I never thought that PJ Harvey was this good. Her songs aren`t catchy in the Beatlish meaning of the word, but she`s an extremely powerful and independant woman. Songs like "To Bring You My Love" remind me of a younger (and living) Janis Joplin and now I don`t wonder anymore how come she had that song together with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Of course Janis was much more of a band blues singer, while PJ is a typical singer/songwriter.

This is a band that (as far as I know) hasn`t sold a single record, hasn`t recorded a single album in a major (even by Latvian standarts) studio, a band that`s only popular in very special circles. I personally found it in a web site where bands could upload some of their songs, so the world would have a chance to know them. The song that I listened to first happened to be "Pavasaris" and it totally stood out among all the crap that was on that site. Music was rather silly and vocals were sung/spoken in a particulary goofy manner. In short it`s quite similar to the legendary NSRD. The band itself claims that the kind of music it performs is called "depressive synth-pop", and it may be quite true. Some of the songs despite the low individual levels of musicianship rule totally. For example, the sad "About a crow" is both funny and catchy. "The Moonlight Sonata" has a good refrain. The opening "About a bear" is a bit dadaistic. I probably won`t be listening to this record for years and years and it won`t last as long as Depeche Mode in the field of synth pop, yet among most garbage Latvian musicians tend to offer to the listeners this is so untamed that I can`t just classify it as shit and forget about PK-25. I would really like to see them perform life, yet I doubt that it would be possible.

This is a B cartoon, according to the budget, according to the participants and according to the animation. To be honest, during the first minutes of the cartoons they eyes just cringe - there`s very little polygons involved, models move in strange ways and the face of Little red riding hood is just awful. But when one starts to accept the visual style as "an artistic decision" the cartoon starts to improve. It has a rather interesting story about who and why crashed Granny`s house and who and why made all the candy makers leave the market. It involves Little red riding hood, Wolf the reporter, a x-sports performing Grandmother, an Austrian woodsman who drives "The schnitzel truck" and a group of detectives, one of whom is played by Xzibit. In the end it`s funny, if not particulary stunning to the eye. I`ve seen far worse cartoons with far bigger bucks involved, and I have no reason to dislike Hoodwinked just because "Shrek" had better animators.

You probably know that a sequel rarely can challenge the original, it just can`t but "Ice Age 2" comes pretty darn close to the first part. The story is a bit of an incoherent mess, of course, with lots of things going on at the same time, yet I didn`t mind that - basically it`s just very much fun, perfect animation, funny characters and little time of "for your consideration" moments. Thumbs up, man! Yeah, Scrat rules mercilesly! I hope next time they pull of a cartoon entirely about that creature for he`s the god of all squirrels.

Jack Black of the White Stripes joined up with a couple of friends and founded a new band that was supposed to be the greatest band in the history of rock bands. So the band recorded an album of merry songs, out of which I liked only the first ("Steady as she goes") and the last ("Blue Veins"). The rest is ok but not outstanding.

That was surely the first time in my life I went to see figure skating, and I wouldn`t be too surprise if it happened to be also the last. I had free tickets for this event from my work, so me and my wife went there just to see what it was. Actually I was expecting it to be a small and insignificant event that no one would be going to see, but I was very far from the truth with that guess. There were literally thousands of people in the new Arena Riga where the ice hockey world championships had finished just a few weeks ago. The event was organized by some Russians, therefore there were more Russians than Latvians in the arena (that`s no surprise actually, for Russians are much more a figure skating nation than Latvians). Among the participants of the event there were several figure skaters, whom even I knew - Anton Yagudin, Jelena Sokolova, Jelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, Alexander Abt and some others who also had had medals at some Olympic games or World Championships. This event wasn`t particulary interesting to watch over a longer period of time, for there`s not very much one can do while figure skating and a sports event without results is like hangoever without a drinking the night before. So we left. It was rather funny though that Liene, my wife, managed to sneak in with an illegal can of Coca Cola (she`s addicted to that stuff, you know what I mean, in case you know me, what you do, of course), telling the security men that she had "a very small umbrella" in her purse.

That was a bizarre theatre performance me and my wife went to see just because I got free tickets for it from my work. The play was done by a Latvian-Slovenian group of actors/musicians as a puppet/garbage show. The story told about a man without a face who participated in some revolution and became known as the enemy of the state. He met a certain Rosa Luxemburg-Monroe and was charged for murdering her. After being beaten up by the cops (or some secret service) he became free once again, met a woman to love and in the end realized that his face was gone. The strange thing was the fact that the leading character was played by clothes of a baby that was held in the hands of several actors, and some other characters were made of random everyday appliances. In this way the play somewhat reminded me of a few films by Jan Svankmajer. The story wasn`t particulary straight, and most of the time it made little sense to me. One more thing that stood out was it being performed in English with Latvian and Slovenian accents. A man was singing in the background and I have to admit that he had quite a strong voice. What else? The play was held at the independant theatre "Skatuve" ("Stage") in a rather creepy location, so we had to leave our car rather far from the theatre. Yeah, and the chairs were very uncomfortable.

This one hour long film was supposed to reveal some part of the mystery around the mysterious things in Leonardo Da Vinci`s works. Contrary to the Dan Brown novel, or the film, this is supposed a documentary, yet in fact it`s a conspiracy theory thing, of course. Every argument one might have against the 9-11 conspiracy theories, stands here even much firmer. I remember watching a similar documentary last year and some of the "experts" from that film reappear here. So it seems that the number of people willing to participate in this sort of stuff is quite little. As for the extent of how believable this all is - it`s very, very far from believable. An old man presents us with words that seem to note that the film intends to reveal some secrets, but it doesn`t do anything. Basically it retells all the conspiracy theory elements Dan Brown employed asking some "grail experts" and "symbolic sex experts" and "lunatics" to comment what they think about it. Unsurprisingly they all agree to their conspiracy theory, still they don`t manage to show anything worthy. Had I not been working paralelly to watching this film, I`d call it wasted time, as it is I call it just a crappy documentary.

Pēdējā laikā daudz esmu lasījis šī autora darbus, bet gribētos sasniegt kādu pabeigtības sajūtu - un šādā nolūkā plānoju izlasīt pilnīgi visus viņa romānus. Tiesa, ar tik produktīvu autoru, kāds bija Grīns, tas nemaz nebūs tik viegli. No vienas puses, pareizāk laikam būtu definēt, ka gribu izlasīt visas viņa uzrakstītās grāmatas, bet tur ietilpst arī dzeja, grāmatas bērniem, lugas, kino scenāriji, tā ka labāk neaizraušos. Līdz ar to lasīšu tikai:

Millions of spears will be broken about this film and everyone has to have an opinion of his own. Why? I don`t really know. I watched "National Treasure" a year ago and at that time nobody said: "Oh my god! It`s a film that tells the truth about masonry!" This is a film of art and not a documentary, why would one believe that everything it tells is true? Do you believe that Tom Hanks is a professor of any sort? Do you believe that Audrey Tautou would understand a slightest criptological question? My answer would be: no. Then why would you believe everything around it true? And why does it really matter? As for what it`s known Jesus might have not been a real person at all, then should I care whether he preferred the sandal or the gourd? One can not prove anything that happened two thousand years ago, therefore everything about it is just a speculation. The film itself didn`t have enough motion imho and I also thought it wasn`t controversial enough. Basically the film didn`t make fun of any real Christian values at all, it didn`t even talk much about symbolic sex, then why would I care about it? If I made a film that stated that Jesus was in fact not executed upon a cross but became a travelling used furniture sales agent that would be a scandal. But this? This isn`t a great film of course, for Ron Howard tried playing it too safe with the film but it`s not a worthless either