Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

Some people call this the best album of the sixties. Most people (of those that know that such a band called "Love" ever existed) call this one of the greatest albums of all time. Until rather recently this band was completely forgotten but all of a sudden it arose to popularity (just like the Zombies did). Of course, this is a record that could have come out only in the summer of love - it has warm guitar sounds, stylistically "Love" is more similar to Beach Boys than to Beatles. Lyrical subjects are quite usual for 1967 - the album opener even has the line "I could love almost everyone", the songs are pretty orchestrated. Highlights include "The Daily Planet", "Live and let live" and "You Set the Scene". Music like that doesn`t happen anymore, and it`s sad.

This is a film that`s mostly known due to a soundtrack done by Pink Floyd at the time when the band was out of the Barrett domination period and was still looking for a new style. I guess there`s no need to describe the album here, for this actually is a film and not a music video. The story is following: Stefan, a young German, goes to Paris where he meets a young and sexy American chick Estelle. They fall in love easily and go together to Ibiza, where Estelle teaches the young man the pleasures and pains of taking drugs. They start off with marihuana, but it`s heroin that does the trick. And what`s the trick? Addiction of course. Stefan wants more and more (hence the title) yet he can`t get more and he can`t escape either. In the end he ODs and dies, just like you`d expect it from a film from late 60s, early seventies. In terms of style it`s quite similar to "Zabriskie point" and other movies my Antonioni, as well as to the French new wave, especially that goes for the abrupt ending which is a typical characteristic for films by Truffaut, Godard and other crazy fellows. The weirdest thing, apart from the music, was the language of the film. Barbet Schroeder is an Irani born German, Stefan is German, but he speaks with some accent in English most of the time, so does Estelle, yet some characters speak German between them, while others use French and still some others prefer Spanish. For me it was quite complicated, not being able to understand the Spanish and French parts (and non-removable subtitles in French didn`t help much with that). As for the film - it`s your basic story of sex, drugs and rock`n`roll and what you have in the end. By the way, it features a bit of Lesbian stuff, a thing I found to be strange for a film from this age. Even "Deep Throat" didn`t have that (as far as I remember). I guess, there`s no need to watch film like this, unless you want to be making out in the process or unless you`re a fan of Pink Floyd. Since I sadly had to skip the first point myself, I had to do with me being a fan, which was ok, but not as good, of course.

Terry Gilliam certainly takes his time in directing films. In thirty years that he`s been in the business he has directed just 11 films, with two out of those being Monty Python films, while the two most recent films came out just last year. I am now actually pretty close to having seen all of his works - only "Tideland" (the latest film that hasn`t been actually released yet) and "Twelve monkeys" remain on my "to see" list, so I guess I can call myself pretty comprehensively educated in Terry Gilliam`s filmmaking. I had quite a lot of trouble getting this film in question, for it isn`t particulary popular and the first version of it I got was in Russian. Then I said to myself - who on earth would want to watch a Terry Gilliam film in some crappy translation? Not me, for sure. So I deleted it and completely forgot about this. But now, almost a year after my last unsuccessful attempt to watch it I managed to get this film once again, and this time in much better quality. Alas, I was hugely dissapointed when I found out that this version of the film was in fact... in French. Damn! Anyhow I decided to watch it even in French, for I doubted that I ever would find an English version. But some ten minutes into the film I thought to myself - why don`t I check whether the film doesn`t have a second audio track. And it did have a separate audio track in English indeed. And there was much rejoicing. So now I`ve seen "Baron Munchausen" in English. What is this film about? It`s about Munchausen, of course - the fool who tells his stories about strange adventures he has had. Now he`s old and wrinkled and his companions are just like him, but his heart is still young and still burning and he`s still capable of great deeds. And the world`s fastest man, Bernard, is played by Eric Idle. That`s positive. The film isn`t just funny, just like any Gilliam comedy it leaves you with questions and who cares that this is supposed to be a film for the entire family. In fact it`s quite similar to some other Gilliam`s works - most notably "Jabberwocky", "Time bandits" and "The Brothers Grimm". I can`t say that it`s the absolutely best film of his career, but it`s good enough for me.

Terry Gilliam of Monty Python directed this movie with John Cleese, Michael Palin and Sean Connery among members of the cast. The story goes in the same direction as the one of Labyrinth - it`s some sort of a fairy-tale about a young boy who joins a group of dwarves posessing a map of time-holes in the history which they use for commiting robberies. Napoleon, Mychenae, Robbin Hood, Titanic - that`s the sort of things they`re after while the Supreme Being and Evil are after them. Somehow the film didn`t work for me. If it was supposed to be a comedy (which it I guess was) it wasn`t very funny - at least not even close to what I could expect from Terry Gilliam. If it was supposed to be a story for children (which I guess it was) it wasn`t very much entertaining. Michael Palin and John Cleese are great as usually, Sean Connery has a boring role and he doesn`t deliver anything special. The ogre is quite good and some parts of the dialogue are also pretty strong. But overall - not better than Labyrinth, and I didn`t really like that movie in the first place.

It`s a film with David Bowie as one of the main stars. Basically it`s a story for children, a horror story probably but for children anyway. A young girl wants her little brother to be taken away by goblins and when he is she suddenly realises that it`s not what she wants and that she must rescue him. David Bowie is the Goblin king, and he goes around by the name Jareth. Most of the other characters are portrayed by dolls and not all of them are extremely well developed. What can I say about the film? First, the dialogues are unconvincing, heck, even I could have written something like that. And David Bowie is not a great actor, to be honest, in this film he`s not even a great musician - what we hear is some sort of 80`s pseudo-disco pop trash good ol` David was practicing at the time. On the positive side - nothing against the plot and visually it`s not the worst one could expect from the 80`s. Watchable but not more.

The beginning was pretty impressive - as Oscar Wilde says "I want to a pop idol". Cool, I say. So was the first scene from the seventies - all the running hipsters and the completely out of place looking Jack Ferry who`s on his way to participate in a silly hoax. Brian Slade (David Bowie lookalike) being shot also was a part of the good things to come out of the movie. Sadly that`s it. In the duration the film has very little to offer - there`s the bisexual Slade who becomes a glam star, Jack Wilde - a mixture of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed who looks like Curt Cobain and is also bisexual. What else? There`s a journalist in the 80s who wants to find out what really happened to Brian Slade after his false death. It may look good on paper but even for a huge fan of rock music it is not a very good movie. First, the image sucks, `cause who can really stand that ugly glam style? Bisexual shit doesn`t really confront me, for I don`t find it that special. The music could be better and so could be the plot. Probably the worst take on rock music in my experience. I haven`t seen `Sid and Nancy` though.

It seems to be a cult movie, although I don`t know what`s so great about it. Basically what we have here is a horror-comedy which is not very scary and not very funny most of the time. Some S-Mart dude who has cut off his hand and replaced it with a chainsaw gets inside a timewarp and finds himself in the fourteenth century where he must fight army of the dead. What stands out? Monsters (the so called `dead`) are made out of rubber. Nice, isn`t it? There are some skeletons (lots of them in fact) and they move something like one frame per second. If that`s OK with you in some scenes where the skeletons are not too close to the camera it can be clearly seen that they are indeed men in grey overalls with bones painted on them. I have to admit that at least some part of this must be done on purpose. But I still think that terrible acting and silly phrases by the leading character Ash (played by Bruce Campbell) are not entirely a gag, for the same actor had worked on the prequels of the film which were plain horror movies and I guess he must have acted like that in those films as well.

I don`t call myself a great fan of science fiction therefore I prefer books that concern with the behaviour of human beings and the ethical part of the possible futures to the ones that describe some imaginary high technology in its finest details. This book in front of me tells a few stories from the `upcoming` history of evolution of robots. A robot-nanny, a robot that doesn`t believe in being created by humans, a robot becoming a governor etc., etc. Of course it`s not about the robots (or probably it`s not only abou the robots). It`s about the way people misjudge things, can`t accept something that`s different from them, think too much of themselves - a very popular subject in science fiction books. And still this one remains among the best achievements in the category.

It`s about Jack the Ripper. Pretty dull by my standarts: there is a huge conspiracy which involves the Freemasons - and that kind of stuff is vomit-inducing. It also features a love story between Johnny Depp and a prostitute - which is absolutely unnecessary. Not later than in the middle of the film it becomes perfectly clear, which one of the characters is the real murderer. No good movie, I say.

I can`t really believe a Latvian band recorded this album. Hospitalu iela is a relatively unknown band, but this record absolutely rocks. What does it sound like? A bit of pop, a bit of rock, a bit of reaggae, a bit of national elements - something like that. Most of the songs are easy to memorise and sing along, but that doesn`t mean that they are primitive. The arrangements are nice, I especially dig the violins. The best songs? "Par kiosku", "Vilcene", "Sinepes".