Sequels

Today I did something I've never done before: watch a Czech movie all the way through. It was Snezenky a machri (rough translation: Snowdrops and Aces) from 1983. You can watch it with bad English subtitles here. Believe it or not, the flick has become somewhat legendary in the Czech film industry.

You might be wondering what in Hades a Czech movie has to do with game shows. Patience. Anyway, the film - a teenage dramedy about compulsory ski training for 17-year-olds (!) - finally spawned a sequel in 2008, Snowdrops and Aces 25 Years Later. And guess what. Almost everybody hated the remake. I found a page of nearly a thousand comments in Czech, most of them yelps of displeasure, which my helpful browser translated into machine-ish English.

This is where the game show angle comes in. If there's anything that risks the displeasure of game show fans, it's a remake of an old show. Seems that Internet critics can only be placated if the remake sticks painfully close to the original, like GSN's Pyramid. Any departure from hallowed tradition brings howls of disappointment and downright outrage, similar to what greeted the remake of my only venture into Czech movie-watching.

By the way, if you're wondering what brought me to the movie in the first place, it was...chess, of which I am something of a fan. (This entry is getting more and more bizarre.) The movie's title inspires the strangest chess tournament in the world, also called Snezenky a machri, which is held each year in the Czech Republic.

The tournament pits a team of twenty-something chess-babe female masters against a team of sixty or seventy-something old-guy grandmasters. The pictures of the tournament tend to look a little creepy, with the old farts seated across the table from the babes.