This is a film that I almost went to see when I went to King Kong instead. After failing to convince my girlfriend to go and watch this film I had to watch it at home and all by myself. I am personally far from the most Eastern-oriented person in the world but I thought: why can`t this Korean movie be great if everyone who has seen it claims that it is. A young fellow lives by breaking into empty houses and living there for a few days (or until the owners return). He sometimes repairs some stuff in the house which he has broken into and he also waters the plants. But what he doesn`t know is that when he breaks into a huge mansion is that the house isn`t empty at all... If you thought this was supposed to lead you to a horror story about dead chicks you`re dead wrong. A woman is in fact present in the house but she`s neither dead nor haunted, she`s just sad, unhappy and she doesn`t speak very much (neither does the lead character who doesn`t say a word during the entire film). When the husband of the woman arrives the young fellow hits him with golf balls (using a 3-Iron club) and escapes together with the woman. Eventually they get arrested and the guy is charged for murder (they find a dead man in one of the houses they`ve broken in). In the end he`s freed from prison and he returns to the house where the woman lives with her husband but he has achieved some ability of being invisible to people so the husband doesn`t see him. Therefore the husband thinks that his wife has suddenly come to her senses and started to enjoy the life with him but in reality she`s cheating on him with the boy. The film suffers from its main strength - the untrivial attitude and choice of techniqe - it`s brilliant but it`s boring. I`m surely happy that I didn`t watch it at a cinema for I`m sure that almost everyone whom I might have dragged along would find this a terrible way to spend his/her time.

I remember having said this already at least once on this factoid but repetition is the mother of all knowledge, so here it goes: "Guys with puppets get chicks." I`m not really sure about that but cartoons with puppets get high rating points. Of course, "Corpse Bride" is one more indication of my obsession with Johnny Depp. I may turn into a stalker one of these days if I won`t stop raving for every bit of film where he`s on. Ok, I probably won`t watch the Elm street movies just because he appeared on them... but such an idea came to my mind something like a minute ago. No, I`m not that obsessed! There`s no way I`m going to watch this Freddy Krueger fellow just in order to see J.D. for 10 seconds. Anyhow, Corpse Bride is one gothic fairytale about a shy young man marrying a dead woman by accident. Victor and Victoria would have been a perfect couple if Victor hadn`t put his wedding ring on the finger of the deceased Corpse Bride. What`s good about the cartoon is the aura, the atmosphere and the animation. Here you won`t see neither the crappy Disney-style drawings that I can`t really stand nor the computerised animation which also rarely works perfeclty well. Although stop-motion animation isn`t quite the hottest trend nowadays in "Corpse bride" it`s done so perfectly that even I can`t complain (although you probably know that I do complain a lot). The story itself is quite nice and the difference between the grey and gloomy world of the living and the colourful mess of the dead is amazing indeed. The only thing I didn`t really like was Victor not staying together with Corpse Bride in the end - she was a much more interesting person than that Victoria for sure. But you can`t always get what you want, they say. Still the perfect combination would be achieved if the whole three of them had stayed together. Nah, that sort of relationships wouldn`t be tollerated in a PG cartoon.

I was a little boy when I read this book first. At that time reading in Russian was to me something similar to what reading in English is today but I managed to read the entire 7 book "Narnia" series which I got circa 1994 on Crimea. As you can probably guess I didn`t have much interest in these books after that for quite a while - and why would I. The first time I really remembered of Lewis was when the first film part of "Lord of the Rings" came out and then I thought - why wouldn`t they make a film after "Narnia" as well. Then something like year or so ago I watched a TV version of "Prince Caspian" which sucked big hairy... bears. And now when I intended to watch the first of the "Narnia" films on the big screen I thought it a good idea to reread this part of the book. As a matter of fact, todays, more than two weeks after the repeated reading I still haven`t seen the film. Maybe I will see it before 2005 ends, maybe I won`t, it still won`t change much. The book itself is a story about four children travelling through a wardrobe into a fantastic land where they have to fight the evil within themselves and a white witch. As a whole the book is too targeted for children and has a bit too much religious nonsense - it`s just like a kids bible with the crucifixion and resurrection of the lion. Although I still stay with my words that "Lord of the Rings" isn`t a book for adults, I have to admit that "Narnia" is intended for a much younger audience - its modern day equivalent would be Harry Potter. The storytelling is so preacherous that I can`t really enjoy this book. And what I hate most than all is that only because of having been written first this is also considered the first book of the series. I proudly stand as a supporter of "The Magician`s Nephew" as the first book (and it is certainly a much better written novel than the one about the wardrobe). If I had to order the books according to their quality it would probably go like this:

The Hollies are virtually unknown in Latvia but it isn`t neither an advantage nor a disadvantage. Among the bands of the British invasion the Hollies don`t stand out as one with a particulary heavy sound. Oh, now, you won`t hear Graham Nash shouting that he can`t get no satisfaction. As for myself I`m not sure whether I prefer bands with a harder or with a softer sound. Probably it differs according to the mood I`m in at the moment of listening to a record. Today "The Hollies" sound perfectly adequate but I`m not raving mad for their poppy sound. "For Certain Because" is certainly my favourite of their records because there`s a lot of pretty songs on it. Examples include "What`s Wrong With The Way I Live", "Tell Me To My Face", "Stop! Stop! Stop!" But the most perfect song on here is "High Classed". It`s just so moody that I can`t find the right words to explain just how much I like it. The melody may be quite a simple one but I don`t give a damn about that. "Peculiar Situation" is a bit too sappy for my taste, although it has a nice chorus. "Ain`t this a peculiar situation? We`re lovers but we don`t make love." Another nice song is "What Went Wrong". Basically this album has amazing vocals, provided mostly by Nash, and a lot of uplifting lightweight bubblegum. "The Hollies" never made a revolution in music, they were never groundbreaking but they surely knew how to make a good album, despite being a bit too sacharine like for me (at worst they are close to "Mannfred Mann". As a matter of fact I like MM some time ago - not Manson but Mann, of course - but listening to their 60s songs is a terrible experience for my ears now).

There`s something about this rabbit. I started writing my impressions of it yesterday but I somehow couldn`t get past the first sentence. Probably it was because I couldn`t concentrate for 100% since I was at my sisters place and everybody was talking all the time. Still it didn`t disturb me to do a bit of programming - which without a doubt is a much more demanding task than writing my own factoid. So it was maybe because of me being cursed by a were-rabbit, just like Wallace was. Then the press first learned to know that this cartoon was soon coming out I thought - hey, how come I not know anything about Wallace in Gromit if everyone considers this film such a huge event? Later on I learned to know that these characters also appeared in "Chicken Run", quite a famous cartoon about poultry but it was certainly too pale for my taste. This one was much better - the whole situation with a competition for gigantic vegetables may be a bit odd, and so would I describe the hunter fellow competing with Wallace for being the best rabbit catcher, but who gives a damn? At least there was no patriotic American cock in this film. Or a penis as a matter of fact. What we have here is some nice British actors, some nice British humour and one of the lead actresses from "Corpse Bride". I don`t know whether you`ve noticed that but I watched cartoons for two days in a row. And you know what? I liked them more than most of the films I had seen recently. I can`t really remember when I saw anything as jolly good as "Corpse bride" and "Wallace and Gromit". Ok, there was "3-Iron" but that comes from a completely different culture, and it offers something different from what you would await from American or even European films.

Some 20 years after his notorious "Dog`s Heart" Bortko has once again taken up the challenge of transferring a work of Mikhail Bulgakov to the big screen. Sadly the screen isn`t that big after all - the film is done in form of 10 episodes as a TV series. Most people probably know that TV series usually don`t have neither the money, nor the quality of a real big screener. But in case of Russia you can never know anything - one thing Russians are known for is their unpredictability. And sure they have once created some of the best TV mini-series ever, including "Mesto vstrechi izmenitj nelzja", "17 mgnovenij vesni", "The adventures of Sherlock Holmes" etc. But it all was in the old days when hobbits still happily lived in the snows of Siberia behind fences with barbed wire and guarded by tall and splendid looking goblins. In the modern days Russians have mainly switched to doing Hollywood-like action films, patriotic bullshit (also Hollywood-like) and TV soap operas. Therefore one can`t expect that Bortko would pull off a "Stalker" with his new film. Instead of stepping forward he has chosen to step back and look at the tradition. This comes once again as no surprise, since in "Sobachye serdse" he also used the black-and-white imagery immitating the aura of the pre-war post-revolution Russia. While watching "Master i Margarita" you`ll probably think that the last 60 years of cinematography simply don`t exist in the mind of Bortko - he rarely uses moving camera, editing is pre-CitizenKane styled, music only comes up when the viewer might otherwise not notice an emotionally dense moment etc. And the cat is done in form of a life-size pupper (or something like that) in a fashion a bit similar to that used in "Teenage Witch Sabrina". I`d certainly prefer a stop-motion animation cat in a fashion similar to that of Jan Svankmajer`s films but ok - that`s Bortko`s choice and not mine. So far the film seems ok - not brilliant, but not half bad either. The only thing that really bothers me is that some actors seem to have come directly from a theatre scene thus incapable of not overacting - intonations of secondary characters are occasionally absolutely unbelievable.

As a fan of Eco it was my duty to read the only one of his novels (except for the latest one) that is not translated into my mother language. First I prepared to take on it in Russian since I already had read "Baudolino" in that language. But when I found out that the English version cost about the same as the Russian I decided to push myself to the limit and read this book in a language that I`m not particulary comfortable with. Only when the book was already in my hands a vague anxiety creeped into my mind whether I would be able to read Eco in English. Mr Eco`s books aren`t usually characterised by an extremely simple language and the intellectual baggage provided in each of his novels couldn`t fit in a nutshell. Therefore one really needs to be quite brave (and stupid as a matter of fact) to try to get through one of his works in a foreign language. Yet I am not a chicken, I`m a donkey and that means that I`m stubborn. So I took a grip of myself and started reading. And you know what? You wouldn`t believe me but it wasn`t that difficult at all. Ok, there are passages in Latin in this book but they still would be in Latin head I read them in Latvian. There is a character who speaks in a mixture of different languages which seems to be something between English and German in this translation but it probably would have been much weirder in Latvian-German.

Despite the fact that everybody and his grandmother has at least once proclaimed that the time of Pelevin were over he still always manages to bounce back and produce something truly worth reading. In his latest novel Pelevin once again takes a comfortable use of modern technologies. The first case when he did it was in the short story "The prince of the government plan" about a man playing "Prince of Persia". Then there was "Generation Pi" where the whole political scene of Russia was rendered by computers. Finally in the "Transitional Period" he wrote a monologue from a girl in a porno site. And now "The helm of horror" is written in a form of a chat discussion. Still this isn`t a simple chat because the number of users is limited, they can`t change their nicknames, they can`t leave the chat and they can interrupt one another - a thing impossible in a realistic chat. There`s a whole eight of them including a man named Monstrodamus, a Romeo, an Ariadna, an orthodox Christian woman named Ugli 666, a computer expert Nutrcracker, a woman of passion named Isolda, a strange fellow under the name of Organizm and drunk chat geek who uses the ugly chatter lexicon that i hate the most. The reasons for the whole situation lie in the fact that the eight people are inside a labyrinth in which the Minotaurus dwells. Every one of the characters has a labyrinth of his own next to his room. For one it is the windows screensaver "Maze", for another - a labyrinth in a park, for someone - a dead end with a chair, a loaded gun and a piece of paper. The problem is that no one knows where Theseus, the murderer of Minotaurus is. Yet they suspect that both Minotaurus and Theseus are among them. The deepest problem thou lies in the fact that everyone of them, including Minotaurus are inside the helm of horror which lies on the head of Minotaurus, therefore both Minotaurus and Theseus are a part of Minotaurus (similarly to a set of all sets which includes itself as a part of itself). The book is short, easy to read, but hard to understand. This time Pelevin doesn`t go too much for sex but much more for the content, and he`s a master of that for sure. Very good, I say.

As the series pass over the equator the speed of the watching increases. While on the first two days I found two episodes a suffiecient dose on the third day I watched a whole three of them. In terms of content we start with Master still talking to Bezdomny and coming to the conclusion of his quite unhappy life. After that we travel to Jerusalem and see the death of Jeshua and Mathew trying to save his masters body in order to bury it. The rest of the episode mostly deals with tricks performed by Begemoth and Koroviev - the singing office, the working suit, the changing money etc. Episode six brings Berliozes uncle into the cursed apartments, the owner of the bar at the Variete also arrives. We see quite a lot of topless Gella who apparantely doesn`t have a scar on her throat which is a fact that I don`t understand. Closer to the end of the episode Margaret meets Azazello, that`s a very professionally done scene in my opinion. And at the end of the episode she turns into a witch and by does that quite convincingly. Since the film isn`t designed for adults only certain parts of the image are blurred. What concerns the technological aspect I can`t say that everything is done flawlessly but on the other hand true art doesn`t lie in millions of dollars spent for it. Episode seven brings us Voland`s ball. The events before it are done quite in an amateurish manner but the ball itself is quite good. Once again the makers of the film went for decency and put Margaret into a weird clothing from metal so she wouldn`t be naked, the suit itself is quite funny but once again I try to separate technology from message. In short - I still like the film although there are some things that I would have preferred to be done differently.

I guess if you`re name is Kazuo Ishiguro most people upon seing momentarily imagine samurai, geishas, sake, sumo wrestlers and lots of hentai images. And after that you spend days and days convincing a person that you`re not Japanese. You can even write a book from the viewpoint of an elderly English butler and still the readers will await Kurosawa appearing in the novel. The hero of the novel, named Stevens, has been a butler at Darlington Hall for some three decades. Now he goes in his masters - an American gentleman`s - car on a journey through England as the first travelling vacation of his life. He doesn`t go very far though and most of the time he still thinks about the glorious days of the past. Not that his past had any glory at all - butlers rarely make history after all but he can philosophise about different great butlers of his days and about his master - the late Lord Darlington. As the book proves, a perfect butler is only remotely human - he doesn`t have any emotions, any opionions, he`s a monster who can`t love anyone but his master. At first Stevens seems to be a normal fellow but as the book gets closer to the end and he glorifies everything his master the reader learns to know that Stevens isn`t really sane in fact. That`s quite a scary book, although nobody gets mutilated, killed in obnotious ways, no-ones eyeballs are squeezed and made into jelly but I still found it very very scary. And very English. Too English I even guess. The whole butler, housekeeper shinanegan is just a lot of bullshit IMHO. A proletaric folk doesn`t need that! Let`s follow Marx, let`s follow Lenin! Well, maybe not, but I still don`t like people of Stevens`s kind. Not that I must like the hero in order to enjoy a book, but the way he treats people and his impression of the world make me shiver.