Vzorný kinematograf Haška Jaroslava

…und er ist in den gesunden Schlaf eines Menschen gefallen, der beide Beine gebrochen hat. Herrlich verrückte Erzählungen von Hašek. Am besten hat mir die gefallen, in der Jaroslav Marvan und sein zukünftiger Schwiegersohn Jiří Sovák zusammen mit dem Rest der Familie und den Nachbarn einen Hamster aus der Couch mit Frettchen, Meerschweinchen und Igeln verjagen. Die anderen Geschichten waren aber auch gut. Die Übergänge sowie den präzisen Kommentar von Jan Werich fand ich sehr nett. (23.10.2013)

"Don't worry, these are the smelliest guinea pigs in Austria-Hungary!" It's wrong from the start, because the contained Hašek stories in it don't have good cinematic potential, so they often repeat the same situations and each one takes an unnecessarily long time on top of that. You're safely set up for this by the utterly desperate first story, which is all about several people not being able to open the door to the toilet without making any kind of funny point. That the film itself struggles with the material is evident just by the fact that it uses virtually every narrative crutch, and by that I mean that there is, among other things, both overvoice and off-screen text describing the plot. If you remember anything from the film, it's the reminiscence of Caddyshack, Ludmila Píchová's manic performance, and a fairly credible attempt to formally conform to pre-war framing and narrative style. It's only overrated here because of Werich, which is a general problem in the Czech Republic, because prickly folk wisecracks are a local disease of civilization. (11.04.2022)