[LITTLE OTIK screens Thursday April 19th at 8:20 pm and Saturday April 21st at 8:45 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Someone once described the movies of Jan Svenkmajer as unbalanced
Czech accounts. I think it was me, in fact. I've seen and written about sooo
many movies. They kind of blend together. Should've done something worthwhile
with my life, conceivably, but there do exist people who actually get decent
money just for piddly things like calling Jan Svenkmajer movies unbalanced
Czech accounts. For a little bit there I thought I could be one of them.
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Someone once described the movies of Jan Svenkmajer as unbalanced
Czech accounts. I think it was me, in fact. I've seen and written about sooo
many movies. They kind of blend together. Should've done something worthwhile
with my life, conceivably, but there do exist people who actually get decent
money just for piddly things like calling Jan Svenkmajer movies unbalanced
Czech accounts. For a little bit there I thought I could be one of them.
Svenkmajer, a surrealist artist-animator and master of
macabre visuals and juxtapositions, in 2000 conjured up one of the more
foreboding (and lesser-known) fairy tales from the canon of the Brothers Grimm
and modernizes it into this morbidly humorous feature. Yes, old news; ever
since LEPRECHAUN (really even before THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, when you think
about it, but those earlier ones had class), filmmakers have been mining
fairy-tale material and spinning darker, if not outright genre-horror takeoffs.
