If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I Served the King of England is very ambitious. It condenses an epic novel into two hours and squeezes in more styles than a catwalk. There are nods to the wit of Charlie Chaplin. The visual eulogies of Peter Greenaway. Penitentiaries, bars, brothels, woods, invading armies. All are collected in a dizzying montage as Jan Díte reviews the highs and lows of his life and loves in flashback.He has just been released from Prague Correctional Facility, having served almost 15 years. He is also in rather humble circumstances. This seems to contrast with his lifelong and apparently successful ambition to become a millionaire. The first half of the film has a theatrical feel of unreality – much like a musical. Serving lad Díte manages to score with a local beauty at the nearby bordello. He then get various jobs that involve him working with sophisticated women of pleasure, or in top hotels, or sometimes both together. His short stature enables him to play many tricks, like surreptitiously throwing a handful of coins on the ground for the pleasure of watching rich men get down on their hands and knees with their bums in the air. One of his favourite penchants with the ladies, on the other hand, is to ornament their naked and prostrate forms with anything from flowers, to fruit, to funds from his growing pocket book. One particularly striking moment is when he decorates a naked brothel girl (who looks worryingly like Kylie Minogue) in large margarita daisies. The scene is as arresting as the nude-and- rose-petals shot in American Beauty, or the female-served-for-dinner in The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover.Menzel's taste for a decadent protagonist is in no way sullied by shame. His whores are creatures of beauty: "The scent of raspberry trailed behind her. She stepped out in that silk dress, full of peonies, and bees hovered around her like a Turkish honey store." ('Bees' you will note, not 'flies'.) The description follows an incident where the lady in question pours raspberry grenadine over herself - to stop Díte from getting into trouble.

I recorded this off the Starz channel, knowing nothing about this movie. The title seemed interesting, and Starz listed it as a comedy/romance. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a drama, with NO humor. No laughs, no chuckles, smiled maybe once the entire movie.This is a drama, and a horrible one. Lame, lame story, with absolutely no point. Since this was based on a book, I have to assume the book has a point to it. This movie had none. Obviously, a director who doesn't know how to actually give a movie, a script, real direction.The main character is somewhat of a simpleton, although he's not made out to be stupid. Towards the end of the movie, when the Nazi occupation kicks in, he's oblivious to what's going on, but where the hell is the direction here? What, dear director, are you trying to say about this Czech man? What are you trying to say about the Czech country? That they are all oblivious people? Or were? You're supposed to be telling a story here, but you don't tell the story. What you tell is literally pointless.And then at the very end of the movie -- after plot holes in character motivations -- the main character convinces his Russian visitors he's a millionaire, ignoring that they just said all millionaires are going to jail. WHAT? WTF? So now, our main character does the dumbest thing in the entire movie. Yeah, that was motivated, alright!Then we get stupid voice over once he's in prison, to say he is where he always wanted to be. BS. What a horrible horrible movie. I should have quit after the first hour, realizing there was no way this could possibly improve. A foreign director with a penchant for indulgence with no point.Minor issue in this mess, but they start the movie with the main character getting out of prison, who looks to be 55 years old. But in flashback, before prison, he looks to be 28, 30. That's at least a 25 year visible difference, not 15. Brilliant casting, director & producers. RULE 1 in casting: Make it believable. You failed here. You failed entirely with this terrible movie, with no point to it. If the book was any good, you all adapted it horribly.Shame on Starz for listing this as a comedy. It should have been listed as sh*t.

This film, though technically good (lots of pretty and well choreographed scenes, beautiful women, and pretty good acting)is disturbing, and some people should probably avoid it. People who are overly sensitive to the horrors of Nazi brutality will probably find the film very offensive. That the main character is a savant oblivious to the dark side of the Third Reich does little to redeem the comedic value of the story. Also, nearly all of the women in the film are either prostitutes, Nazis or both. That was a problem for me. That said, the film makes some interesting and humorous comments about wealth and the value of money.

Like the butler played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1994 film "The Remains of the Day", the waiter at the centre of "I Served the King of England" (Jiri Menzel, Czech Republic, 2006) is not interested in politics. Major historical events surround him, yet these completely escape his attention. His ambition is simply to become a millionaire, like the fat cats he serves at table. In 1930s Prague, Hitler, in Berlin, is making a radio announcement about his aim to "liberate" the Sudetenland. Bored, Jan Dite, the waiter, simply turns the dial to a dance music station.He manages to float through the Nazi invasion, first of the Sudetenland, then of Czechoslovakia. By a combination of hook and crook, he achieves his ambition of owning his own hotel through the sale of valuable stamps, stolen from a vanished Jewish family. This does not give him a moment's pause but later, when he sees a trainload of Jews in cattle-cars moving off to Auschwitz, he has a rush of compassion and chases after the train in an attempt to hand the deportees a sandwich. After the war, as a self-confessed millionaire, he is sent to prison when his hotel is nationalised. He emerges fifteen years later, older, but not much wiser. He is Schweik, but without the latter's sly intelligence.This sketchy summary cannot do justice to a film which has been described as a near-flawless masterpiece, in which "Prague has never looked better". It is permeated with the ironic wit which marked Menzel's earlier films, such as the Academy Award winning Closely Watched Trains (1966). Dite befriends the German girl Liza, described by one reviewer as "the sweetest little Nazi in the history of the cinema". They are in bed, making love in the missionary position. Liza keeps pushing his head aside so that she can gaze at the big picture of Adolf Hitler on the opposite wall. Such was love in the Third Reich. The scene in which Dite is undergoing a racial fitness test which involves giving a sperm sample is intercut with young Czech men being unloaded from a lorry at an execution ground. Of this, Dite is blissfully unaware.The Remains of the Day was based on a serious and perceptive novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The genesis of I Served the King of England, by contrast, was a comic novel by Bohumil Hrabal, a book I cannot wait to get my hands on. Any offers?