Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

Have you ever wondered whether there might be a place where your all-time favourite "Santa Barbara" heroes live in reality? Have you ever wanted to be dragged inside your TV just like it happened to Spiderman and Legally Blonde in "Pleasantville"? Have you ever wanted to have three buttocks? In fact I have not, but that`s not the question here. At first I thought this film would be a film version of "Space Quest" - a nice game for old PCs. But in fact it was a tribute to "Star Gate" - you know that TV series about some weirdos on a space ship (not "Pigs in Space" in case you hoped for it). Anyhow, the actors of this TV series called "Galaxy quest" have no good acting jobs nowadays so they do conventions and sell their autographs for peanuts, but everything changes when a race of stupid aliens arrives which has watched the series and believes that it`s documentary and not acting. So they hire the actors to help their civilization agains some evil bastards. As you can probably guess, this film is a comedy, not a particulary great one, of course, but as a matter of fact it does have its strong sides: it`s entertaining enough, it pokes fun of "Star Gate" (out of which I haven`t seen more than 5 minutes), and it was the right film for me to watch at the particular time when I watched it.

This time I don`t know what to say. You see, I didn`t like this film at all. It was horrible. For a person like me I mean. I don`t really know why but I found everything about this movie disgusting. I may be just a stupid, stupid, stupid dreamy teeny weeny child but I don`t want life to be like this. I know that ideals are a thing of the past and that I should be laughing at myself but I can`t. I don`t find it particulary great that every character in the film has a somewhat "accident" sexual intercourse with another persons partner and after that becomes attached to that person. It`s like sex is stronger than love, and not only stronger but more important. Especially to the male characters of this film. I can`t identify myself, I can`t like anyone in this film, I don`t want life to be like this. Yet I can imagine that this could be a very sincere film that reflects life on earth better than almost anything else in this world. But I don`t want this to be a part of me, because to me this film gives no hope. And hope is essential. I don`t even know how to rate this film. On one hand I didn`t like it at all, probably more than any silly teen comedy. On the other hand the film is certainly good - both in terms of realism and quality of acting. So what will my final verdict be? Rate it as if it was average? But average doesn`t leave you so overwhelmed with emotions. Rate it high? But I hated it, I wanted it to end all the time, I couldn`t really bear watching it and only my attitude that I must go over this kept me watching. I`ll probably pick a random number between 3 and 8, who cares how high or how low, I want to get past this for sure. Oh, I`ll leave it blank!

Why is sixteen the number of years when the word "sweet" is usually used? I`ve got no idea for that. You see, at sixteen a person rarely is really sweet stuck in the middle of being a loser at school - either a loser in social rankings, in financial status, in marks, in personal life or somewhere else. And Liam, the main hero of this film, can certainly be called a loser in many categories. He`s not even sixteen yet, but he already doesn`t go to school and lives from selling fags and stolen drugs. He`s Scottish (just like most people in Scotland) so he speaks some really weird language. One thing I`m sure about is that you should use the word "wee" very often if you want to be a real Scottish person. He`s got a friend named Pinball together with whom Liam does what he does. By the way, they don`t use drugs themselves. Liam mainly only wants to help his poor mother who on the other hand doesn`t want to be helped. Somebody told me this film was similar to "Trainspotting" but I didn`t find it that way. First, the story wasn`t that good, then the actors and last but not least the music. If "Trainspotting" provided the soundtrack of a generation "Sweet Sixteen" falls flat at doing that. Yet this ain`t a bad film.

When I got this film I didn`t know that Woody Allen directed it. Now I know it. And it ain`t a good thing to know. Luckily he doesn`t play the lead role in the film, but sadly he`s the voice behind the screen and you can hear him quite often. Not that otherwise the film were any good. Actually it`s just so boring that I didn`t fall asleep while watching it only because it would be too yuck for me to be sleeping not more than a metre away from my pal who was already asleep. Still a film about supposedly Woodies childhood with all his Jewish relatives each of whom is about as layered as a donkey drove me to sleep faster than you can say "Kaboom!" and you can say "Kaboom" very quickly.

Can you imagine John Travolta as an old man? Isn`t he the young looking fellow you know from "Grease", "Pulp Fiction" and that Brian Da Palma film about the sound engineer? You bet he is. But nowadays he`s just an old English professor who has given up teaching for a nobler thing to do - to be an alcoholoic. He lives together with his former assistant named Lawson (a he and not a she), and everything is cool until Perslaine (Scarlet Jochansen) arrives and messes his live up auite strongly. Perslaine is 18, out of school, working as a waitress and not giving a damn about olds perverts like Bobby Long. In fact she doesn`t even have a relationship with him in this film. She only tries to find a life which she never had. The film doesn`t fall in the over-the-top category. In fact it`s a slow faced and gentle film about the man, the bottle, the girl who doesn`t want to go to school and about country music in New Orleans. And those are the ingredients for what I`m asking for.

Finally a new country is added to my factoid. Norway - the country which has given the world Ole Einar Bjorndalen and probably something else as well, Knut Hamsun, for instance, has given us the band "Madrugada". I don`t mean to tell that the band is particulary popular anywhere in the world but who cares about fame, who cares about anything? So, the band is a bit pessimistic in its sound having some goth elements in its sound. The first track on the album "The kids are on the high street" is a superb one, and the album goes on in a similar manner having some references probably to "The Cure", some to "Joy Division" but with less synths and more guitars. That means that Joy Division can be replaced with the Smiths and now you`ll get it more. A good record for sure, although it doesn`t make you shake your lazy ass off the chair.

The author has obtained a Nobel prize. I coudn`t achieve reading this book until the end, giving up on it at the half of it. Basically it`s a psychological porn story with some witty remarks in it. Not interesting to me, as a matter of fact. If you`d count how often the word "dick" arises in this book, you`d get a very big number. Sadly I can`t rate it to that number.

One of the films of Lars fon Trier about America. Selma is a Czech woman that has left her socialistic country somewhere in the sixties for America where she needs to find enough money for an operation for her son which would allow him not to go blind as she already is losing her eyesight. She has already got close to what she needs when a neighbor of he (in whose trailer she lives - and pays the rent for it, of course) tells her that he`s got a lot of debts that not even his wife knows about and that he`s close to suicide. Selma on the other hand tells him as the only living soul about her eyes and her son`s problems. The neighbor tricks Selma and finds where she hides the money for the sons operation, afterwards he steals the money from her and Selma is forced to kill him in order to regain her money for she has no chance to prove that it`s her money really. In the end she is executed by hanging. The film is very dark and depressive, it`s partly a weird musicle where Bjork plays the title role. Certainly the film is good, but not as good as "Dogville".

It took me nearly three years to finally find tickets for this performance, and as a matter of fact, it still was worth it. The play is based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov titled "King, Queen, Knave". Franz arrives from the country in the big town where his rich uncle lives with his wife. A relation ship develops between Franz and his auntie very quickly. The uncle doesn`t notice anything even until the time when lovers decide to kill him in order to gain all his money. What was interesting about the performance was that it was played in a very small room with something like 80 spectators. Most of those spectators didn`t even notice when the play started because at first two out of three actors participating in the play were sitting among the spectators and one of them started talking without a big part of the spectators realising that it was the play already what they heard. Overally the thing was acted supperbly, the material behind the performance is good as well, so no complaints from me.

It makes me wonder how I managed not to see this film until yesterday. Not only did it win a heap of Oscars in the size of... a rather big heap of Oscars, but it had the screenplay written by Tom Stoppard, one of my favourite playwriters, the author of the legendary "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead". The title role is played by Joseph Fiennes, brother of Ralph Fiennes, but there is be no performance of Elton Wilde reading poems by Oscar Wilde in sight. William Shakespeare is young, a bit crazy and in a desperate need to finish his latest play "Romeo and Ethel, the pirates daughter". Yet when he meets Viola - a rich man`s daughter and a passionate lover of theatre - good ol` William falls in love and his never existing story about pirates falls apart. From this film you learn to know what the spectators at theatres around the world want - comedy with dogs and blood, blood, blood. Quoting the film about Ros and Guil: "Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can`t give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They`re all blood, you see." This film isn`t essentially the best I`ve seen in ages but it`s essentially a very good one.