Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

samkan You don't have to be a big fan of foreign film to like this movie, though you might require some patience. The beauty of PROTEKOR is how well it depicts the WWII lives of semi-elite members of society in both a place, Prague, and a profession, film and entertainment, having more physical and social distance from the conflict. That is - at first. Of course the war catches up with our characters and we see what they are truly made of. Our leading characters, overly ambitious husband and wife, are vain, flawed and often reckless. But we manage to become attached to both of them and the story revolves around their hidden reserves of fortitude and, ultimately, their shining hour. There is one film devise that some may see as "artsy-foreign". But it's well used and never overly so. You should enjoy PROTEKOR.

Simonster Viewed at the Festival de Cannes 2010Protektor was the Czech Republic's official submission to 82nd Academy Award's Foreign Language in 2010. It didn't win.Okay, if you want to know the plot go read the IMDb summary, that's what it's for. But if you can't be bothered: Czech radio journalist Emil starts to collaborate with the Nazis to protect his Jewish actress wife, Vera.But Protektor is no Schindler's List and on the scale of Holocaust-themed films it comes way down, being essentially a relationship drama. His career takes off and hers, well, is over and if she's not careful, so is her life. But the unforgivable flaw with the film is that there is no tension here, no atmosphere. Everything unfurls in a drawn out and typically central European narrative manner. The film is simply flat and dull.To make matters worse is the character of Vera, who is, quite simply, a preening and self- obsessed egomaniac. Don't think for a moment I'm saying she deserves what she gets because she is Jewish. But she does deserve everything she gets she embarks, among other things, on a highly visible and dangerous affair and then adopts on a course of behaviour that is quite literally suicidal. It is impossible to like or even sympathise with such an unpleasant individual.Protektor wants to examine how people react under such circumstances but it fails with Emil too. The character is never properly defined. Does the film wish to say that many people also drifted into collaboration as opposed to embracing the enemy with love at first sight? I suppose so, but the director busks around the subject in such a way that his intent is never clear.Visually, in terms of sets and costumes, camera-work and lighting, Protektor looks great. But unless you're a completist or fan of Central European cinema, or just want to see why the Czech Republic didn't take home the Academy Award, there's no real reason to see this film.

Red-125 Protektor (2009) is a Czech film, directed by Marek Najbrt and shown in the United States as "Protector." (The title refers to Reinhard Heydrich, who was a high-ranking German Nazi official. He was Deputy Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia.)Marek Daniel plays Emil Vrbata, a Czech journalist and radio announcer, who has no Nazi sympathies. However, Marek takes on the role of media spokesperson in order to protect his wife, Hana, who is Jewish. (Hana is played by the lovely Jana Plodková .) Hana is given papers that will allow her to escape Czechoslovakia, but she disdains them. She, like so many others, cannot believe that the European powers will accept Hitler's demand for the Czech Sudetenland in order to prevent war. However, as we know, that's exactly what happened, and eventually Germany occupied all of Czechoslovakia, and began the ruthless persecution of Jews and of all opponents to the Third Reich.Everyone has a limit beyond which he or she will not be pushed, but who knows where that limit is? Both of the protagonists in the film are selfish, reckless, and immature. That behavior may have been acceptable--or at least not lethal--in prewar Czechoslovakia. However, once the Nazis took over, it was just a matter of time before people had to change or be destroyed.Someone pointed out that neither Emil nor Hana are particularly praiseworthy individuals, and that's true. However, as I see it, that's the point of the movie. We have all seen movies about heroes and martyrs. This is a movie about flawed people who find themselves in a horrendous situation. How they deal with this situation is at the crux of the film.We saw this movie at the very praiseworthy Rochester Jewish Film Festival. It will also work well on DVD. It's not a great film, but it's definitely worth finding and seeing.

gocaps99 This is a review I posted on another forum.Let me get the beauty of it out of the way first - it looks astonishing. The colors are fantastic, the highlights are beautiful and the shadows are surprisingly tense and deep. Take a classically beautiful noir film and make it even more beautiful, on better film stock, and add a better DP. Whoa man! However, with the editing, it throws you into many different spirals always wondering what is actually happening to the man, changing which characters you care about more and changing how you think a character is going to act - sending all of your ideas about what could happen next all over the spectrum.My one complaint about the editing was that sometimes to relate scenes (relating scenes as in the way Tarantino did it with Pulp Fiction by having diegetic music in one scene that spills over into the next scene. It's done very often), the editor would show clips from the next scene in the current scene. Now it's very interesting, because it doesn't give you any idea what's going to happen next, it just adds to the emotion you are supposed to feel during that scene. While it adds a lot to the storytelling, it is noticeable. Like sound design, 99% of the time, good editing should go nearly unnoticed by the viewer. It's not at all that I don't like the editing, I just found it awkward at some points.I won't even get into the score and music. See the movie! There was also one big problem with the ending - and I won't give any important information away, it's just that there should be no credit music. Once you see it, you'll know exactly what I mean.Now maybe it won't win Best Foreign Film, but I'll be surprised if it isn't nominated.