Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

Emir Kusturica is considered to be a great filmmaker, and after this film I have absolutely no doubt that he really is one. "Life is a Miracle" is a film about the Bosnian war in early 1990s but it`s probably the weirdest film about war I`ve ever seen. Like an army man says to the main hero: "This isn`t your war or my war, it`s the war of some idiots." (or something similar to that). Luka is a railroad man, although there are no trains on the railroad, his wife is a half-crazy opera singer and his son wants to play football at Partizan Belgrade. But the war changes their lifes dramatically - Jadranka goes completely crazy and runs off with some Hungarian accordeon player, Milos (the son) is drafted and taken war prisoner, but Luka has a war prisoner of his own - the beautiful Sabaha that`s given to him planning to exchange her for Luka. But it proves that he falls in love with her and doesn`t want no change. The film doesn`t show the good people on one side, the bad - on the other, Luka doesn`t have anything to do in his position with Milosevic or anything like that. The film is apolitical. It doesn`t show any battles. It`s very warm and heartfelt. It made me cry, if you want to know. This certainly wasn`t the first very dramatic comedy I`d seen over the past years, but this certainly ranked among the best films I`ve seen - the images, the sounds, the characters, the dialogues - it all made perfectly good sense.

When I was a little baby-boy I used to read a lot of books for children. "The Chronicles of Narnia" was among the books I read. Today I am not a little boy anymore, therefore I don`t read books of this kind too much. Still there is a big inner child inside me which makes me watch every movie designed for little children and happily shout how great it is. I will not give you the story of this film for I`ve already done that on the record for the book of the same title, so I`ll just state how the film compares to the book. First, there`s a much longer description of World war 2 in the film than it was in the book. Ah, who cares about this stuff anyway. I don`t care, so you don`t care, so nobody cares. Hiphop rules!

Pentaloģijas par autostopu Visumā otrā daļa atbild uz vienu no dzīves pamatjautājumiem - kur mēs varētu ieēst pusdienas? Viens no atbilžu variantiem ir Milliways - Restorāns Visuma galā. Tā ir vieta, pēc kuras apmeklējuma nav jāuztraucas par paģirām nākamajā rītā, jo nākamā rīta nebūs. Tā ir vieta, kur vari satikt dīvaiņus no dažādākajiem Visuma nostūriem. Tā ir vieta, kur tu vari apēst dzīvnieku, kas speciāli tiek audzēts tāds, ka tas vēlas tikt apēsts.

Neviens nopietns Makkas fans šo ierakstu neuzskatīs par vienu no viņa labākajiem veikumiem. Es neesmu nopietns Makkas fans, bet tāpat to par tādu neuzskatu.

Back in the 60s the Stones were considered to be a dirty and angry rock band and not a bunch of old bafoons as it is the state of the arts today. And no wonder why - who else if not a band of angry misfits would perform such songs as "Around and Around" (a cover of Chuck Berry) or "Suzie Q"? Ok, that`s not really heavy and that`s not really brave but maybe it was in 1964. On this record the Stones don`t really sound like the Stones we love the most - for they write little of their own material and mostly stick to the rhythm and blues patterns without daring to pull off some less expected numbers. The performance is usually quite good but the music itself is a bit too powerless for me - it`s a thing I find perfectly adequate for a band like "The Hollies" but the Stones seem better suited for being angry than for being calm. "It`s all over now" is the best song on the album but it`s a bit too poppy for my first day at work in 2006.

Droši vien Ingmars Bergmans varētu pretendēt uz pirmo vietu nominācijā "Pasaulē konservatīvākais kino režisors". Savā ziņā viņš ir vienveidīgāks par Vudiju Alenu. Kā tas izpaužas?

Tā īsti es nesaprotu, kāpēc Kobeina atraitnes ieraksts iekļuva manā ierakstu krājumā. Es nekad neesmu aiz sajūsmas spiedzis, iedomājoties par Kortniju Lovu.

Now we are hooked on classics. And who can be a bigger British classic than Mr. Dickens? Only the metre Shakespear himself, but he`s too goddamn old. David Copperfield once was a sensation, and it does have its strong points even now. In this huge novel we get to follow the life of a boy who has it tough from the beginning. His father doesn`t come back from the war before David is born. His mother marries a villain who driver her into the grave, and leads his stepson into physical work at a very small age. David escapes and runs away to his grandaunt, a very interesting person, who because of some strange reason dislikes donkeys more than anything (how can a person be so rude not to like those adorable creatures)! After that his life improves a little, David goes to a good school, meets the Nora - the girl of his dreams (who`s quite childish and stupid), marries her, has problems because of a guy named Uriah Heep ("July Morning" - you got to know that song), his wife dies, he marries the one woman that had loved him his entire life (Agness, the daughter of an influential lawyer that once offered David a place to live). The ending is certainly banal - the good characters live happily ever after, the bad ones are punished (even the ones that certainly would have escaped from that), but that goes without saying for such a moral work. But it`s still worth reading, especially if you have a good taste in classical literature.

Latvians and comedy? It`s not like fish and chips, it`s more like fish and meat. Or I don`t know what and I don`t know what. Ok, Maris Bishofs went to Israel and spent there a few years but he still comes from Latvia. At this exhibition there were his drawings done over a period of something like fourty years - starting with the work back home for a magazine named "Dadzis" and including work back home again for our biggest daily newspaper "Diena". Basically his work is done as carricatures. The technique is very simple - I guess I would be able to draw like that. But what he has is a massive amount of ideas, of creativity and certainly of wit. The level of details is extremely low - Bishofs doesn`t draw what you can see everywhere around you, and if he does that he does it in a minimalistic manner giving you a perfect impression of what life is like. And what is life like? It`s not particulary great, there are banks and casinos everywhere, people ar reduced to numbers and have about as much individuality as birds flying south. I enjoyed this exhibition like I rarely enjoy something. It`s in the following style - you laugh and think at the same time: damn, is it sad! A wonderful experience for sure.

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.