Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

In here you can find all the novels about the worlds greatest detective. Three of them I had already read or seen on TV (but never in English), while the fourth one wasn`t that good. "The Valley of Fear", "The Sign of the Four", "A Study in Scarlet" and "The Hound of the Baskervilles".

Who the hell is John Malkovich? Isn`t it the guy who played in the film about the bank robbers? No, that`s not him - it`s what you can learn by watching this film. Craig Schwartz is a puppeteer, and he can`t get no work (despite the thought from "GTA3" where a man says "Were you kept in a box? Guys with puppets get chicks!"). No, he can`t get a job as a puppeteer, but his wife Lotte offers him to take just some job to get some money. And he finds a job as a filer for a strange company that`s residing between two floors of a huge builing. And on this floor he finds a portal through which you could enter the mind of actor John Malkovic for ten minutes. Together with Maxine - a colleague of his - for whom he lusts - he opens a business of being John Malkovic. It turns out that Maxine and Lotte fall in love but since they are no lesbians they achieve their love by Lotte entering John Malkovic and Malkovic being together with Maxine. But Craig learns to take over Malkovic`s mind and to push Malkovic himself out of it. In the end though there are some more twists, I don`t really want to explain. But what I want to say is that it`s one hell of movie! It`s really something special. It`s mystical, it`s funny, it`s scary - it twists your mind like a Bender (from Futurama), and after watching the film you have a hard time putting your mind together again).

Why on earth do people write boring books? I really don`t know but probably they get some sort of tingling in their backbone from doing that. This book in question, for example, is a story about a woman that leaves her husband with a total stranger, spends a few months with him, then comes back to her husband, stays a few months at home, and goes away with the same stranger once again. Oh, and on her second leaving she dies in a car crash. For the 300 pages of the book it wouldn`t be too little, if there had been some other things happening. But basically it`s just what I`ve already told. Her thinking isn`t particulary interesting to me, her husband and lover are both quite uninspiring characters and the whole thing drags like a very slow snail that has probably suffered a heart attack just two minutes ago. And what`s the worst thing about it is that this is the most typical kind of German literature you can encounter - too pretentious, too long, too useless.

It had been years since I last saw this film. Not that I liked it much back in say 7th grade when I did, but without any clear reason I decided to give it a try in 2005. "Four Rooms" is a film that contains 4 separate segments done by four directors and those segments are connected by happening at the same hotel and including the same bell boy. The quality of those segments differs. The first one - "The missing ingredient", directed by Allison Anders, is quite a boring story about a cavern of witches that do some silly ritual in order to rescue their goddess from a piece of stone. Yet when it turns out that one of them hasn`t brought fresh sperm the Bellboy (played by Tim Roth) enters the game. One of the witches/bitches is played by Madonna, still the whole thing is quite similar to the disastrous film "Help!" by the Beatles. The second segment is titled "The wrong man", it`s directed by Alexandre Rockwell (not that I know who this director is). Bellboy who`s name is Theodore by the way enters the wrong room and encounters a man who has tied his wife to a chair and threatens Ted with a gun. The whole thing gets kinda bizarre and a bit boring once again. Now the third part is directed by Robert Rodriguez and this time it`s much better - we have Antonio Banderas, we have naughty children consuming alcohol, the part may not be particulary elaborate but at least it`s funny and interesting to follow. The last part - "The Man from Hollywood" is directed by Quentin Tarantino and he himself is the main star of the episode. Although many claim that he isn`t too much of an actor it doesn`t bother me at all. What Quentin and a pal of his do is they play a game stolen from one of Roald Dahl`s stories - the one where you light your cigarette lighter ten times in a row or your pinkie will be cut off, and the Bellboy is asked to be the butcher. Funny. Overall: 3/4/8/8=6. Still since the film ends on a higher note than it starts I give it a bonus half a point.

"Tango in the night" ir tas pats leģendārais "Fleetwood Mac" albūms, kurš zīmīgs veselu divu faktu dēļ:

Kad es izdzirdēju, ka iznākusi jauna Vonnegūta grāmata, mana pirmā reakcija bija: wov! Kad uzzināju, ka tas ir eseju krājums, nevis romāns, mazliet sadrūmu. Romāns un esejas tomēr nav gluži viens un tas. Tomēr tas nemainīja faktu, ka gribēju uzzināt, ko tad vecais labais Kurts bija gribējis pateikt pasaulei neilgi pirms nāves.

Hooray! I saw the new Harry Potter film even before its official world premiere! Isn`t that so cool that you can go to the screenings and see what others can`t? Not that I was that much of a Potter fan (or if you ask - not that I was a bit of a Potter fan at all), yet it is interesting to watch where the whole series are heading for. First I have to say that I missed the first few minutes of the film due to security measures of the cinema - the screening started earlier than it should - probably so potential screener makers would come too late, and apart from that I had to show the contents of my bag to a security fellow who was particulary interested in my laptop. Anyhow I didn`t miss that much so I probably don`t have to complain. In this part Harry Potter takes part in a weird competition of wizardry which leads to him resurrecting the Voldemort person. The film may really be darker than the previous parts but really dark it surely ain`t. Who would expect gothic horrors from the Rowling woman after all? CGI are quite good this time, you don`t get a lot of disastrous elements like there were in the Prisoner of Azkaban. Discussing the plotline it isn`t too advanced and too unexpected for sure yet quite solid without doubt. Ok, the whole thing with the ball is kinda sissy and only meant to show that HP is growing and that he and his pal will be needing to find some chicks in order not to become known as Harry Potter and his boyfriend. Still I think this may be the best HP film so far.

Dīvaini, ka manā kolekcijā agrīnajos diskos diezgan daudz parādās šī grupa, kurai es zinu tikai dažas dziesmas un no kurām neviena nav iekļauta šajā albūmā. Iespējams, nekā interesanta tur arī nav.

Dīvaini, ka "Kuņas dēls" man tolaik, kad to lasīju pirmoreiz, likās laba grāmata. Ne jau dīvaini tādā ziņā, ka tā nebūtu, bet dīvaini - kāpēc tā. Tagad pārlasot šo romānu, saprotu, ka tolaik daudz ko nebiju sapratis un ka izņemot autoram raksturīgo nekaunību neko vispār nebiju uztvēris.

Last year I watched a film that was done after this book (and done brilliantly by Stanley Kubrick). And now when I had a chance to buy the novel, I didn`t really hesitate. Reading it in Russian was a bit weird though, for the storyteller has a wicked language that has borrowed quite a lot of words from the Russian language which would certainly look more like it if the rest of the text was plain English. Still the story is quite simple - Alex at the age of 15 is one spoiled brat who gets his kicks for living by attacking people in the streets and in their houses together with his gang. But suddenly his comrades turn the back on him and he`s left to the police and charged for murder (which he has commited). Alex goes to prison but after two years he joins a program for "curing" criminals which means that he gets pain every time he sees something bad happening or when he does something wicked himself. In the end he returns back to his old style of being a spoiled brat. Still in the book he grows out of it as well and becomes a normal member of the society. What I like about Alex is that he despite being a violent asshole loves classical music, is pretty intelligent - thus shitting on the whole concept of blaming the modern subculture for youth being out of control.