CHAMPIONS

Fueled by drink, hockey, and greed, CHAMPIONS is an oddball black comedy that pays homage to the Czech films of the 1960s. It involves the denizens of a single building in an outlying town. Zdena, the only woman, is married to robust Karel, who runs a ?pub? consisting of a TV, some chairs, and rum. But she is in love with the bus-driver Milan, who seems to take a lot of showers. Pavel is a surly, newly divorced man fighting with an even surlier older man?a German with a grudge. Jarda is a large, wheelchair-bound man who relies on his teenage son for everything. There?s the one they call the Gypsy, and the half-crazed Bohous, a man obsessed with rock music, hockey, and drinking anything containing alcohol (including gasoline.) Against a background of nationalism via the 1969 world hockey championship, this ungoverned, irrational group implodes with sometimes funny, mostly shocking consequences.