Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

It`s year 2006 out there. Elvis is long dead and buried. Slobodan Milosevic is long dead and buried. Rock`n`roll is long dead and buried. Ozzy has completely sold himself out and turned into a joke. Sparks still do the same kind of twisted piano/strings pop they did back in early Seventies. Their lyrics are still funny, one of them still has a very impressive voice. The opening "Dick Around" gets a bit heavy in the second part of the song and I can`t say that I like it as much as the first part of it, before the guitars kick in, still the "All I do know is dick around" chorus is cool. "Perfume" has the same dirty guitar noise in the background, put up to a steady bass rhythm. The first real highlight on the album doesn`t follow the "Propoganda"/"Indiscreet" pattern as closely as the preceeding numbers and it sounds a bit messy to be honest, yet it`s once again saved by a perfect chorus: "Baby Baby, can I invade your country?" "Waterproof" is the most typical Sparks song on the entire record with the goofy operette meets rock music attitude that Queen lifted from Sparks. Come to think of it, another brilliant song is "There`s no such thing as aliens". The band is still capable of delivering the goods, that`s for sure, but I still see that they have to try harder in order to be in top form than it was for themselves when they were young - occasional moments of sloppines don`t let "Hello, Young Lovers" to take the same level of "Big Beat" and some other their records from the 1970s in my heart.

Despite the fact that Roman Polanski is considered to be one of the most important living filmmakers, I can`t call myself a big expert of his work. So far Rosemary`s Baby has been just the second of his films (after The Pianist) that I`ve seen in its entirety. Rosemary is a young woman that`s married to a moderately successful actor who has so far appeared in several plays and some TV commercials. They decide to rent a new apartement and for that they choose quite a pretty place in a house where strange things have happened over the years, yet Guy and Rosemary are young and happy people and why should they worry about tales of dead infants being found in the house or living children being eaten alive? Some things do seem somewhat strange though, especially that concerns their neighbours - an elderly couple - whom Guy somehow gets strangely attracted to. But everything turns really strange when Rosemary gets pregnant (she has some strange visions about that for the neighbours have given her some sort of a strange drink). The whole thing with the baby doesn`t go perfectly well - Rosemary is given some strange drinks which she gets prescribed by a famous doctor and which don`t make her feel better. Only with time she learns to understand that she`s surrounded by a group of practicing witches that have involved her in some crazy ritual, and the trouble lies in the fact that her husband has sold their child to the devil for success as an actor. And in the end, when the baby is born, it doesn`t get used in satanic rituals for there`s no need for that - after all, it`s not Guy who`s the baby`s father, but the Devil himself. To be honest, this film isn`t the scariest one I`ve ever seen, but it`s still pretty haunting. Actually it`s somewhat similar to some works by Hitchcock, as a film that mostly relies on suspense and not on troubling images, yet it is scary enough for a person to become a troubled mind after watching it for sure. By the way, Rosemary is played by a very young and good looking Mia Farrow (before her connection with that Allen creep). Certainly a must-see for all lovers of scary movies (but not of Scary Movie though).

A man in his 50s lives a partly normal life until the day he sees a pigeon in the corridor leading from his room to the bathroom, and it scares him almost to death. Not the most popular beginning to a book? Quite so, and there you can discover Sueskind close to his best. A character that doesn`t make any sense, doesn`t do dirty things (unlike most characters in modern books) and is absolutely out of his mind. At some part of the book he has envy towards a clochard who begs money outside the bank the hero is guarding, but everything changes when he sees the beggar shitting in public and realises how tragically it is when a person can`t lock the door even in the most sacred moments. Groovy!

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?)