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Reviews:
John Beifuss, Commerical Appeal, Memphis: “Celebrates the pleasures of life while acknowledging its tragedy and absurdity... Its attitude might be described as good-natured fatalism.”

Larry Ratliff, San Antonio Express-News: “Plays like a combination of Life Is Beautiful and Forrest Gump.”

Jonathan Richards, In the Dark: “…filled with wonderful moments, set pieces of absurdity, and a richness of humor. But underneath, Menzel and Hraba have a wry and sometimes painful story to tell of the history of their country in the 20th century.”

Official Web Site: http://www.sonyclassics.com/iservedthekingofengland/
IMDB :http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284363/

January 11th, 2009 – Galaxy Cinema
   
 
   
Young @ Heart

I Served the King of England

Year: 2007 / 2008
Country: Czeck Republic
Director: Jirí Menzel
Leads: Ivan Barnev, Oldrich Kaiser, Julia Jentsch
Genre: Comedy, Romance, War
Runtime: 120 minutes
Rating: Rated ‘R’ for sexual content and nudity
Language: Czeck, German

Working from a novel and script by renowned Czeck author Bohumil Hrabal, director Jirí Menzel again achieves a serio-comic triumph, as he did with his Oscar-winning 1966 adaptation of Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains. Oldrich Kaise plays Dité (which means ‘child’, in Czech), who is released from prison after serving ‘only’ 14 years and nine months of a 15-year sentence for being a millionaire, this ironic referencing part of the Eastern European theatre of the absurd. Dité reflects back to his pre-imprisonment life as a diminutive young frankfurter vendor (brilliantly portrayed by Ivan Barnev) who becomes upwardly mobile by getting jobs at a series of increasingly ritzy and well-established hotels. While the Czeck Republic faces political upheaval from 1939 onwards, Dité falls for a pretty young Nazi (Julia Jentsch) who has his Czech blood tested for its ‘Aryan’ qualities before she will bed down with him, in this unconventional reliving of Czeck history.