Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

This is one of the cases when I watched a film just because I had nothing better to do. It was late in the evening on Saturday night and my wife (what a silly word to describe my girlfriend!) was asleep in a hotel room not far from the centre of Berlin, but I just didn`t feel like sleeping. I hadn`t thought of taking a book along, so I started watching this silly film that I had already seen in 2003 when it was still new. Actually I thought the film was a bit older but that doesn`t really matter. Basically it`s nothing more but a remake of the first part. A huge accident has to happen at the beginning of the film but one of the people involved saves the rest from dying, thus damaging the death`s plan. So death tries to get back at all those people for they already are on the list. The most interesting thing about this film is the various deaths of characters, mostly caused by household appliances. As for the rest - who gives a damn about the story in a film like this - it`s probably the accident death equivalent to a porn movie. As for the deaths they are planned masterfully, as for the rest - it`s a typical forgettable film that noone should care about.

The subject of what Pilate thought and did to Jesus has been used in lots of different books, and as for itself isn`t anything unmentioned before. But I already knew before this book that E.M.Schmitt is capable of creating very convincing stories. What I didn`t expect from this book was that it wasn`t a comedy or a farce based upon the birth of Christianity. It turned out that this book had two parts - Jesus tells about his own life until the last Thursday in the gardens, and after that the story is taken over by Pilate. The first thing that comes to mind about Jesus according to Schmitt is that he is loveable - much more than Jesus of Bible - he himself doesn`t have the faith to believe that he could be the Messiah. His closest friend is Judas, who`m Jesus asks to give him up to the law trying to save the rest of his people. To achieve that Jesus uses the same words that he does in the Bible - that`s one interesting thing that Jesus quite often in this book says what he says in the Bible but Schmitt brings a whole different meaning to those words. Pilate is also very similar to the biblical one - but it`s interesting to follow how he finds different explanations for the dissapearance of Jesus`s body, using the common logic but logic fails him every time. I guess, if the Bible was anything like this gospel, I would be much more of a Christian than I am now.

A man returns from a war and stays at a woman`s place. He is a bit mentally disturbed. She is a doctor herself and tries to help him. They stay together. Boring.

A young fellow goes to a boarding school. Some things happen to him, some - to others. The novel contains lots of stories that aren`t too closely related. Several of them are memorable, most are not.

What do you want to tell me? Nothing. A title similar to this one was added to most of the pieces of art at this exhibition. If it was only that, I`d say, it ain`t so bad. But there was also some crazy stuff about visions and something that goes with them. Gray forms on huge black sheets, disturbing sounds, video of tomography and a few quite bloody photos - that`s what I saw. I really don`t want to taste the soup although it is not that sour as it might seem. Yeah, and I`ve never been to something like this before.

This is a film based on the rock opera "Tommy" by the Who. The songs are rerecorded especially for the film with the cast doing the singing in a broadwayish manner. Tommy`s father doesn`t come back from WW2 and his mother finds herself a brand new lover. When dad unexpectedly does come back, the lover kills him with a candlestick (if I remember it correctly that it was a "Cluedo" weapon he used). Anyway, Tommy who`s aged about four or five sees that in the front of his very eyes and after that he becomes deaf, dumb and blind. He grows up like that, nobody being able to cure him, he`s tortured by a cousin of his, a perverted uncle named Ernie (played by Keith Moon - the deceased Who drummer) "fiddles about", but there`s one thing Tommy can do - and that is playing pinball. Which is not the most typical thing for a person that doesn`t really know what pinball is all about. And he also likes starring at his own reflection in the mirror. And then he gets his vision, hearing and talking back, and becomes some sort of a preacher. What`s the film like - it`s basically just a long video for the music, and nothing more. Roger Daltrey - the singer of the band is kinda ok as Tommy, but both his Mom and Dad make 2 are not only lousy actors, but crappy singers as well. Still the music is good, altough it`s a bit musicalised which I don`t really appreciate. By the way, Elton John is the pinball wizard, while Eric Clapton simply does a song.

A documentary about a tour the Rolling Stones did in the United States. The tour ended with a free concert for something like 300000 people which had the famous incident with the bikers "Hell`s Angels". Basically it was a stupid idea, and it basically is a stupid film. Why on earth would you have on a 90 minutes film about a concert where the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Grateful Dead played on the same stage have only circa 45 minutes of music and no sign of the Dead on stage whatsoever? Ok, there was this violence part, that was interesting, but why would I need to see a lot of crap about how and why somebody made the Stones change the place of the concert, and what problems arose at any moment? Could the film makers have at least got some replies from the Stones why the hired those Hell`s Angels to be the safe guards at the concert? If they could, they did not do that. All they did was make a visually interesting piece of film - I mean there are many masterfuly filmed scenes, but there`s very little content behind it. There`s something like 6 songs done by the Stones, one by Tina Turner, one by Jefferson Airplane which ends with a fight, and one by the Burrito Brothers. The rest was just crap.

A collection of stories. Some of them seem to be missing the final pointe, while others don`t need to have one. Actually I quite liked it, although now, just a few weeks after having read the book, I remember very little from it. Not memorable but enjoyable.

I went to see this exhibition so I would have been in an art gallery in Berlin. I am not a huge fan of paintings, so my hopes weren`t too high before the thing. The biggest problem with paintings lies in the fact that I find them quite boring and the only thing of at least some sort of interest for me is seeing famous paintings so I could later say - I`ve seen them. As for this exhibition, it consists of paintings from the era of 14th century until the 17th century and I can`t say that I noticed a lot of works by famous painters, and I can`t say that I enjoyed this stuff much.

Knowing me as a sicko who`s just crazy for anything done by any member of the Monty Python flying circus, you can guess that I watched those 3 episodes of the Muppet Show only because of John Cleese`s performance. It turned out that he indeed was the only worthy thing about those episodes. Peter Sellers was a great actor for sure, his performance in "Dr Strangelove" playing multiple characters of that film was just excellent. But he doesn`t have a very funny part in the Muppet Show. Probably the only good thing about his performance was when Kermit introduces him as the epitome of Britishness and then says: "So we naturally employed him as a gypsie violin player." The rest is crap. John Cleese has two good sketches - one where he complains that he never works with pigs, and then another when he works with Pigs in space as a pirate with a stupid talking parrot. Dudley Moore? Who`s that fellow? I don`t know, and after watching the show I`m not so sure that I want to know who he was.