Lower education unveiled in Jan Hřebejk/Petr Jarkovský's dark and delicious THE TEACHER

Another first-rate gem from the film-making team of director Jan Hřebejk and writer Petr Jarkovský, who have earlier given us Divided We Fall, Up and Down and Kawasaki's Rose, their newest venture -- THE TEACHER -- is also one of their best. Of course, we say this every time the pair makes a new movie. But, hey: It's true. I can't think of another film-making team that produces such consistently funny black comedies that are simultaneously ridden with examples of sad, weak and oh-so-real humanity. The combo is bracing, to say the least.

This Czech duo, pictured above with Mr. Jarkovský on the left, knows how to create situations so fraught with oddities and ironies that yet seem absolutely believable, and its combination of smart dialog, nimble direction and terrific performances results in movies that are both memorable and hugely entertaining.

So it is again with The Teacher, which tells the tale of a rather special teacher back in 1983, when Czechoslovakia was under the thumb of Communist Russia. One of the consistent surprises of this film-making team is how accessible, understandable and darkly funny it makes life under the Communist behemoth. I suppose that abusive power is pretty much the same all over the world; the degree to which is it used is what varies. Here in the USA we may just be seeing currently the fuller exposure of that particular iceberg.

Our teacher, played with a rich array of acting arsenal attributes by Zuzana Mauréry (above and below) has a fascinating and unfortunately all-too-easily-achieved way of working the system. TrustMovies will not go into details, for these are both original and too much fun to spoil your surprise.

Said to be based on a real situation that the writer and director make seem all the more so, The Teacher tackles the subject of fighting against injustice vs groveling to power, and the parents of the children of whom this teacher is in charge come down, as expected, on both sides of the issue and to varying degrees. What they say and how they say it in order to explain their position makes for much of the movie's exhilarating (if queasy-making) fun.

Bravery under Communism was hard to come by, and even when it reared its head, this might have been for as many wrong reasons as right. The filmmakers understand this, and they also know how to demonstrate it without finger-wagging or hammering it home. The situation, if it divides the parents (above), also brings together a set of students (below) who, under other circumstances, might have almost nothing in common. Here they bond -- in yet more irony!

Defection, education, submission and protest, the movie covers them all -- and more. By the time of its denouement, which takes Czechoslovakia to its post-Communist era, The Teacher unveils its final small-but-telling irony which is, like the film itself, a dark gem.

From Film Movement and running a just-right 103 minutes, the movie has its New York City premiere at Film Forum in New York City this coming Wednesday, August 30. Elsewhere? Well, it opens in Santa Fe at The Screen on Friday, September 8. Click here then scroll down to see futher upcoming playdates across the country.

Land of the Wolf: BAM screens 35mm restoration of Czech classic, F. Vlacil's MARKETA LAZAROVA

The following post is by our occasional 

guest critic and writer, Lee Liberman.

The medieval world created by Czech filmmaker Frantisek Vlacil for his operatic film of wonder, MARKETA LAZAROVA, does not square with your usual medieval genre piece. It appears to be a story about warring clans, but the plot is subordinate to what may be its real reason for being -- to give its audience a taste of the state of numbed existence that results from anarchy and repression. Voted by Czech critics and film-makers their nation's greatest film some 30 years after its release in 1967, it will be screened at BAM Cinématek in Brooklyn from Feb 28-March 6 and is also available now on DVD and Blu-ray.

George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones novels and HBO series are by contrast gorgeous winged-dragon versions of medieval clan warfare -- plot and character driven. Vlacil's medieval canvas is a black and white nightmare in which plots and people are fogged over but you know bad things are happening from which you'd like to wake up.

The Middle or Dark Ages gave us popular tales of romance and struggle -- of which the Mists of Avalon, Arthurian legends, Tristan and Isolde, Braveheart, Robin Hood are just a few. It is that period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance in which anarchy and brute struggle for survival replaced national identity and citizenship. Roman infrastructure was crumbling away, its systems of governing and taxation long gone, leaving rival clans on their own to battle each other and/or local kings over turf, honor, resources. 

Director Vlacil, shown at left, places his clan grudge match in the 1200's in a stone-age version of the Dark Ages (stylistically more like the period than most). To get his cast in primal struggle mode, he seques-tered them in the Bohemian forests living off the land in rags and skins for several years. He succeeded -- the affect they deliver on celluloid calls to mind the old zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead. During the 1960's while Vlacil was making his film, the Czechs were under Soviet control. Marketa's story, ostensibly apolitical, may be a device created by a storyteller unable to criticize real-time Soviet domination for its numbing effects.

In the end the film is a political statement, if not an obvious one -- set many hundreds years earlier so as to be hard to label as contemporary dissent. It depicts a Middle Ages world lurching between extremes of catatonia and violence caused by poverty, geographic isolation, and shifting national identity in its own game of thrones. (The film's source novel was written in 1931 by Czech novelist, Vladislav Vancura -- executed by the Nazi's in 1942 for resistance to occupation. A translation of the novel is in progress by Alex Zucker.)

Shakespeare gave us a more humanistic view of clan grudge match in Romeo and Juliet in which Prince Escalus shows up to scold the battling Montagues and Capulets, now grieving the deaths of their children. "All are punished," he says. The Bard has brought all to tragedy and tears; the Prince represents civil order. 

The Saxon nobility in Vlacil's film also represent governing order, but as with all factions in Marketa Lazarova, no one character or group wins our sympathy, empathy, or judgment over another; not one tear falls for victims, and no positioning favors justice or order. Vlacil has us watch murder, crucifixion, incest, rape, mutilation, marriage of a live woman to a corpse, the devouring of human remains by wolves and more. But we are numbed by disjointed dialogue and jagged changes of scene; it's easier not to look closely, not have any feelings at all. The titular character, Marketa (above), a teenage virgin promised to the cloister (below), does not appear until midway in the film, always with the flat, unfocused eyes of a starved dog. She is raped and abducted by an enemy who has just crucified her father (two photos up) but we are told she falls in love with her rapist and rejects the nuns -- all without a shred of emotion, save the muffled undercurrent of rage that propels the action.

The narrator's opening disclaimer puts us off the importance of plot: "This tale was cobbled together almost at random and hardly merits praise." And from the first frame, the viewer's senses are drowned visually in a wide-screen black-white panorama of human squalor in stark winter and swampy spring accompanied by a gorgeous score of keening chorales, tolling bells, and constant subliminal muttering -- easy to watch but difficult to follow (this descriptive imagery paraphrased from J Hoberman of the NYReview, July 2013). In fact we literally feel catapulted and then submerged into the forest world, aided by then-novel camera work, jerky perspective shifts, and the use of lenses that focus near and far in rapid succession, just as the human eye refocuses constantly. The viewer is as fogged over about violent plottings as we are ignorant of the deals going down on the street corners of our own daily lives; one simply screens out excess stimuli. The immersion in Vlasic's sensually enveloping physical environment replaces what otherwise might be a proper narrative spun out to historical, moral, or emotional purpose. You are simply in the scene and had better keep head down or risk an arrow lodged in the eye.

If you want program notes, there are many plot outlines on line, though being armed with detail does not create involvement; it helps reinforce how much the director has been distracting you from caring about who is doing what to whom. Three groups drive the action -- the pagan clan of professional bandits, the Kosliks, the for-ostentatious-display-only Christian family of Lazar merchants, and the more civilized German knights dispatched to bring order. This fabric is roughed up by a menacing pack of wolves (seen at top) poised to pounce, and mellowed by heavenly white-lit nuns (two photos above), wandering monk Bernard (below, who carries around the severed head of his beloved sheep), and Katerina, a pagan witch. Bernard and Katerina babble nonsense, predisposing the viewer to ignore them both equally, which is to say, to slide right on by any tension that may be here between the church and the old pagan ways.

Thus 'show' by the director and 'tell' by the narrator cause the details of plot and the impulse to take sides to be sidelined without judgment or pity. Rather the viewer submits to the tapestry of chimes, ringing bells, and heavenly voices; ducks to avoid projectiles; and cowers watching humans skirmish for remains along with the wolf pack. (One is reminded of nature programs about survival of the fittest among the beasts of the Serengeti.) While the effect is stark and beautiful, it is not a narrative that inspires the viewer to know or care about Marketa, her relatives or enemies, or be aroused by their deeds. As an artist craving freedom, the filmmaker appears to have wanted his audience to experience what dissociation and numbness feel like. After near 3 hours in Vlacil's land of disorder, one exits the theater quite relieved to return to our own land with all its faults.

As a footnote, the young Czech actress who played Marketa, Magda Vasaryova, is now a famous liberal dlplomat and politician in her mid-sixties. (That's she, below, at a screening of the film during the 2011 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.) Film director Vlacil was a painter and graphic designer as well as prolific filmmaker. He died in 1999.

BAM Cinématek's week-long run of Marketa Lazarova extends from this Friday, February 28 through Thursday, March 6. For screening times, directions to BAM, etc. -- simply click here.

NICKY'S FAMILY: Matej Mináč & Patrik Pašš bring us feel-good Holocaust -- that works

You may try to resist, but I would suggest giving up fairly quickly and simply going along with this multi-award-winning 2011 Czech documentary just now reaching our shores. NICKY'S FAMILY tells the very fine story of a young British man named Nicholas Winton, back in 1938, when Europe was gearing up for World War II and the Jews of Germany, Austria and nearby countries were fearing for their lives -- and especially for those of their children. Instead of going on his planned skiing trip, Nicholas was corralled by a friend into coming to Czechoslovakia, where he learned first-hand what was happening and what Germany had planned for one of its next-door neighbors. So Winton immediately began working toward getting as many children of Czech Jews out of the country as quickly as possible.

The reason it is so easy to fall into the swing of this film is that the documentary -- directed, co-written and co-produced by Matej Mináč (at right), and edited, co-written and co-produced by Patrik Pašš (below) -- is quite beautifully organized. It incorporates, and near seamlessly, archival footage and photos with present-day (or thereabouts) material, while its re-enactments thankfully are only visual, with none of the thudding dialog that so often weighs down these re-creations, making them seem more important (but less well-done) than the actual documentary footage.

Why did Winton undertake such a mam-moth effort? This is a good question, and it's one that the film only partially answers. Perhaps, 70 years later, the man himself -- now 104 years old and still going relatively strong! -- barely knows. At the time however he saw what needed to be done and simply set about doing it. As he tells us, in one of his more famous quotes: "Anything that is not actually impossible can be done, if one really sets one's mind to do it and is determined that it shall be done."

In any case, the filmmakers detail how the job was planned and then accomplished (hundreds of children were saved, though most of their parents died in the concentration camps); what happened to the children (Britain was the only country at the time that would accept them); what all this cost in terms of time, effort and money; and how, decades later, the survivors actually, and for the first time, learned who Nicholas Winton was and what they owed to his efforts. (That's Nicholas, below, seated at right in the foreground, with some of his "survivors.")

The film does not dwell on the horrors of the Holocaust but instead concentrates on the saving of these kids. You can fault it, I suppose, for that, though by this point in time, we've certainly gotten plenty of the other kind of documentaries and narratives. (We do hear one awful anecdote about the gas chambers new to me: "When you take your children into the gas chamber, sing with them. If you sing, you will inhale the gas faster and will die more quickly.") At times these grown and now elderly survivors do talk about their parents and must stop to wipe away their tears and wait for their composure to return. But mostly they, along with their own children and grandchildren, want to show their appreciation for Winton's good work.

Although this might seem like an old and one-off kind of situation (a "Schindler" in Britain, as Nicholas has been described), there appears to be a large and strong movement of young people dedicated to emulating the work of this man, keeping alive his and their own desire to help the helpless. Seeing this movement come into focus, which ends the movie on a very "up" note, is bracing and stirring indeed. (That said, all this feel-good-cum-lighted-up-cell-phones does go on a little too long: Less would have meant more.)

There appears to be an effort afoot to see that Mr. Winton is a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize. Why not? If that idiot committee could bestow its 2009 prize on Barack Obama for doing absolutely nothing at that point in time (you can bet they'd never give it to him at this point!), why not on a man who accomplished what we see in this excellent documentary? (Shown below is the young Mr. Winton with one of the Czech children.)

Nicky's Family, from Menemsha Films and running 96 minutes, opens in New York City this Friday, July 19, at five venues in the New York area (The Quad, the JCC, Kew Gardens, Malverne and Soundview) and four in Los Angeles (Laemmle's Royal, Town Center 5, Playhouse 7 and Claremont 5). See all the current, past and upcoming playdates by clicking here and then scrolling down.

Martin Šulík's GYPSY (minus Mama Rose) has theatrical premiere at NYC's Film Forum

One of Shakespeare's masterpieces is turned into something less in the alternately compelling and unnecessarily otherworldly tale of a gypsy teenager in the present-day Czech Republic whose dad has died under mysterious circumstances, whose mom has now married dad's brother, and who is suddenly getting repeat visits from the dead dad. That's right: a play, one word, sounds like Sam wet. A not-quite-organic mix of neo-realism and the supernatural (trying to disguise itself as something a little psychological), GYPSY (Cigán), the new film directed and co-written (with Marek Leščák) by Martin Šulík -- is best when it concentrates on the life and times of our hero Adam and the community in which he lives. When the movie steals from the great Willie, it tends to come off as second-hand and melodramatic (not that Shakespeare wasn't both those adjectives, but, gosh, he had some language to back him up).

Backing up Mr. Šulík (shown at right) are a good story; interesting characters, well-drawn and acted by the ensemble; and -- primarily -- a fascinating look at what a gypsy community is like today, as the world grows ever smaller so that the moving from place to place that used to distinguish gypsy life (if one can believe all that we've seen and read about gypsies over the decades) is no longer practical or maybe even possible. I would have thought that all this would be enough for one movie but perhaps Šulík's idea from the beginning was to do Hamlet in modern-day and -dress, setting it in the gypsy community.

Beginning with a shot of a pair of riveting eyes that totally fill the screen, the filmmaker knows how to reel us in with a stylistic touch that immediately turns toward character definition. Shot in grungy blues, greys and browns so that a bright color, when it occasionally appears, pleasures us enormously, his movie never buries us in the dirt and muck as much as it forces us to understand the kind of moral universe in which its people abide -- a world that is equally mucky and dirty and more than a little unfair. All of us do what we must in order to live, but some of us must do a lot more, in a lot messier ways, to survive.

The screenplay sometimes comes up with a wonderful bit of dialog ("She was so beautiful, she didn't have to wash"), and its introduction of a group of "musical anthropologists" opens the movie up just a bit to a life for our protagonist that might exist outside the boundaries of his community. (Though the gypsies' sense of what's out there in the "other" world does seems charmingly off-base: "We'll go to London where they'll think we're Pakistanis, and they'll like us!" Ah, yes, Britain is know throughout the world for how welcoming it has been to its Paki population!)

This little group of "white" music lovers (the gypsies themselves refer to each other as "black") who arrive to record gypsy songs, while well fleshed-out, indulge in one scene in which they appear too stupid to be real. The "gypsy" joke one of them tells at the restaurant table hardly establishes "unconscious racism," as the press material notes. This is racism, conscious and ugly. What is most unbelievable about the scene is that one of this fellow's white co-workers, who keep asking the man to shut up, does not punch him in the face before he finishes the joke.

Forced thievery, arranged marriage, and a local priest (above, center left), who, though accused of being gay, is less a predator than a very genuine help to our hero -- all this conspires to make the movie real and meaningful. So what about this "ghost" who keep materializing? Well, you could imagine that this is the hero's own thoughts and remembrances taking form. But, then, what about the introduction of that knife-on-ice? The whole finale, in fact, seems a tad too easily achieved -- including those ostriches, which, like Chekhov's gun, if they appear once, you just know you're gonna see 'em waddle again.

Despite the melodrama, for those with a particular interest in gypsy culture, Gypsy will be unmissable. The friend with whom I attended the press screening, in fact, sent me a link to some interesting online gypsy information for further reading. Click here (to learn of an earlier and highly regarded and award-winning gypsy movie from the 1960s) and here (to access a well-received book of readings on the gypsy world). And of course, there is always the interesting, gypsy-filled oeuvre of filmmaker Tony Gatlif. Meanwhile, this Gypsy (107 minutes, in Slovak and Romany, with English subtitles) opens Wednesday, June 27, in New York City at Film Forum. Other playdates?  Haven't a clue, nor do I know the film's distributor, in order to be able to check a website there.

Jan Hřebejk/Petr Jarchovský KAWASAKI'S ROSE: a shoo-in for BFLF nomination?

Another whopping good Czech film from the team of Jan Hřebejk and Petr Jarchovský, who earlier gave us Divided We Fall, Up and Down and Beauty in Trouble, KAWASAKI'S ROSE is every bit as fine as those other three films -- maybe better. (When serious filmmaking gets as good as this, comparisons begin to seem petty.) You might think, from the great and humane work of this film-making team, that the Czech Republic (what TM used to call Czechoslovakia) down the decades has been and continues to be a veritable hotbed of terribly divided characters who -- torn between doing good and bad, looking out for themselves and/or others, and most of all, despite their desperate and sometimes best attempts to do the right thing -- end up betraying each other.

While each country has its own history, those that spent some decades under eastern bloc dictatorships have their own special and continuing trauma to deal with, as we saw a few years back in the fine German film The Lives of Others -- of which Kawasaki's Rose may remind you at times. Here in America, while we've had nothing quite like that (though we may have come, over the past decade, closer than we know), we have had our run-ins with political/personal betrayals during our Blacklist years of the "informing" 1950s, and this movie may have you, as it did me, thinking of Elia Kazan, whose name and work is back in the news/culture these days.

Betrayal is paramount to Kawasaki's Rose, and it comes in all kinds of ways -- from the more typical infidelities that haunt marriage from generation to generation to the ratting-out of one's comrades in times of political upheaval and stress. In this immeasurably subtle, flawlessly woven movie, both sorts of betrayals are linked in a kind of dance that leaves its players, along with us viewers, shaken and forced to confront the "whole" of what character comprises.

Judgments must be made, of course, but -- whew -- they are not so easily managed coming out, as we might have imagined going in. It is to the great credit of these constant collaborators -- director Hřebejk (shown above) and writer Jarchovský (shown at right) -- that they manage all this with such fluidity and graceful filmmaking. Their movie flows along, encompassing a relatively wide range of characters, all of whose humanity and individual needs register strongly, despite -- more often because of -- their flaws.

In the center of the story's ensemble is an extended family, the daughter of which (Lenka Vlasáková , below) has just had a bout with cancer (her scene in the doctor's office is wonderfully original -- giving us as much information about her character as it does the necessary exposition). Her father, a distinguished psychiatrist (played by Martin Huba, above), is about to be honored with a high award of  the state for his life's work, as well as his role as a famous dissident under the Communist regime. His son-in-law, part of the documentary crew filming the family (and, it seems, vetting the shrink's bona fides), has some personal problems with this man, which soon impinge on his professional work.

These are all bright, quick, intelligent and likable people, and yet things are not as they seem. We're soon neck-deep in all kinds of contradictions: personal, political, moral.  The fluidity of the film-making, together with its quiet, easy pacing, allows us to enter these people's world in a sidelong manner, learning as we go, in much the way that the characters themselves are doing it.

The deeper we get, the more bizarre things turn, and the film has one of the richest mother-daughter outbursts (that's the mother, played by Daniela Kolárová, above) that I've seen in some time. Heroes have feet (legs and torsos) of clay, and there's a trip to a foreign land that reaps surprising benefits. By the finale, with its incredibly moving and meaningful speech, we've come quite a distance.  This is, in fact, an even better film that The Lives of Others because it relies less on melodrama and is more thoughtful and stringent.

If there are no heroes to rally behind (nor mourn), the filmmakers are to be congratulated for not giving us any facile "We're all guilty" conclusion.  We may be, of course, but to varying degrees and in ways more important and less. You'll see, hear, feel for and finally understand the perspective of all the characters here -- including one fellow (shown above, right, with his pal), whom we encounter in that foreign country. Whether you'll be inclined to forgive some of them is another matter. But I guarantee you will wonder what you'd have done, under these same circumstances.

Kawasaki's Rose, from Menemsha Films, opens this Wednesday, November 24, at Film Forum in New York City, and is, I suspect, a shoo-in for our Motion Picture Academy's shortlist and most probably a nomination as Best Foreign Language Film.  (Divided We Fall was also a nominee.)

Special note: the film’s director Jan Hřebejk will be present for a screening and post-screening discussion at Film Forum on Saturday, November 27, at 7:50pm. Noted Eastern European film specialist Irena Kovarova will be moderating this event -- which is co-sponsored by New York's Czech Center at Bohemian National Hall as part of the closing event of its continuing series of new Czech films.  Click here, and then scroll down, for details. 

CZECH PEACE, from the duo who gave us Czech Dream, debuts at Traverse City Fest

TrustMovies is breaking one of his almost cardinal rules (call it a bishop rule) by reviewing a new documentary that recently made its American debut at Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Festival but might never be seen in this country again. As the film is very good -- and very important -- TM wants to beat the drum a bit and maybe get some further interest going.

A few years back a pair of Czech filmmakers Vít Klusák (below, left) and Filip Remunda (below, right) made a funny and fascinating documentary called Czech Dream (my GreenCine review of it appears here). This concerned a hoax perpetrated upon the poor (in spirit and intelligence, among other things) Czech consumers, informing them of the grand opening of an important new store that never did or would exist.  How this happens, why, and what everyone involved made of it, is the subject of the film -- which skewers consumerism, capitalism and a number of other "isms" along the way.

The duo's new documentary CZECH PEACE (ČESKÝ MÍR) stars George W. Bush and Barak Obama, among others (Condoleezza Rice has a walk-on or two) and tells the apparently true story of how the American government wants to locate a radar base, manned by American military, on Czech soil. While the "radar" capabilities turn out to be nearly as fake as the fabulous new consumer store of the earlier documentary, the base itself is all too real, and Czech citizens (70% percent or more of them) resolutely oppose its location on Czech soil, as everything from street demonstrations to town meetings (that's the mayor -- center right, below -- of a small town located near the base) to government sponsored programs (Let-us-teach-you-how-wonder-
ful-this-base-will-be-for-the-Czech-Republic) make perfectly clear.

The Czech government, you see, is as every bit behind the whole program as is the American government -- despite the opinions and wishes of the vast majority of its own citizens.  As the protests build ("A foreign army has no business being in a sovereign country," notes one fellow with intelligent certainty), we meet many of the principals involved, and also see some of the other side -- Czechs who want the base on Czech soil.

This is where the movie comes closest to problematic, as Klusák and Remunda show us much less of these people than they do the anti-base groups. Further, they choose what looks like the town drunk (above) to lead off the "pro" display. Still, with finally only 30 percent of the population "for" or "undecided," they seem to have weighted their movie in similar -- or close to it -- fashion.

One Czech government official even writes (or maybe she adapts) a popular song (performed above in,  I think, an ironic fashion) to celebrate this wonderful Czech/American connection (another example of which is shown below). Some scenes shot in the US may remind you -- visually, not verbally -- of In the Loop.  Soon we see the most peaceable-looking and sounding American military commander possible, and later we watch a well-endowed toy soldier (below) masturbate atop the miniature White House, and a live bird sit in (and shit in) on one of those Czech-government-sponsored "educational" pro-radar-base meetings.

A "green" group of protesters declares the radar area as "Peaceland," a state separate from the Czech Republic.  When one of these greens refuses to leave, Czech soldiers evict him. Later we learn that the whole radar thing is unworkable. Yet when Obama makes a visit here, he seems to indicate that the base itself will remain. Later he seem to indicate otherwise.  Government "indication," whether Czech or American, consistently trumps plain-speaking, truth and reality.  

By the end of Czech Peace--a movie that seems absolutely all over the place and yet never leaves its subject matter for a moment--we are left to marvel (that's not quite the right word) at how small countries are forever co-opted by large, and governments exist to trash even the most reasonable will of their people. We learn how some Czechs, just as some Americans, consistently elect and follow politicians who clearly do not have the best interests of those people in mind or heart.

From its opening moments (after a bit of scenery, the movie begins with a Czech newscast of maybe five or six years past, in which the radar project is officially announced) to its conclusion (which I'll let you discover -- and I hope you finally get the opportunity, should this film have some sort of U.S. release), Czech Peace covers several full years. During this time we see some very ugly and dangerous barbed wire placed around the "radar" base, even as elected Czech government officials leave office and then go to work for the very lobbyists and/or companies with which they were doing business, or move on to cushy job in the media -- which in Eastern Euope seems to serve a similar function as does media here in America.

Klusák and Remunda have given us a thoroughly depressing look at our world, even if the look is almost consistently filled with very funny moments that skewer the hypocrisy and denial of everyone from Presidents downward (or maybe I should say "upward," given the sleaze quotient displayed by both Bush and Obama).  I hope you'll have the chance to view this documentary treat. For myself, as soon as I post, I will try to Google any late-breaking information on that American military base in the Czech Republic -- which I should think might prove an interesting topic for WikiLeaks....