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Reviews
Dealer (2004)
Artificial
Gradually, I've come to appreciate slowness in cinema. I'm getting sort of fed up with action-packedness, video clip-like editing and the fact that if for ten seconds no one speaks on the screen the audience starts chatting, because obviously, there is nothing important going on.
However, I do not think much of this film of Fliegauf Benedek. I appreciated hist last piece (Rengeteg), I liked it's sketch-based structure, the amateur freshness of acting and especially the language, which is farther to the artistic, created language of the Hungarian cinema in the last couple of decades than anything I've seen for a long time. Now, in Dealer all this are present, but they rather work against the movie. The actors are terribly, incredibly bad (consider Barbara or the mathematician girl). If this is conscious than it is simply BAD. The language is terribly artificial - and there is no meaning for this at all. They usually quote that Dealer is slow and beautiful. I think, you have to be a very good director to be able to direct a slow film that works. For me this wasn't slow, but boring. I reckon, I understand why he wanted to make it so slow, but then there has to be something else to keep the movie alive - most favorably actors. Who act. All in all, I think this film is repulsively artificial, pretentious and pretty much forced.
Gyertek el a névnapomra (1983)
Well-made TV movie
Quite enjoyable TV movie from the era when Hungary could afford making quality TV films in terms of money and talent. It's almost the literal implementation of the short story it is based on. Quite brave and nicely reflects the age it is about and was made in. Great actors (esp Kállay and Haumann, but Mácsai is surprisingly bad, I hear, he himself did not like it very much :), good director and pictures, but lousy music. Its 70s slang sounds a bit odd today, I think. Not my favourite but I come back to watching it every three years or so. Whatever happened to this articulated film-making in Hungary, though?