire, he is sent to prison when his hotel is nationalised. He emerges fifteen years later, older, but not much wiser. He is Schweik, but without the latter's sly intelligence.This sketchy summary cannot do justice to a film which has been described as a near-flawless masterpiece, in which "Prague has never looked better". It is permeated with the ironic wit which marked Menzel's earlier films, such as the Academy Award winning Closely Watched Trains (1966). Dite befriends the German girl Liza, described by one reviewer as "the sweetest little Nazi in the history of the cinema". They are in bed, making love in the missionary position. Liza keeps pushing his head aside so that she can gaze at the big picture of Adolf Hitler on the opposite wall. Such was love in the Third Reich. The scene in which Dite is undergoing a racial fitness test which involves giving a sperm sample is intercut with young Czech men being unloaded from a lorry at an execution ground. Of this, Dite is blissfully unaware.The Remains of the Day was based on a serious and perceptive novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The genesis of I Served the King of England, by contrast, was a comic novel by Bohumil Hrabal, a book I cannot wait to get my hands on. Any offers?