Divided We Fall

1st watched 12/5/2008 -(Dir-Jan Hrebejk): Well executed film about a couple in Czechoslovakia who house a Jewish friend during the Nazi occupation of the country. The storyline is really about how people can stick together despite their differences and this is where it shines.

This 2000 masterpiece is a creed apart from the usual holocaust narratives . Amazing to see that World War II is still a fertile ground for brilliant creations like this one .

In Krszysztof Kieslowski's brilliant film, 'No End', set in post-Solidarity Poland, a lawyer tells a dissident union leader: 'You decided to collaborate the day you decided not to throw yourself under a tank.' Which is of course true, but often forgotten in our easy condemnation of those who picked the wrong side in past wars.

Great movie but the soundtrack is horrible. Too much happy wedding music at all the wrong times.

Certain significant subjects have been covered in cinema so often, and with brilliant results that one wonders if still another is needed. The Holocaust and the Nazi menace have certainly inspired numerous fine films, with Schindler's List and The Pianist and The Tin Drum and scores of others covering the subject exhaustively.

"Divided We Fall" is an odd little Czech film. That's because like at least one other reviewer pointed out here on IMDb, the distinction between the good and the bad in the film is not 100% clear--people are not all good or all bad in many cases.

Mediocre WWII movie from the Czech Republic. Bolek Polivka and his wife Anna Siskova are just regular Czech citizens trying to survive the occupation when their former neighbor, a Jew, arrives at their doorstep having escaped the prison camps in Poland.

It's testimony to something or other that World War II still provides fodder for quality films almost 60 years after. This is one of the best and writer-director Jan Hrebejk sets the scene in an economical montage that begins in the late thirties and establishes 1) a small company town in Czeckoslovakia 2) the company in question, Wiener 3)Josef Cizkova, a foreman in the company 4) Horst Prohaska, an ordinary employee and butt of endless jokes by virtue of his fluent German and German sympathies.

I like to eat a snack when watching a film. Sometimes it's chocolate and other times it's fruit.