Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

Original review: A bit similar to `The Rules of Attraction` only this one shows more naked bodies. Two young guys send their girlfriends on a trip to Italy while they themselves go on a roadtrip with a woman that has discovered that her lover is cheating on her. I wouldn`t call the film bad but it didn`t impress me either. It`s not one of those pieces where you think about it after watching the film for a few days. I don`t think that it has any message, not that I desperately needed one. It rarely gets boring but still there is not so much to tell about the film.

It`s the first Hitchkock movie I`ve seen and it`s good. The main point is in the fact that from the very beginning you know who the murderer is - it is not a detective, it`s much more a kind of anti-detective. The characters are nice, so is the camera work, and despite knowing what will happen, it`s still amusing to watch.

For a more detailed information see "askjeeves.com". Who is that Jeeves fellow you will ask me? Jeeves is the greatest butler in the world. Even if you`re a stupid and careless young gentleman just like Bertie Wooster, Jeeves will help you to get out of all the trouble you find yourself involved in. In this book though there`s no Wooster insight, because Jeeves works for lord Rochester while his master is being taught to make his own bed and to clean his own schoes at a special school for young gentlemen. Since lord Rochester is close to going bankrupt with the help of Jeeves he starts the career of a bookmaker, and everything goes well until a hunter from India wins a lot of money that lord Rochester can`t provide him. What can the lord do? He wants to sell his old and ruined mansion, to marry a nice girl, but it`s not as easy as it seems to be. The possible buyer of the mansion is a woman he once knew and because of that lords girlfriend gets angry, the hunter also comes to claim his money - it`s a deep paddle of shit where lord Rochester finds himself. Luckily there`s Jeeves around who can save the day. I like the humour of this novel, it`s traditional Wodehouse style and at some moments you won`t laugh only if you can`t read. I especially like when lords relative discusses with his wife where lord Ro-er might have money from, and suggests that it must be blackmailing, and tells that he would also start a career of gentleman blackmailer, if he had no family. And what`s also good - why did Jeeves leave lord Rochester in the end - because Bertie Wooster was thrown out of school after he got a prize for knitting when it turned out that he had used a trot - hidden an old woman in his room.

I gotta admit that I`m a worthless prick who just pretends that he has some sort of good taste, intellect or whatever. Actually I`m just your everyday bum who chooses the Beatles over the Incredible Ubercool Underground band. And I also choose classical music over the crazy shite you can probably call modern classical. Although probably it`s about the performance and not about the actual piece. Nevermind, "Jenufa" is an opera by the czech composer Leos Janacek, and is supposed to very good. To me it wasn`t - I am not a particular fan of people singing without any sign of a melody and with no connection between the music and the singing. I also rarely find it entertaining when the music sounds as if it was intentionally played very badly, out of tune and by drunk musicians. The story of the opera is also not particulary smart - Jenufa is a young woman that`s become pregnant from her almost groom, but she has a jealous guy running after her. Anyhow, nobody except for the child is killed, but at least everyone lives unhappy everafter. Great, optimistic, ain`t it? I left before the last part. Who gives a damn?

I somehow didn`t like this book as much as others Frisch had written. The plot is quite strange, off course, an American man gets arrested by the Switzerlands customs police for having a false password. He claims that his name is White and that he isn`t a certain Anatol Stiller (the quiet man, if you judge strictly by the name). The book is written as White`s diary in his unsuccessful attempts to convince the police that he is a murderer who has just returned from Mexico and not the supposedly involved in spying Mr. Stiller. Still everyone who knows Stiller, including his wife seem to be convinced that White and Stiller are the same person. In the end it proves that everyone was right, although I guess Stiller in the past was even more of a bastard than the murderer White.

Was I out of my mind when I decided to watch this film? Supposedly, yes. How can it otherwise be explained that I gave the creator of "Bad Education", "All About My Mother" and "Talk to Her" one more chance? Ok, I do have another explanation for that - all of those films weren`t bad at all. And I thought - maybe when Almadovar was younger he didn`t make movies as full of perversion as he does nowadays. Now that was a wrong presumption. In "Kika" Almadovar uses most of his typical scenario elements:

I was just too lazy to review this earlier, for I had worse things to do, but no I can state my case clearly, if you want to listen. This film is done by Clint Eastwood, and he got a very good actor to play the leading male role in his film - a guy who once was popular in westerns, you know - shooting dice, taming wild horses and loving them big breasted women of the wild west. You want to know who this fine fellow is? It`s a guy named Clint Eastwood. Oh, he`s got the same name like the director! It`s so cool, man! Oh, no, it IS the director! Anyhow, Hilary Swank is a young (almost) wanna-be boxer and Clint Eastwood starts training her, despite the fact that he never trains girls. And Hilary almost becomes the champion of the world, but after an illegal punch by a german prostitute she falls into a coma never to fight again. By the rules of boxing in movies she is called the loser of the final battle, by the way, and the chick that delivered the illegal punch retains the title. You know how it goes. If the ending were a lucky one, you could say that this was a remake of Rocky. Although Eastwood does dig deeper, and he has Morgan Freeman on the cast. But even if Hilary Swank never became world champion she at least got her second Oscar in 5 years, despite the fact that she still holds only two good films under her belt. But the Academy works in mysterious ways, you know. By the way, this film is quite good but certainly not exceptional.

Once again I find that my factoid is far from complete - I`m absolutely sure that I`ve read another of Boyd`s novels - "The New Confessions" - when my factoid was already online, yet I can`t seem to find a trace of that book anywhere around here. Probably it was one of the books I read before my computer broke down and it somehow got lost when I tried to recapture everything that was missing. Anyhow now it`s too late... no, maybe not - I eventually will add that book to the factoid although I remember very little from it. But enough about Boyd, it`s time to talk about Boyd. There was one fellow named Boyd who played for the Scottish national football team, Tom Boyd, if I`m not mistaken, yet he has absolutely nothing to do with this book.

I bought "Daniel Martin" when I was in London something like one and a half years ago. My logic was the following - a huge book that`s written by the author of the masterful "The Collector" - how can I deny myself the pleasure of reading it? Yet upon my return I somehow just couldn`t force myself to start reading it - it is very thick after all and I usually prefer smaller books. Yeah, I know that it sucks judging a book by its size but I have been observing a tendency that big books tend to be interesting in less cases than smaller books - because it`s hard to maintain a high level of a tight story for something like 700 pages.

Do you believe that people are vain indeed or do they just pretend to be? On the trip through the most classical works of English literature we make our stop at the great novel "Vanity Fair", which the author himself called "novel without a hero". Is it true that there isn`t a hero? In the sense of a central male figure - yes, it is true, there isn`t a man whom you would call a hero, especially judging them by their behaviour - there`s Joseph Sedley - a naive and not particulary smart coward, there George Osbourne - a rich guy who doesn`t really know what to do about his own life and there`s William Dobbin who`s at least smart but who acts like a fool in love. And about the female stars - Becky Sharp who marries a possible heir of big bucks is an interesting character that`s able to use her female powers to gain control over men. But she`s considered to be the bad person, while Amelia Sedley - a whiny silly chick that loves her one and only George despite him being such a fool, is thought to be the true positive heroess a novel needs. Disgusting! And the novel is extremely long - there are many characters, every single one of them does lots of things (except for Amelia that keeps on crying the whole time thus making me want her death). The only reason to read this is to improve the overall level of education, but if you want to read an interesting it`s not the best choice. Oh, I forgot - the idea about the "vanity fair" of high society life is a good one, and the last sentence about the puppets being put back in their boxes is also good.