The duration of the friendship as well as the movie's sound come up a little short.

Rating: 6/10 (10 March 2008)

"Once is not enough", one might say when the budding friendship and musical partnership depicted in this movie is cut off cold turkey after one week. Of course, the movie aims at being realistic, and people do stupid things in life all the time. And, if one is sufficiently concerned about these characters, one might entertain the expectation that the protagonist will return from London in a jiffy when he realizes not only the high cost of living in this city, but also the fact that he left his musical adjunct behind who assisted him to possibly become a real success on the folk music scene. This music is nice to listen to, as modern popular music goes, although not quite in the same class as when Ann Sothern helped Robert Young to come up with "Lady Be Good".
Technically, a steadier camera would have been appreciated. Most American viewers will probably have to make use of the English subtitles. However, the producers should have chosen conventional subtitles rather than those for the hearing-impaired (which inform the listeners of happenings such as "music continues"); hearing-impaired people won't get much enjoyment out of the movie anyway since most of it comes from the music. While the producers were at it, they might as well have subtitled the occasional Czech conversations. Most astounding, however, is the fact that on a movie that has been heralded as possibly "the best music film of our generation", the sound has not only been robbed of much of its dynamic, but is monophonic to boot (at least on the DVD). To be sure, it has been encoded as "Dolby Surround", but all channels reproduce exactly the same sound at all times. The success that the movie nevertheless enjoyed, even among the professional film critics, offers the interesting cognizance that all the present-day zeal about sound reproduction with ever more channels is perhaps a tiny bit exaggerated?