Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

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.

"Double Faced Eels" claim to be the most extravagant band in Latvia. Actually it`s the only thing that separates them from zillions of similar sounding bands. But since the bandmates do nothing except for bragging about their wild sex life and make a homophobic title song for the album you have no chance but to get to know them. "Zilais valis" itself isn`t a bad song by the way. But the main problem with this band is its total lack of originality - every one of their songs seems to have a stolen melody, and the supposedly funny lyrics don`t add much. They play the most simplistic and trivial riffs in the world and claim to be much more than they are in deed. "Cemme" for instance reminds me of I don`t know what but the guitar sound on it is about as fresh as a fish that has been dead for two weeks. "To take breathe" is a shitty Linkin Park meets Nickelback. "16" is a cover of a popular Latvian pop song and it`s not an improvement despite the fact that the original wasn`t even close to a masterpiece. The key point for this band probably is sounding very relaxed and unforced but without some talent you can`t achieve much (if you don`t count fame among Latvian teens). A crappy record that sometimes becomes offensive. And not because I was scared of them making fun of gay people.

How I love the beautiful days when I was young, the grass was green and Queen was keen to crash your spleen but there was no Ween and it was so mean for you to be seen by your school`s dean after you`d been doing something teen. So, I`m not a great poet but I once participated in a competition at poetry.com and my poem was selected for a book of crappy poems by people willing to pay for their poems being published among other pieces of crap that everyone could have written.

The concept as such is quite a fresh one, probably not a fresh one, but still something I never read. Its what women of the worlds most important men might have said. For example, how Desdemona could have told Othello that he was an asshole, or what Maria could have told God about herself being a virgin. Then there`s Martin Luther`s wife complaining for crowds of goodfornothings comming to them for dinner. And what I found the best of the sotireswere the words of Hetaere Megara for the women of Athens in order to stop war - she said that it`s not the lack of sex that will bring their man to victory but too much sex which will bring the end of the war without battles. Nobody listens to her, of course. I also found quite interesting what a dying Donna Laura can write to her beloved Petrarca blaming him for not caring about her at all but just loving a vision of his own, thus making her a masterpiece instead of a living woman. Feministic tendencies are quite strongly expressed in this book but why would I consider that to be such a bad thing? I have no reasons to do so.

One of these days I`m gonna cut all those Germans in tiny, tiny pieces! Man, how they know the best way to dissapoint me! This time I go to the library and I think to myself - now I won`t be getting me some boring and overblown crap, I`ll better stay with comedy. So I take a book with Hitler in Indians` closing on the cover and a title promising "Fun fun Fun!". And what do I get? Is this supposed to be funny? Man, even my change for Aerosmith`s "Falling in Love is Hard When She Pees" is funnier than these stories. Ok, they aren`t offensive, it`s just some sort of altered history which is meant to be a grotesque puzzle but to be it`s just another of those books that I can`t enjoy simply because there`s nothing in it. And it`s a book where you meet some of the biggest villains of the 20th century! It`s so depressing, how on earth can you find Stalin saying that probably some of the people who died in Syberia didn`t deserve it? I don`t find it inventive, I find it dull. And not because I would think - oh, God, how dares this Buch fellow write stuff like that! I don`t give a damn about what he dares and what he dares not. If you ask me, I would care if Hans Christoph Buch came to my place and peed on my rug - even then I would ask him how he dares to do it. I would only ask him how he dares to think that he`s a good writer if the only thing he`s capable of doing is peeing on the rug. So, Mr. Buch, what will you answer me for that?

F.C.Delius goes in this book to write about one of my favorite periods of history - the late 1960s. Here you get the Vietnam war, the hippies, the Beatles and the Stones and a young insecure man who is nearly a poet but fully a loser. He can take part in demonstrations and he can love and hate the States at the same time, but he doesn`t know what to do with a girl. And when he gets a chance to do it he blows it about as good as the fellow in "American Pie" did. Not an outstanding book but not bad either. Forgettable, that`s the word.

It was just like a strike of lighting upon my very head. Very rarely does a book move me half as much as The Collector did (although I didn`t even read it in the original language). The crazy maniac who collects butterfly and locks up a young girl in his basement is some form of that stupid sort of villain that appears in silly books but it`s not about the plot. It`s much more about the psychology of a completely insane person and of one of his victims (and don`t you think that it`s as simple as inducing fear or some sexual perversions - it`s much worse than that). And the ending is especially horrific.

School of rock? No, school of English and English literature. Sylvia Barret is a young teacher that has taken a job at a normal American highschool. Everything would be great, if the school had turned out just as she thought it would. First, the students were of different ages - some of them were still children, while the others were older than she herself. Then were were the problems of discipline and of the poor state of the school. Sylvia tried to do her best - to make the young people read, to understand that she`s not the enemy. And with some students it actually worked, not with all of them, of course. There was this guy Jose Rodrigez whom nobody cared for, there was Lou Martin - a prankster who was very unhappy most of the time, then there was E.Williams who complained all the time that he was being discriminated because he was black. And there was Joe Ferrone - her favourite student who fell in love with her, because she tried to understand him, no matter how low his marks may have been. The book is organised in quite a remarkable manner - consisting from letters, notes dropped in a box, essays by students etc. A positive experience in reading, quite good ideas in terms of education, some comic episodes.