Word: hungarian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BOREDOM is itself boring, except in Chekhov's plays," writes literary critic George Watson. Ugliness is itself ugly, one might add, and this fact strikes home in Time Stands Still, a new Hungarian film directed by Peter Gothar. Set mostly in a high school in Hungary after the 1956 rebellion, Time Stands Still is mercilessly unvarying. Gloomy blue lighting, harsh, barking voices, and interminable sordid scenes--such as the pornographic picture postcards the director insists on showing--merge in a powerful social description of the dreariness of life under a repressive Communist government. The very factors that give the movie...
...Eastern Europe too, worming not just into jeans but into dreams. The ecstasy of fear flashes on a teen-ager's face as he dares to sass a sadistic teacher, and one can trace the punk-heroic contours of James Dean. Seven years after the Soviet-crushed revolution, Hungarian youths want only to escape, if not to America then into its music and attitudes. But escape is an adolescent fantasy; maturity comes to these engaging kids when they realize they are stuck where they are, glued to themselves and their society...
...teasing visual intelligence of the very brightest film-school graduate. He is forever calling attention to his devices, such as putting his camera on roller skates, pixilating the images, and then, at the last moment, flummoxing the viewer's expectations with an ingenious twist. Like just about every Hungarian movie that reaches the U.S., Time Stands Still is a handsome piece of work, with suffused lighting and a gray, ominous mist that hangs over the characters like a nuclear cloud. But there is verve sparking all of Gothar's calculation, and his young actors (notably Sandor Soth...
...latest novel, The Loser, Konrád takes the ultimate journey of the modern European, piling up horror upon horror on the way: the Holocaust, the Gulag, the carnage of World War II, the postwar purges in Eastern Europe, the failed 1956 Hungarian uprising. The literature documenting the inhumanity of the age is vast. Yet Konrád's masterly new novel offers fresh insight into the cruel stratagems of totalitarian rule...
...Budapest and hid with other Jews in a house that was under the protection of a foreign embassy. The young fugitive scrounged for dry beans and moldy sausage. Searching for a relative in a ghetto hospital, he came upon a mountain of bodies that had been machine-gunned by Hungarian Nazis...