The Last Old Mod***MDP74 v. 3.0

The Road (movie) builds expectations. To be fair, it is a good, driving movie, painting a unresting picture of the future, raising interesting and valuable questions (despite they are not new and breakthrough), building and keeping the tension with minimum of instruments with great cast and visuality. Intimate yet epic, strong, beautiful and sad. Like life itself. You hardly can be disappointed.

But is it a future classic, the icon of the genre? To be fair, it is not a truly breathtaking cinema – leaving out the basement meat storage scene (you are not breathing because you are dead paralyzed – right) and the dog in the final scene (you are laughing so much you can’t breathe – wrong).

Death, fear, morality, parenthood are pictured with a light sentiment understanding the matter of things and some of these normally-over-the-edge scenes are the best I’ve seen – except the dog. Tasteful (leaving out the two mentioned scenes and the product placement scenes), with a fine sense of storytelling and extremely well fine-tuned level of CGI and other visually catching elements. But there are serious bugs. And they haven’t been fixed.

First of all, the music by Cave and Ellis is nothing special. You may dispute: Easy to say! And I would tend to agree and show some respect: It is not the easy film to do a score for. The fact is that the music these two master did just proves it.

It is sponsored by Coca Cola and unfortunately this is one of the main things kept in my head a few hours after seeing it. Honestly, some scenes merge immediately in my head with War of The Worlds (ouch!) and many other no-name post-apocalyptic movies of last few years.

Last but not least, a version of this film ending 2 minutes prior the DOG SCENE would make it way more iconic and ballanced. At least for me.

To summarize it: Despite The Road is an outstanding film (not so hard to stand out), there is a gap between expected emotional impact (according the story) and the actual emotional impact you get. And I don’t know why. Maybe because of the few disturbing moments building an invisible but impenetrable wall between you and the father with the son. Maybe it was just me, maybe it is that part of the story which can be hardly captured on a silver screen – that difference between a book and a film. I don’t know, I didn’t read the book. Just a cheap presumption. Finally, sitting with a handful of popcorn, you are ready to suffer a bit more that you actually do. You want to be dragged into their inner world but in some moments you find difficult to keep the track. And the dog? Try to forget the dog. Or, try to love it. Up to your taste.

“Up in the air” is shit. Pure shit, there is nothing to excuse such a silly film like this. “Thank you for smoking” was a very good profession-insightful american movie with a strong entertainment factor, good script and right amount of cheap jokes, “Juno” is simply brilliant and fresh, but the third film of young Jason Reitman tries to build on success of the first one and fails completely. The all-american bullshit, economic crisis, real love, shallow feelings, bad people, good people, sad people, businessmen, success, family, big cities, small towns, classic values, life changes and new hope. There is a lot of talking about Mr. Clooney magical smile in the film. One thing’s for sure. It ain’t save a lame government-ordered tribute to all people looking for a new hope, new opportunities, being sacked out of their jobs in todays America. It doesn’t work, at least not for me.

For people who already saw the film: “Imagine carrying a back-pack and you have all your favorite movies in it. It’s so heavy you can’t walk. What will you throw away the first?”

Doing a cooking show may seem to be the lowest career point of a film director (even when talking about advertising film directors duo). And I say: Don’t let blame yourself, it can be fun. Actually, it can be more fun one can handle. We were asked by Outbreak to create an internet-broadcasted cooking show with a twist for one rather old-fashioned food product. We said yes and started thinking how to make a program like that without just creating another silly cooking show we can see in TVs around the world every day. We were encouraged quite well by the original concept to push the limits of idiocy to unknown heights and we decided to elevate the hopeless effort of two main characters as high (means low) as necessary to stand out from the crowd. Tomina, czech comedy unknown superstar, was an easy choice, we know each other for years and our experience is great. Ivana came to the casting recommended by Petra Svarinská from Vivid casting and turned out as the best out of many. They created together a great looking disaster-couple with ability to fuck up anything including a world-wide revolution. Their redneck, provincial, friday-disco-to-bed style of humor was brill. I laughed so much during the two-days shoot that it seriously hurt me and I felt so tired like actually working. We created a cooking show which literally kills any cooking skills a make them look lame in comparison to the level of cheap entertainment we offer in our “Vaříme s Pejskem a kočičkou” series.

Before we will start the project at stream.cz, I am not allowed to post the videos, so here are some pictures from behind the scenes.

Starring Tomáš “Tomina” Jeřábek and Ivana Huspeková, make-up Tereza Prachařová, sound by Roman Sečkář, D.O.P. and lights Jirka Málek, second and third camera Martin Přikryl & Michal Nohejl, food styling Marek Všetečka, set & props Kristina Šedivá, wardrobe by Lela Geislerová and Josefina Bakošová, edited by Tomáš Klímek, production manager Kristina Šedivá, produced by Jirka Ptáček, Bistro Films. Directed by Mods. Based on a concept and screenplays by Lukáš Franz and Petr Hanousek (Outbreak).