Jirí Menzel News

08/26/08 For the last decade American movie audiences have been bludgeoned so mercilessly with poorly and vacuously executed whimsy ("We're drowning in quirk," Michael Hirschorn famously wrote in the September 2007 issue of Atlantic Monthly , and I wholeheartedly agree) that an even partially successful excursion into magical realism like Czech New Waver Jiri Menzel 's " I Served the King of England " comes as nearly a relief, a rare contemporary example of how fanciful, wide-eyed filmmaking can be employed not simply for the sake of ironic condescension or set design window-dressing but for genuine emotional and political exploration.  |  indieWIRE