John Cale of the Velvet Underground fame doesn`t give up on recording music. On his latest album he doesn`t pretend to be a young and crazy fellow, oh, no, he records songs like "In a flood" where he sounds just like Johnny Cash a few years before his death. But he isn`t always like that, he also does stuff like "Outta the Bag" where you`d be surprised that the man is over 60 years old. Of course, the days of experimantion Cale was best known for are long gone now but he has some of the weird charm not many musicians have. My favourite track on the record is "Perfect" which sounds so rocking you`d never think it was the same John Cale. With it`s simple rocking sound Cale doesn`t like a dinosaur that still doesn`t wanna die but like a very diverse musician that will record until the day he dies interesting music that will selll badly.

No, I wasn`t really planning to see this film this soon. It was just that I went to a wrong press preview. Not that I wouldn`t be on the list for this one but I was planning to see "Cinderella man" - a film I have no interest in whatsoever. Anyhow, "The Transporter", the first part, doesn`t bring me any good memories at all. It was the kind of stupid action film that makes you laugh more than it keeps you intrigued. Now we discuss the sequel for that film. And you know what? I liked it more. No, it`s still pretty much the same stupid scenario, Jason Stetham (he, who once was so brilliant in "Snatch" and that "Lock Stock" flick) is a transporter - a guy with his rules which include not asking any questions. But now he works as a driver for some rich man`s kid. When the bad guys kidnap the kid and inject him with a deadly virus the Transporter can`t simply let the kid die. So he starts hurting people. Being more skilled than B in Kill Bill, he rarely needs any weapons at all - a fire hose usually is enough for him to stop something like ten villains. Yeah, technically in terms of SFX and stunts the film is brilliant. In terms of a plot it sucks. But at least it doesn`t have a sappy love story like the first part. And it has the guy who played Tom in "Lock Stock" as a Russian biologist villain. And it has a nice middle aged Frenchman who cooks for the police after he`s been taken to the office.

One of Oliver Stone`s most famous films. Buddy Fox (Charlie Sheen) works in the stoke selling-buying part but he wants to become a big gun. In order to achieve that he has to get to Gordon Gekko (the notorious villain actor Michael Douglas) - a local multi millionaire who`s become rich as a pig just by selling and buying stuff. When he does that GG teaches Buddy how to play in the big game. It proves to be quite a dirty one, but Buddy is ready to do almost everything in order to becoming like GG. He gets a high-class chick, a high-class apartment, etc, etc. Only when GG tries to buy the airplane company Buddy`s dad works for in order to break it apart, Buddy can`t stand it anymore. By the way, Buddy`s dad is played by Charlie Sheen`s real father - Michael Sheen, that`s cool. So GG`s and Buddy`s roads cross again. And you can probably guess that it don`t end 100% well for Bud. A film about finance and brokers isn`t particulary easy to make watchable, yet Stone has done a good job with this one. Ok, probably some parts of it aren`t 100% entertaining but as a whole the film deserves little complaints from a fellow like me.

This is not the kind of literature I read just because I find it attractive. This is the kind of literature I read because I need to read more in German. F.F. was an East-German writer who apparantely was one of the most important writers of his kind. After reading a book of his late stories (he died before the wall came down) I`m not so sure why he`s so important. Fuehmann seems to be more specialising in rewriting already known stories without giving them too much of himself than in anything else. Yet some of these stories are quite worth the read. For example, the title story is a story about two kings ruling two lands both of which have three wishes, two out of those wishes match - to rule the other land and to have the mouth of a prophet. Yet not one of them can stand a prophet talking to him, because a prophet doesn`t have too many good words for a tyrant, and prophets predictions aren`t too pleasant either. Then there`s a story about two brothers falling in love with their own sister. But apart from that I found F.F.`s book quite uninspiring to read, and made it through mainly because of knowing that it`s not right to stop.

I would probably be annoyed if somebody called me a metalhead. I never liked any of those half crazy bands playing faster than hell, louder than hell and having vocalists sicker than the master of hell. You see, screaming over the top some shit about death and how good the dark lord is doesn`t work well for me. But Metallica is different. It relies more on music, and I never cared for their lyrics anyhow. Yet I doubt that I could enjoy a Metallica album as much as this LP by four Finnish guys. Why? Because they play all your favourite Metallica hits on cellos without help of any other instruments. Thus they transform loud and disturbing metal into loud and completely enjoyable classical music. If you did the same thing to any given Britney Spears track the results would probably be different, but metal and classical work together really well. "Master of the puppets" is my favourite song on this album, not that I wouldn`t like the original. Nobody would be interested in having all of "Metallica`s" catalog transferred into cello music but this one album is just perfect for such a thing. Had "Apocalyptica" chosen to re-do stuff like "St. Anger" it would surely come out as a disaster, but since most of the less modern Metallica stuff has some great things about it, it works amazingly well.

This film was shown in Riga as a part of a festival of Russian films. It was supposed to be an erotic black comedy. Yet it didn`t prove to be either black, comic or erotic. More it was like some underground drama. All the points this films gets are entirely for its visual elements. For a Russian film it`s done stylistically really well, a pretty thing for the eyes for sure. Yet in terms of content it doesn`t go far beyond a music video. And a music video doesn`t go on for more than an hour. Where the filmmakers found their actors is a mystery to me, since most of them can`t act at all. And I mean what I`m saying. You shouldn`t always hire ten Tom Cruises in order to make a good film, but you can`t make a film with actors with no talent whatsoever. And its worse than neo-realism, for the great filmmakers of 1940s, 1950s that did this sort of stuff were geniuses of their work and you didn`t need a Humfrey Bogarte for "The Bicycle thief" to be a great movie. Here you only have two young dykes that pretend to be cool walking the streets and kicking the cans.

Ewan McGreggor and Scarlet Johannsen. Isn`t that a perfect pair? No, it is not. You can`t pick up two great actors and make a great film without giving anything else. Ok, I liked the film at first. It starts off as a sci-fi story about some perfect world that seems to be lifted of Aldous Huxley but in the end it all ties up as a "Matrix meets xXx" kind of stuff. You have a lot of SFX, you have two Ewan McGreggors but you don`t have much more. As for the story - there was a global catastrophe, so they say, and only few people survived it. So they live under the ground and the only hope of every man and woman is going to the only unspoiled island. Yet Lincoln (McGreggor) discovers that there is no spoon, and that they are only clones for other people in the normal world that need spare parts for their eldering bodies. Sad, isn`t it? If it were original I`d probably like this thing. But here you get a Hollywood treatment of Huxley and Orwell, and Hollywood treatment of an anti-utopy sucks balls per se.

This film tells a story of a man that just can`t be caught by the French police. He himself ain`t that much of a bad guy, of course, but he`s got a lot of dirty money and therefore the cops are after him. In order not to be caught he`s overgone a serious plastical operation so that even his girlfriend would recognise him if he were standing half an inch from her. Anyhow, his girlfriend (played by Sophie Marceau) has to find a lonesome man on a train in order to trick some russkies that are following her. It`s not really clear why she has to do that but who cares. So she picks a guy who works as a translator and who`s shy and simple and all that. She takes him into a world he didn`t even know that existed. Yet he has to pay the price of being considered to be Anthony Zimmer. But the chick falls for him. And in the end he proves to be Anthony Zimmer himself. Of course, it doesn`t make much sense considering his previous behaviour but who cares. Ok, this film is a no-brainer but I`ve seen a lot worse no-brainers than this one.

William F. was one of the most acclaimed novelists of the previous century yet until this time I hadn`t read a single one of his works. I`m not so sure how it happened this way but it`s a solid fact that I never really had time for Faulkner. Maybe because I thought he was one of those boring WW1 writers (not that I had anything against WW1 writers). But the Mansion doesn`t have too much to do with either WW1 or WW2. Yes, both of those wars happen in the period the heroes of this book live, yet they aren`t mentioned too often (heck, they are nearly not mentioned at all). The books starts off as a story about Mink Snoups, a young and not too bright farmer that gets angry with his rich neighbour mainly because of his own weird perception of the world. It ends for him quite badly after he kills the rich neibhbour Mink is sentenced for life at the Parchman farm (a prison where you work in the field). Later on we switch more to other Snoups`es as people connected with them. Mainly due to the adopten daughter of Flem Snoups - Mink`s cousin who has achieved much in his life and who doesn`t want Mink ever to come out of Parchmen`s place. The novel has lots of different leading characters, forming something like a weird flow of different story lines, that somehow get perfectly connected in the end. At some scenes the whole thing may seem overlong, yet Faulkner knows exactly what he`s doing and what each character is for in his world. Not than most of them have a purpose or something, it only means that nothing is out of place.

Alejandro Amenabar was the director of a film that got one of the first records on my factoid - "Open your eyes". But "Mar Adentro", his latest, brought him even more acclaim than that film. He even got an Oscar for the best foreign film. Ramob Sampedro is a man who`s been paralysed for 28 years and who wants to have a right to die, but Spanish law doesn`t give him such a right. Now he`s found a lawyer woman named Julia that is also suffering from a disease that will kill her, thinking that she might help him. A weird love story starts between the paralysed man and the insultic woman. Some sort of Romeo and Julia. Then there`s Rosa, a simple working class woman that wants to convince Ramon that he needs to live. But Ramon says that the woman that loves him will help him die. Which one will it be - Rosa or Julia? The one that could die with him together or the one that will live on after his passing? The film isn`t only about whether it`s right to die if you want to, but about what`s worth in life and what isn`t. It`s so sad it makes you cry, and at the same time it`s so uplifting that you can smile through your silly tears.