Nomad's Pub

International Life...

Some family friends, Laszlo and Marc, are over visiting my family here in Slovakia for the New Years visiting, from Hungary, and being as that English is not their first language, nor even their 2nd necessarily, we have some interesting conversations...since Hungarian is not a language spoken by anyone in my family yet.

So we were discussing a film to watch, and The Peacemaker (Nicole Kidman, George Clooney) was brought up as an option. Or at least as an object of mirth... You know the parts of it that take place in Vienna? Well, they were filmed here in Bratislava, Slovakia. In fact, friends of mine watched its filming. So we laugh at that. And of course, the part where the CNN reporter is on TV from Bosnia? That's also actually Bratislava, in front of one of our universities here. Even the train scenes were from Slovakia. So our question is... is the film actually a good film, or just plain bad?

My sister (very opinionated, I might say) said that the film is tacky.

"What, what does this word mean?" Laszlo asks.

"Um, you know... lame. cheesy. corny." she answered.

Of course, he does not know what any of these words mean outside of their usual context of a maimed person, cheese, and the vegetable corn.

"Tacky is just, well... junky, I guess. Mom, what's the original meaning of it?"

"Ah, and lame?"

"Well, if it's lame, it just means..." my Mom explains.

"Ah, yes--we have similar meaning in Hungarian." Marc says.

"And cheesy? This is just something with much cheese?"

"No, it means it's dopey!" my sister answers, grinning wickedly at me as Laszlo frowns.

"Dopey? What does this mean?"

"Well, dopey is from being all drugged up," I say. "So that when people are all drugged up, they do certain things and we say that they are dopey. Because they are probably on dope."

"Drugged up, this is something like being dragged up from the ground?"

"NO! You understand, on drugs?"

"Oh, like a joint, yes?"

"Yes."

"Ah. So, this movie, it is lame, and cheesy--how do you spell cheesy?

"C-h-e-s-y" my sister spells.

"C-h-e-e-z-y" I spell.

"C-h-e-e-s-y" My Mom says. ("That's what I meant!" my sister cries)

He writes them all down, with our names in brackets.

"(Cheezy is the 'teen' way of spelling it,)" my sister explains.

"Ok, ok. So, someone who watch this film, they are dopey?"

"No! But if the film is dopey, then they are dopey if they watch it, but the film is dopey anyways."

"Why?"

"Because they didn't film it in the right places!"

"But many films do that!" My mom protests.

"Yes, and isn't it awful?"

"Well, no one who lives in the States knows the difference!"

And so our conversation goes. The word "goofy" got in there somewhere, too, but I can't remember where it fit.

posted by Lada @ 3:46 PM