the unbearable lightness of being

It's a title and a half is that isn't it? The Unbearable Lightness of Being. You could get half a dozen regular titles out of it. I'm going to call it TULB.

The film itself is long - the best part of 3 hours. I'm not sure that entirely endeared me to it. I have to admit it seemed a bit too long if I'm honest.

Y'know, the problem here is I'm a little worried I'm going to come across as something of a philistine. You see TULB is a proper film.

I don't tend to think of myself as a snob. I'm perfectly happy to enjoy low-brow entertainment as much as I am high-brow. I'm not one of those people who will dismiss an action film simply because it is an action film.

But then equally I wouldn't hesitate to criticise it either, and the same goes for higher art as well. To be frank I both enjoyed TULB about as much as I didn't enjoy it.

The film is mostly set in Prague atthe end fo the 60s. If you know anything of history you'll realise that's when the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia. However, the film isn't really about that, as such.

I mean on one level it is, but on another level it isn't. The events affect the characters, but I dunno, it almost seemed like the characters didn't quite engage properly with the events. It's like sometimes they seemed really involved in the politics, but at other points it was reduced to a backdrop.

I was reminded a lot of Dr Zhivago actually, which is set during the whole tumultuous period of the first world war and the Russian revolution. But at it's heart it's a complicated love story - a romantic story; a tragedy.

But in Dr Zhivago the events of the time genuinely seemed to actually impact the character, whereas here that was less apparent.

Also, Dr Zhivago doesn't have a lot of tits and ass.

I'm not sure how I felt about the tits and ass. I mean on one level it's real, and realistic, and makes an important point, but on the other it gave the whole film a sort of artificial European-ness. The film isn't European - it was made by an American studio and is in English, etc, but it seemed to adopting a faux-European style.

Not wanting to be harsh, but it was like someone had watched a lot of European films and tried to mimic them without quite 'getting it'.

But then to be fair I could almost level the same criticism at European cinema. It can be quite pretentious at time. "We're showing you these nipples, because this is totally serious 'art'... phwoar, look, nipples!"

I'm being over-critical - a lot of the film worked. The characters were wonderfully deep and complex, for example. They felt quite real a lot of the time. The ending is particularly poignant, and the whole storyline with the dog was beautifully realised.

It just felt a bit too disconnected from the whole soviet invasion = bad and communism = bad things, I think. Like they were more of a boorish imposition than genuinely scary things.