Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

First there`s the world famous "The Inspector General" (aka `The Revizor`). If you don`t know about, shame on you, I don`t even want to tell you about it. Next comes a somewhat obscure short play with a long title. Then there`s "The Marriage" - another good comedy. And last but not least - "The Gamblers" - which actually deal with a subject common to "The Inspector General". To be honest most of the text is pure enjoyment which makes one wonder about the power of language Gogol had.

The bald gay person named Michael Stipe is the singer of one of the most popular contemporary rock bands. R.E.M. is the title of this band. And they have been around for almost 25 years now. On this DVD a retrospective of their videos is given from the day they joined a major record label. Most of these songs I know by heart without watching the videos - "Everybody Hurts", "Man on the Moon", "Losing my Religion" - and these are just the most popular once. The overall quality of the songs is certainly superb. And some of the videos are also quite intersting - for example the one for "The great beyond". On the negative side - the amount of extras isn`t extremly high - ok, if the so called "Bonus videos" were really something rare I would understand it but "I`ll take the rain" and "Lotus" don`t seem very rare to me. Then there are three songs performed live -they are pretty nice but nothing more. And as for the interviews between the songs - they aren`t particulary intersting, I`d rather hear Stipe and co. talking about the songs, and the videos, and not just talking `bout "things".

That was one of the worst films I`ve seen in my life. I`m not gonna say that the original "The Mask" was a cinematic masterpiece which made me cry like a little baby (although I was small at the time it came out), but this utterly disgusting vomit inducing painful experience will never heal. What was the good thing about the first movie? It was the acting by Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz. What do you get in "Son of the Mask"? Some unknown asshole named Jamie Kennedy who has played tiny roles in some bad films, probably never reaching beyond "Hello!" level and a baby. Actually I didn`t really see the baby because after something like 30 minutes the movie was switched off because it was not only totally unfunny but also sleepy and senseless. It just would be a crime against humanity to make somebody pay for the possibility to watch this film. That Kennedy person is got to be the worst actor I`ve ever seen. Not to mention that while being a mask he had some stupid plastic hair upon his head as if he intentionally looked similar to Barbie`s fuck buddy Ken (only with a green disgusting face) but he also had no mimics whatsoever and reminded of the already mentioned Ken.

Sweet mother of god! I didn`t believe that they would pull it off, but they certainly have done it - this film is worse than it`s prequel - Scary Movie 3. What are the ingredients for a disastrous film? You need: 1)a plot that sucks beyond comparison (and beyond comparison means - deeper than Linda Lovelace in "Deep Throat"); 2) lots of terrible actors (including Shaq and Dr.Phil, both perfectly uncapable of starring in anything else than "How the bitch got slapped by a group of construction workers"); 3) no plan for direction whatsoever and 4) talent for making dumb movies that sell well for dumb audiences. That`s where David Zucker jumps in. You see, even a group of the most miserable actors without a normal script could eventually make a pretty decent film - maybe not really watchable but at least experimental. But when a director of David Zucker`s caliber takes over, there are no limits for attrocity. The film is in fact a mixture of several Hollywood hits of the last years - "Saw", "War of the Worlds", "The Village", "The Grudge" and "Million Dollar Baby" all get their share of "laughs" in this film. Discussing the plot of this film itself would be kinda wothless - it`s basically just a platform for jokes similar to this one: a man wants to commit suicide and eats a lot of pills, but those pills happen to be viagra, so his dick rises to enormous sizes. Since there`s a woman in his apartement, he`s ashamed of that and starts kicking the dick hoping that it would lose its size, but he doesn`t have much luck with that, instead his cat jumps onto the dick and lets the claws out. The man starts jumping around in pain trying to shake the creature off, tossing the cat over the balcony. After that he falls from the balcony himself, lands on his enormous penis and dies. Ha ha! I haven`t laughed more in my life. Other scenes, comparable in terms of humour quality, follow. The only surprise in this film was the relatively normal part of Leslie Nielsen in it - he`s still the president of the USA, and when the world is attacted by alien tr-iPods (one of the best jokes in the film), he`s listening to a fairytale about a duck in a school classroom and when he`s asked to do something about the attack, he says: "Wait, I wan`t to know what happens to the duck!" To conclude my bitching about this film - combining a 5 minutes trailer would make it look like a good comedy. But 85 minutes of it combined to one of the worst films I`ve seen lately, and in some ways I found it worse than the bastardisation of "Lost" that happened to be a porn movie from which I watched less than five minutes for sure.

I`m not really sure why, but I believe that there is a tendency for me to rate collections of stories higher than novels (in average). And "Lunkenbergs fest" applies for this rule. The book contains 11 stories and most of them are good. The first one - "Das Totenschiff" - is a strange tale about a man who somehow kidnaps the tourbus he`s on, although he has no intentions for that. So he decides to ask as the kidnapper for the following - he asks his boss to let his workers leave work one our early today for there`s a holiday coming up, yet his boss refuses to speak to Ebert. "Der neue Mann" is a story that goes to her mother`s place for Christmas to meet the mother`s new friend but the whole thing doesn`t go very well. "Das Los" tells the story of a East German man who won the lottery in the West but wasn`t informed about that. "Kleine Taenzer" is a funny piece about an old rock band playing a boring event (by the way it`s dedicated to a song by Elton John - "Tiny Dancer"). It`s followed by the best story of them all - "Samstagsspiel mit Sallinger" - it`s about a dad who tries to be cool for his kid (and being cool means listening to "Green Day" and "Papa Roach") but who doesn`t convince the boy and who still regrets that many years ago he didn`t go to meet again a woman that offered him to read a book by Jerome Sallinger. At the end the book gets a bit boring though, so I won`t go into any more details.

I watched this film right after the experience of "the Son of Mask" or "the filmmakers sucked on doing their task", and this probably had some influence upon my attitude towards this film. It`s a partly real story about Mexican mafia people who are kidnapping people. Denzel Washington plays a man of criminal past who`s now a bodyguard for a little girl who`s father is a latino pop singer Marc Anthony (at least the guy playing him is Marc Anthony). When the girl is kidnapped and killed, he starts his own inquiry trying to get the people responsible for that. It turns out that the whole police of Mexico City is totally corrupted and there are criminals in every hole, but he does his task quite masterfully. I wouldn`t say that this film was unpredictable, not at all, but at least it was solid and was quite interestingly filmed. And there were no babies with super powers! That`s just a miracle!

Edward Scissorhands, Arizona Dream, What`s Eating Gilbert Grape, Ed Wood, Don Juan deMarco, Dead Man, Donnie Brasco, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Sleepy Hollow, Chocolate, Blow, From Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, Secret Window, Finding Neverland, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride. That means that "The Ninth gate" is the 18th Johnny Depp film that I`ve seen so far. Sadly in terms of quality it`s one of the worst of his films that i`ve seen so far, and that`s not good. Depp plays Dean Corso, a rare book dealer who`s asked by a very important client to determine which one of the surviving three copies of a satanic book is the real one. The problem is that the film ain`t particulary interesting - whilst the first hour of it is a bit creepy, later on the film doesn`t develop into anything special. It`s supposed to be a mystery/horror/thriller, yet there`s no sign of horror in this film and I can`t say that I was especially thrilled by it. Actually it wasn`t scary at all, I mean visually it was very good, but the content lacked something to put it all together, sometimes becoming absolutely ridiculous. And one more thing - why is Roman Polanski such a fan of satan (I`ve seen 3 of his films so far, and two of them are about the dark prince. is he a worshipper of LCF himself or what?)

Johnny Depp and Leo di Caprio in the same film! One of them is crazy, the other is not! Their mother is as big as a whale! A good alternative film! A very lazy me!

After the singer of my once favourite band had passed away, the remainings "Queens" organized a huge tribute concert at the late Wembley stadium, at which some of the biggest names of popular music participated - among others Tony Iommi, Metallica, Paul Young, David Bowie, Annie Lennox, George Michael, Roger Daltrey, Elton John, Slash and Axl Rose participated at this massive event. On the DVD we don`t get the whole concert but just the various performers playing together with May, Deacon and Taylor the songs of Queen, and that is a big minus, knowing that there was much more in the concert, while here we have a second disc featuring a reahersal for the concert. Who needs this sort of stuff anyway! As for what we get - the musical performance is always up to notch, except for maybe "We Will Rock You" which sounds much more powerful in the fast paced and more "bouncy" usual live version - and not the traditional "boom - boom - bang" with no guitars until the solo. Concerning the singers - Roger Daltrey is good, so is Hetfield, Lisa Stansfield is ok, David Bowie and Annie Lennox are not bad, Zucchero sings like a half dead man, and Elton John singing together with Axl Rose may have seen good on paper - one being an enemy of homosexuals, the other being gay - but it stills sounds pretty lame what they do on "Bohemian Rhapsody".

This is not the most famous band around, and I rarely listen to live records by unknown bands, but today it is just the case. But it seems out that this band is a good one. There are quite a few strong and catchy tracks on this disc - for example "Working Girls" is a nicely crafted upbeat song with a good singalong chorus. Apart from it the album doesn`t have any really outstanding songs but it`s pretty solid as a whole, rocking in a nice manner. I`m not sure that the Pernice Brothers might ever become bigger than giants (I mean bigger than "Bigger than giants") but they have the possibility to be better than the average pop band (or what was the title of that band?).