Word: jannings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Jan Dítĕ (Ivan Barnev) is a little guy - short in stature, and short on political awareness and social conscience as well. He's just someone who wants to get rich as quickly as possible, which in the course of I Served the King of England he briefly does. When we meet him, however, he is being discharged, penniless, from a Communist-era Czechoslovakian prison, having served a term of almost 15 years because more or less accidentally, and certainly without malice aforethought, he ended up - very profitably - on the Nazi side during the war. After jail...
...Jan may be a geopolitical dimwit, but he is extraordinarily shrewd when it comes to his own career in the restaurant business. He's an expert listener, overhearing conversations that enable him to rub off his rough edges and advance his interests. He begins as a waiter in a provincial pub and moves on to a posh Prague restaurant, then to service in a high-end spa. That establishment becomes a camp full of often naked Nazi boys and girls, earnestly attempting to create a genetically perfected Master Race. In time, as the war goes badly for the Germans...
...Throughout these low-key adventures, Jan maintains his air of wide-eyed innocence. Stuff is always happening to him, and he reacts to circumstances but never acts upon them. When, for example, the maitre d' in that Prague restaurant makes a bold subversive gesture to the occupying Nazis, Jan is sympathetic. But he does not take a stand with the man who has been his friend and mentor. He is, in effect, the heir to "The Good Soldier Schweik," anti-hero of the classic novel by Jaroslav Hasek, which is the Czech anti-epic...
...speak with certitude, since other names - probably the researchers', less likely other reviewers' - occasionally appear with his. When Polito compiles his Complete Manny Farber edition, we'll know for sure. For now, I'm taking on faith his authorship of all Time movie reviews from Sept. 12, 1949 to Jan...
...JAN. 28 Ted Kennedy gives Obama the most important endorsement of the whole campaign...