The Firemen’s Ball is one of three feature films completed by Czech director Milos Forman prior to his emigrating to the United States, 
and was the follow-up to his successful Loves of a Blonde (reviewed below). With a touch of endearment, Forman lampoons a rural fire brigade and symbolically skewers the mentality of communism, leading to the eventual ban of the film after Czechoslovakia gave way to Soviet occupation. While hardly a revelation, The Firemen’s Ball is a superb early example of the smart “dumb comedy.” (It is, for a very different time and place, a spiritual cousin of Mike Judge’s recent Idiocracy.)
While they attempt to execute the various aspects of their annual community dance and raffle, the lovably inept firemen prove themselves to be so devoid of leadership and self-assurance that their crescendo 
of failures results in a competition to see who can more emphatically declare another to be an idiot. Forman’s mixture of Keystone Cops antics with irreverent social commentary displays a brand of humor and ideology that would surface in his later projects, notably Amadeus, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Man on the Moon and The People Vs. Larry Flint. Here, however, he relies on mostly nonprofessional actors (including some familiar faces from Loves of a Blonde) with mixed results. Unlike his protagonists here, Forman has, throughout his career thus far, proven to be a bold champion of independent thought. His latest project, Goya’s Ghosts, is now in limited release.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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1 dmh // Aug 4, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Forman was on Charlie Rose this week to promote Goya’s Ghosts. I really like him in interviews, and not just because I would like to hear him say “Moose and Squee-rel,” but because he seems to have such confident passion and calm integrity. He said, with certain caveats about a filmmaker’s lack of objectivity for his own work, that Fireman’s Ball and The People v. Larry Flint are his favorite of his own films.
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