Poslední aristokratka

I find this movie kind of unfinished. On one hand it is a nice leisure-time comedy with beautiful shots of Czech castles’ exteriors and interiors. On the other the humor is kind of superficial and surprisingly quite simple in a way of all those mainstream Czech comedy series. Still it has its originality in its premise based on the book written by Mr. Boček, and therefore it makes its humor more bearable. What surprises me is that the father portrayed by Hynek Čermák had so little space to show off his stress caused by the lack of money. For example in his case it could have been a lot funnier as it is in the book. The only characters whose potential was used to their fullest were Eliška Balzerová portraying the castle cook and Martin Pechlát portraying the castle keeper. If all the characters were as great as these two it would make this comedy really brilliant. As it is now it is just nice and it wouldn’t become legendary as the book did. (02.08.2020)

The current aristocratic book series by Evžen Boček has gradually grown into a pentalogy, with each individual volume slowly but surely becoming a bestseller. It would therefore be rather surprising if no film transcript was made of it. So how good is the final film, you ask? It's not as disastrous of a Vejdělek film as others. However, the cast is not overly suited to current tastes. And it would not, of course, tolerate authentic Americans playing Americans. In any case, something pleasantly Christmassy was created, and in these early days, even a mediocre film is actually happy news. Think of such experiments as Little Baby Jesus. (16.01.2021)

I'm afraid that as long as Jiří Vejdělek writes his own scripts, he probably won't make a good comedy. The Last Aristocrat is just another spasmodic attempt to be funny, nothing more. The excellent book has lost its greatest trump card on the way to the screen, i.e. the narrator Maria, and much that beautiful verbal humor; the plot often makes no sense at all, and the sometimes good actors here are simply terrible because that's what they were obviously asked to do, and all of them are severely upstaged by the young Yvona Stolařová, and she's not even trying. If I ever laughed, it was always thanks to Pavel Liška – not his useless character, but really him, the actor Pavel Liška, who clearly understands humor better than Jiří Vejdělek. (14.11.2019)

The Last Aristocrat es una estupidez de primer orden, plagada de cursilería, dominada por escenas en las que uno de los personajes dice algo y luego siempre hay una larga pausa para que el público se ría a carcajadas. Pero quizá uno de cada cincuenta chistes sea al menos medianamente divertido. Y con una duración de casi dos horas, hay que ser muy valiente para terminar algo que da tanta grima. (02.01.2021)

​Soy muy consciente de que hacer adaptaciones cinematográficas de obras literarias es siempre extremadamente difícil. Nunca es posible complacer a todos los lectores, por no hablar de los fans acérrimos de la obra original. Hasta ahora he leído cuatro novelas sobre la aristócrata y en tres casos quedé muy satisfecho. Creo que incluso me reí a carcajadas. En la película el humor ha desaparecido, además, está impregnado de escenas en las que nadie habla y no pasa nada, lo que es prácticamente imposible en el libro, que está muy orientado a la acción. El primero lo leí hace mucho tiempo, pero en lugar de caballos, por el castillo deberían correr perros indómitos, el abogado debería ser un poco mayor, con una insoportable hija adolescente a cuestas, y habría más matices tan esenciales que faltan en la película. Y a mí, lamentablemente, el reparto elegido realmente no me cayó bien, con dos excepciones: Tatiana Vilhelmová e Yvona Stolařová. Vilhelmová ofrece al menos un mínimo de comedia y Stolařová es creíble. Desde mi punto de vista como lector, todos los demás actores están elegidos de forma muy inapropiada o estúpida. No sé si todavía querré ver las secuelas si están concebidas de la misma manera que la pobre primera. (28.11.2023)

I have read Evžen Boček's excellent novel and was greatly amused by it, so I approached the film adaptation with a great deal of apprehension. But it was an unexpected surprise and a nice one at that. This is not to say that it was a major success, but I was expecting a much worse result. Jiří Vejdělek’s decision to remove the language barrier with Vivian wasn’t a particularly good one, depriving the film of a lot of potentially funny moments. Mr. Boček's humor was generally suppressed. On the plus side, the characters were well cast, excluding Zdeněk Piškula as Max (Zdeněk Piškula always gives me the impression that he’s about to start handing out the WatchTower magazine), especially Martin Pechlát was absolutely perfect as castellan Josef. All in all, I can't say it was a masterpiece, but I had fun and I’m not going to rate it low - slightly above average. It put me in a good mood. (12.05.2020)

I haven't read the book, but I believe that many of the humorous situations in the book work much better than in Jiří Vejdělek's film. However, given how bad current Czech films are, I was expecting a much bigger mess. The story flows quite decently to its sunny conclusion and is adorned with good performances by most of the cast, so I wasn't bored at all. One character even grew on me. The wonderful Eliška Balzerová simply matures like wine, or rather like a nut liqueur, which she vigorously offers to everyone in the role of a lively housewife. (60%) (31.01.2021)