Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

Emir Kusturica should only make movies at home, and not bother to become popular all over the world. I`ve seen four of his movies so far. 3 of them were done in Yugoslavia/Serbia, one - in Hollywood. And guess what? The one with the most popular actors and the biggest budget did nothing for me. And all the rest - they were just top class movies. "Underground" is surely the hardest to bear among those 3. First, because it is a film where war goes on the whole time. The characters are still what you would expect from Kusturica, but the circumstances are just dreadful. Marko Dren and Peter Cerny are two real good friends that are communists and fight against the fascists in WW2, it doesn`t mean of course, that they`d be great people or something like that, on the contrary they are sick weirdos, that don`t care much for the others. But it happens that Peter and a group of his people has to remain underground hiding from the nazis, but Marko decides at the end of the war that he doesn`t need to inform his pals that the war is over, and they remain underground for 15 more years. Marko and Peter meet again in the Yugoslavian war of 1990s, where literary a brother kills a brother and a friend kills a friend. Of course, I read that this film is a support of the Yugoslavian fascist regime of Milosevic - but I also read and knew that already that stupid people are stupid people. And Emir Kusturica ain`t a stupid person, but a great film director, capable of creating a drama of a very high level.

Harry Potter, beat it! You are nothing but a useless second hand magician living in a world of fairies and bullcrap! Now Lemony Snicket`s creation is a really good flick for children. First, it`s the choice of the actors - Jim Carrey as the main villain is superb, and his villainy character is much stronger than that Voldemort loser Rowling gave her hero. He is funny, and that`s the most important thing. Then there`s Jude Law as the narrator, who repeatedly offers the audience to leave in order to see a cartoon about the smallest of elves. There`s also Meryl Streep who plays the good aunt, and Billy Conolly (man who sued god) as the snake scientist. The plot is not particulary smart, of course, but it`s fun to watch at, and it`s more inventive that Harry Potter for sure. The Baudelaire children - the main heroes - can`t escape from their unfortunes by waving a stupid magic wand, `cos they don`t have one. Of course, this ain`t no Shakespeare, this even ain`t no "Lord of the Rings" but as a film for children this certainly is a very solid example of the genre.

This is a film that you are bound to know. It`s the highest acclaimed work of Martin Scorcese and one of the most famous films with Robert de Niro as the anchorman. Travis is a Vietnam veteran who suffers from loneliness and who can`t sleep. Therefore he works as a taxi driver. Being dissatisfied with his world, with his life, he goes a bit over the roof. He tries to start a romance with Nancy - an activist for a president elections candidate Charles Palantine, but fails miserably after inviting her to a cinema to watch a Swedish porn movie. Somehow it happens that she is not a fan of this type of movies. After that Travis buys a lot of guns and starts training for cleaning up the city of New York. Why does he do that? Just because he doesn`t like the scum of the city. And he even manages to shoot something like 4 people, and even become some sort of a local hero in the end. What is good about this film? I guess, the acting is quite good, the characters are realistic - especially the one portrayed by De Niro himself. But what`s not that great? At least I could see why this film could be considered that good - it`s level of tension is pretty low and it seems to go for a very, very long time. Maybe I didn`t get something but I wouldn`t call this a real masterpiece, just a good movie.

American Beauty, American History X, American Pie, American Wedding, American Psycho, The Quiet American... the list could go on and on forever. What has this Splendor thing got that the other films don`t have? It certainly is the embolishment of the American dream, although in a bit acward way. First, it`s a film based on true facts, and it even features the prototypes of the films characters. Harvey Pekar is a middle-aged loser who works as a filing clerk, has been left by his second wife and has very little pleasure in life. His interests include collecting old records and comic books. I personally never got what`s so great about them comic books, but I don`t care. And one day he decides that he can start a comic book of his own - not about some superhero but about the average loser - himself. He can`t draw, off course, but there are other people who can. And he becomes massively popular, not that it makes him happy or anything, cos` he`s still a loser. He even gets married and he could be happy if he wanted to. But he doesn`t want anything like that. There`s also his friend Toby who`s a genuine nerd, and who`s proud for that. This film is somewhat similar to "Napoleon Dynamite" - in being an obscure comedy about a loser, although it`s less obscure for sure. And it also reminded me of a Simpsons episode called "Angry dad" - where Bart started drawing comics about Homer, and also became successful at that. This film is certainly worth watching, but not particulary interesting.

I`m getting a bit bored writing long reviews for things I have no interest in. This is a typical example - stories by a modern Latvian author, most of them have very little interest for a person that`s not a fan of Latvian literature. Of course, if you enjoy stories about the Latvian countryside or you are a major fan of descriptions about old women in a sauna and what advantages a big clitoris gives you, you won`t enjoy this very much. Probably this book isn`t about flat old breasts and sending SMS messages, but this still is pretty boring. There was a single one interesting story in this book - it`s entitled "The years of love" and it`s about a man who awaits a blue centaurus and by doing that misses his own wedding. But apart from that there ain`t very much to speak about.

Paraquoting a review that "Spinal Tap" got to its album "Shark Sandwich" ("Shit Sandwich") this is Legally Shit 2, Blonde Shit 2 - or whatever you want. 17 minutes of this film was more than enough to stop watching it.

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.

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.

Once Vladimir Voinovich was a very important writer in this part of the world - he was one of the so-called dissidents, he wrote about the private Chonkin - a legend in terms of underground literature, he was even extradicted from his native country. But nowadays he`s basically an old fart. Ok, that is a tough thing to say about an old man who has suffered quite much in his life, but it`s still true. This book, for example, it`s basically autobiographical and it`s bound to show how much he has gone through in his life. Well, and how much is that? Not that much actually. Ok, he had some hard time when nobody published his works in the USSR, he had no telephone, a small apartment- but he didn`t starve for he had money from books published in the West, he had a loving wife, he wasn`t physically hurt - although he claims that he was poisoned once and even writes about it for something like 150 pages, but I guess there were millions of people in the USSR who had it tougher than he did, only most of them weren`t as talented as he was, therefore their sufferings weren`t worth that much. Ok, he doesn`t claim to be the only one who had his problems with the regime but he surely seems to be quite a brave character who went through snow and rain (I meant to say that instead of fire and ice) in order to achieve something. Overblown, too much elderly sexuality like only a really old pervert could write, and not particulary much to say - that`s all this book can offer, by the way - I have no idea what good this book is already now - it`s been 15 years since the Union collapsed and Soviet bureaucracy doesn`t seem to be a problem to me nowadays.

It`s been a many long year since I read this book (at the moment of the writing that is), because this is one of the pieces that came into the zone of no return when my computer crashed last summer. The date of reading is probably wrong as well, but I don`t really care for that. This is a story of a long time communist named Aglaya Revkina that is a fan of Mr. Stalin and even organized a monument of his in the little village where she lived (or was it a small town? i don`t care that much about it) and when Stalin became unpopular she even held the monument in her own apartmenet. There was also some guy who did some blowing up for local criminals in modern (post-soviet) Russia who lived in the same house with Aglaya, then there were some modern stalinists that started visiting Aglaya, to be honest, that`s the most of what I remember from this book. Also I remember that the first part was somewhat interesting, but as we were heading towards the conclusion the book became less and less appealing to me - and Mr. Voinovich became more and more traditional in the sense that many modern Russian writers do the same gangster-criminal style, although I did get that his main target probably was showing that a criminal is worse than a communist, for a communist at least has some ideals, still most communists are criminals and have no ideals (yeah, there were some scenes with people that at first glorified Stalin, than spat at him and the glorified him once again). Not to mention that the only time in her life when Aglaya had an orgasm was by looking at the father of the Soviet Union in person.