Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

One of the worst if not the worst film in the category "teen movie" or stupid american comedy, as a matter of fact. A film that features BOTH Leslie Nielsen and Pamela Anderson just can be good. And all those stupid tit and butt jokes and being hit by a shovel in the face are not what seems to be total fun to me.

You gotta be crazy even calling this thing to be short stories. These aren`t even stories - simply some works that Kafka had started to write but never managed to complete. Some of them are but a few sentences long, and don`t show no sign of Kafkas genius, just like you could expect such stories to be. One of the longest stories which seems to be at least something has even a fragment that says "a few pages missing" and that isn`t a joke from Kafka, simply the texts are missing. Great! Then why don`t I rate these stories lower than Britney Spears rates Michael Boltons imaginary stepbrother Ricky? Because there`s one story that lives up to Kafkas fame and is interesting to read, partly even hilarious and absolutely unconventional. It`s about some school teacher who claims to have discovered a gigantic mole, and about another guy trying to drag the worlds attention towards the discoverer of this phenomena. Of course, nobody ever cares about this mole thing, but at least those two guys start a conflict because they have different opinions towards the mole that even they themselves don`t try to catch or to prove seriously its existence. You can read this one story but the rest isn`t worth even looking at it. That guy whom Kafka asked to burn his works would have done a good job if he had burned those stupid unfinished stories.

Buttercup is a simple young girl, and her Westley is a simple young man. When he goes on a trip to gain some easy money and never comes back Buttercup agrees to marry the evil prince Humperdink. But Westley isn`t dead and he`s ready to fight the seven nations army with his bare hands in order to regain the Buttercup of his heart. This is a fairy-tale, you can be sure about that. And this is supposed to be a superb fairy-tale - it`s in the IMDB top 250 greatest films of all time and has a perfect 100% freshness in the Rottentomatoes. But somehow I don`t find this film to be that good. Ok, it has some funny moments, but they seem to be known to me. Most likely because I could have already seen this film before, I`m almost sure that it`s true. Still, it`s not more than a family movie, despite the fact that the dialogues are perfectly designed. The special effects are about as cool as they could be in a film that came out in 1987. That`s not too much of a complaint, of course, but I can`t call this film a great masterpiece of any sort. The characters are developed about as good as they can be in a fairy tale. Oh, there`s one more disturbing film - the main story happens actually in a book an old man reads to his grandson who`s sick and has to remain in bed (by the way, the grandson is played by the fellow who later became the leading star in the marvelous TV series "The wonder years"). I don`t mean to say that this film is no good, but I don`t get why it should be as good as some people tend to think. Oh, come to think of it - there`s one really weird thing - Westley turned to be Edgar in "Ella Enchanted" - you see, in just 17 years a perfectly nice young man turns into an evil uncle. God works in mysterious ways, doesn`t he?

The second part from Chapek`s so called "Trilogy" of novels didn`t impress me as much as the first one. Although I have to admit that it had a much more promising content. While Hordubal was just a variation of a real crime commited somewhere in Czechoslovakia, "The Meteor is a purely philosophical piece. A strange man has survived a plane crash and sent to a hospital without a chance of ever coming out of coma again. Three different observers create their own versions about this man`s life - they have no real facts about him for his face is gone with the fire that happened on the plane, he has no documents and he isn `t concious. First a nurse has a dream where mister X tells her what a sinner he has been in his life. Then we have an oracle who just happens to be lying next door to the Meteor who has some visions about the man yet he can`t give no exact information about the man`s life for as he says himself he cannot look at insignificant details in a life, he observes the life as a whole. And in the end a writer writes a story how Meteor became the right hand of a mafia man somewhere in Cuba and how he lost everything. Whether any of these stories contains any truth about the hero isn`t mentioned. What`s true what`s imagination - that`s left for the reader`s imagination. Why did I like this novel less than the first part? Mainly because there`s too much of theorie and too few of practics in here.

This is where I reach the conclusion of Chapek`s "Trilogy". I still don`t know what all these books have in common. Maybe - that you can look differently at everything and that your conclusions cannot be separated from your person. Maybe - that no man is plain as a plank. In that case "An ordinary life" is the right conclusion to the trilogy. Its main hero is a man who knows that he`s going to die soons and he writes his lifestory so it would be a perfect example of an ordinary life. Only by writing it he finds out that he isn`t as ordinary as it may have seemed to him. He finds out that there are several different personalities within him and that he doesn`t like some of them at all. And without all those different personalities, including a simple man, a distrophic, a poet, a hero, a pervert, an ambitious ladderclimber and others he wouldn`t be what he is. Yet he isn`t really sure whether he likes himself for some of his personalities are quite ugly indeed. It would probably be right for me to give here his biography - he was a son of a carpenter, he was very good at school, yet he had no friends there. The went to some good school and started to study at a university. But when he shared a room with a fat poet he forgot about studies and became a rebel, an alcoholic and a supposedly bad poet. When his father refused to send him more money he left his poetry and took a job on a railroad. There he made some sort of a career, married the daughter of the director of his railway station, did some sabotage during WW1 and got a job at some ministry in the new republic of Czechoslovakia. And then he died. Simple? Isn`t it. But some of the pieces of his life didn`t match the pattern he wanted to find everywhere - for example, his short love with poetry, which was characterised by a young man calling him some 40 years later the Czech Rimbaud. And then there was an episode where he had sex at the age of 8 with a gypsy girl.

Hey, this is a fairy-tale! It is not based on true facts, if you want to know! Like a fellow I know said: "Sweet Mushu the honey baby!" Ok, I don`t know the fellow who said that. But I do know the guy who called this film a remake of Shrek with live actors. There was no donkey, though. And that`s a big minus. Damn, how could anyone forget about the donkey? Still, there`s an elf named Slannen who plays the donkey part. I think, of course, that a donkey would have done a much better job, but it`s not me who`s opinion you`re after. No, sir-ee! Ella has a gift from her fairy godmother - she has the gift of obedience - and if someone tells her to do something she does just that. And I mean literary! Since this is a film for children nobody orders her to perform a fisting or golden rain, but she still does lots of silly stuff. She falls in love with the beautiful prince Charmont but his evil uncle Edgar wants them both to die. Yeah, and that Edgar fellow has a perfectly terrible CGI snake. Man, even I could create a snake like this for a couple of beers and a free edition of 3D Studio Max! Ok, I don`t drink beer, but you get the point. Ella has to stop Edgar from killing her and her pretty boy (who ain`t that pretty at all, if you ask me) and find the fairy to take her marvelous gift back. What`s good about this film is that despite not having a donkey (a very stupid decision) it has a Monty Python member Eric Idle. Whopee! I`d probably prefer this film not having anything but Eric Idle, and a donkey, of course, but a bit of Eric Idle and no donkey is surely better than Richard Gere having sex with Julia Roberts. So, this film is okay, if not better than that. A fairy tale with a silly plot and silly actors, but that`s all right with me.

I don`t know why but I thought myself a fan of European animation. Maybe it had to do with me liking the collection of short European films I watched at the same place something like 9 months ago, maybe I just wanted to prove myself alternative. As for being alternative - the K.Suns cinema in Riga is the perfect place to see "alternative" young people. Most of the spectators at events in there usually look so out of reality that you can`t probably imagine how funny they are. In short - it`s a place where you`d meet a lot of people who look worse than bums and are proud for it. I got tickets for six hours of French animation but neither I nor my girlfriend had enough mental strength to stay until the end of it. Therefore we saw only two out of five programs of animation films.

Lai būtu skaidrs, par ko ir runa - tā ir otrā daļa Franču animācijas filmu festivālā, kuru ar Lienču apmeklējām iekš K-Suņa un kur tusēja daudz tā saukto šallaiņo.

This here is a higly contraversial Russian play. Some people claim it to be a piece of trash that one will never remember about except for its dirty scenes, while others compare it to the best works of modern and classical literature. What`s my judgement? I`d like to tell that the truth lies in between, but it`s not the case. What does this play tell us? There`s a 14-year old boy who makes some things out of plasticine, for example, a huge penis. He has a hard time at school because of his smoking and because of him being an orphan living with his grandmother. He has a friend who pretends that he get laid all the time but that is not true, of course. Almost everyone in the play uses a rude language. And perversion is on every corner. At the very beginning there`s a coffin with a child in a room which the main hero enters, and an elderly woman starts slinging him for coming too close to her in order trying to rub his dinky against her. And later he and his friend are raped by two drunk men. Yeah, and in the end the main hero is also killed by one of them. Great? I don`t think so. The only parallel I can find for this play is "400 blows" by F.Truffaud (that`s a film actually but who cares) only this play here has nothing to offer except for a child touching a womans womb and the hurt of a penis entering his anus. I guess, "this ain`t no technological breakdown, oh no, this is the road to hell".

Oh, dear, it`s the Coen brothers again! And this time they happen not having got George Clooney in the cast, but they somehow managed to sneak Tom Hanks in. What`s weird is Tom`s beard. I never imagined that he could have a thing like that on his face. But - he can! And it looks good. I gotta admit that at the beginning I thought he was the devil himself who went to ask a room from this nice old black lady, but I was proven wrong. He and his comrades from different backgrounds were planning taking a whole lot of money from a riverboat casino. And everything would be good if it weren`t for the black lady. The needed to kill her but not one of them could. Of course, there were circumstances to that, but she still happened to survive. What`s interesting about this film is that despite it being set in modern times of hip-hop most of the characters (except for the one played by Marlon Wayans of the Wayans clan) seem to be living in a world of yesterday. There`s a professor of philosophy (Hanks), there`s a mountaineer, an asian general and a stupid football player on the squad, and Marlon Wayans, of course. This film is somewhat similar to "O brother where art thou" in the fact that no one really gets the money in the end, but while that other film was inspired by "The Odyssey", this film here has a lot to do with Edgar Allan Poe. It`s funny, of course, because Coen brothers don`t do shit, it`s entertaining, probably it doesn`t have too much value, but it`s ok.