Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

It was the first commercial flop for the Beatles. And I don`t wonder why. While "A Hard Day`s Night" was a funny and not too typical comedy, while "Help!" was a silly B level comedy, those films still at least made some sense. This film on the contrary was directed by the Beatles themselves, and great filmmakers they were not. Especially it goes for the storyline - there isn`t a one. Ok, if you call "people get on a bus and they go for a magical mystery tour by bus where nothing really ever happens" a story line, then it is what you just read. Otherwise it`s just some crappy bus images mixed with some silly sequences without the bus. The only part of the film which I liked was the performance of "I am the Walrus" which despite being a bit strange was good. And the "Bonzo Dog Band" playing some Elvis imitation was also at least decent, although the strippers breasts were censored. But everything else is just a sloppy mess - there`s close no humour involved, it`s just psychedelic, and that doesn`t work for me at all. As for the music - now that is the biggest disaster - only the title song and "I`m the Walrus" from the great Beatles songs are present in this film, while everything else is either film muzak or simply not worth mentioning. Still I don`t rate this film particulary low since this film at least doesn`t seem very pretentious, it isn`t long, and I like them Beatles quite much.

It`s been almost ten years since I saw this film on TV. And now after a long waiting (I remembered about it something like a year ago but didn`t know what its title was), I finally saw it again... on TV! Actually on VHS which was recorded from TV but never mind that. The film is based on a short story by Kurt Vonnegut (which I hadn`t read before re-watching the film) and tells about the world of tomorrow where all people are equal both socially, physically and mentally (oh God, there`s three aspects and not two, what am I supposed to do about the word "both"?), and in every other aspect. To achieve that marriages are designed to have average kids and the best mark at school is C. But Harrison Bergeron is a very bad student he never gets lower than A+ and has to stay in the same class for several years. Since he can`t be cured with the help of a little antenna attached to his brain he has to overgo an operation. But if he doesn`t want that he can join the real masters of America and remain as smart as he is. Only by doing that he loses his family and isn`t allowed to have any private life. This film isn`t a big budget one, of course, but I liked it anyhow. Out the actors only one of them made it big later - the guy who played Harrison later became Sam in LoTR trilogy.

This one hour long film was supposed to reveal some part of the mystery around the mysterious things in Leonardo Da Vinci`s works. Contrary to the Dan Brown novel, or the film, this is supposed a documentary, yet in fact it`s a conspiracy theory thing, of course. Every argument one might have against the 9-11 conspiracy theories, stands here even much firmer. I remember watching a similar documentary last year and some of the "experts" from that film reappear here. So it seems that the number of people willing to participate in this sort of stuff is quite little. As for the extent of how believable this all is - it`s very, very far from believable. An old man presents us with words that seem to note that the film intends to reveal some secrets, but it doesn`t do anything. Basically it retells all the conspiracy theory elements Dan Brown employed asking some "grail experts" and "symbolic sex experts" and "lunatics" to comment what they think about it. Unsurprisingly they all agree to their conspiracy theory, still they don`t manage to show anything worthy. Had I not been working paralelly to watching this film, I`d call it wasted time, as it is I call it just a crappy documentary.

That was a bizarre theatre performance me and my wife went to see just because I got free tickets for it from my work. The play was done by a Latvian-Slovenian group of actors/musicians as a puppet/garbage show. The story told about a man without a face who participated in some revolution and became known as the enemy of the state. He met a certain Rosa Luxemburg-Monroe and was charged for murdering her. After being beaten up by the cops (or some secret service) he became free once again, met a woman to love and in the end realized that his face was gone. The strange thing was the fact that the leading character was played by clothes of a baby that was held in the hands of several actors, and some other characters were made of random everyday appliances. In this way the play somewhat reminded me of a few films by Jan Svankmajer. The story wasn`t particulary straight, and most of the time it made little sense to me. One more thing that stood out was it being performed in English with Latvian and Slovenian accents. A man was singing in the background and I have to admit that he had quite a strong voice. What else? The play was held at the independant theatre "Skatuve" ("Stage") in a rather creepy location, so we had to leave our car rather far from the theatre. Yeah, and the chairs were very uncomfortable.

I might have been a person that would think - Oh, this film has Jack Nicholson in it, he`s such a brilliant actor, I absolutely must see it! Or I might have been another kind of person that would think - Oh my god, Sean Penn - a brilliant actor - directed this film and he even got Jack Nicholson and Benicio del Torro to starr in his film. But in fact I watched it because its based on a novel by Friedrich Duerrenmatt. Sadly it`s not a comedy but a piece of crime/drama. And that`s not the thing I love Duerrenmatt for. Ok, I didn`t have no bad feelings because of this film being a thriller/crime movie, but it just didn`t work as well as it would be in the case of a comedy. So we have this retired cop (Nicholson) who has given a pledge to find the murderer and rapist of a little girl. The police find the supposed killer - a mad Indian but the old fox can`t believe that it`s the real killer, but after the guy commits suicide he has no way of prooving that the Indian wasn`t the guy he`s looking for. So he starts an investigation of his own and becomes too involved and partly goes crazy himself. The film was interesting to watch and until the very end I couldn`t know who the killer was, but actually it wasn`t more than a crime movie - and crime movies don`t sell like hotcakes in terms of rating points.

That was surely the first time in my life I went to see figure skating, and I wouldn`t be too surprise if it happened to be also the last. I had free tickets for this event from my work, so me and my wife went there just to see what it was. Actually I was expecting it to be a small and insignificant event that no one would be going to see, but I was very far from the truth with that guess. There were literally thousands of people in the new Arena Riga where the ice hockey world championships had finished just a few weeks ago. The event was organized by some Russians, therefore there were more Russians than Latvians in the arena (that`s no surprise actually, for Russians are much more a figure skating nation than Latvians). Among the participants of the event there were several figure skaters, whom even I knew - Anton Yagudin, Jelena Sokolova, Jelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, Alexander Abt and some others who also had had medals at some Olympic games or World Championships. This event wasn`t particulary interesting to watch over a longer period of time, for there`s not very much one can do while figure skating and a sports event without results is like hangoever without a drinking the night before. So we left. It was rather funny though that Liene, my wife, managed to sneak in with an illegal can of Coca Cola (she`s addicted to that stuff, you know what I mean, in case you know me, what you do, of course), telling the security men that she had "a very small umbrella" in her purse.

The greatest TV series ever! Or the greatest I`ve seen so far. Me, my wife and all our friends are completely crazy for it. Since it`s a whole season I can`t even go into details of what has happened here but I can say that nothing is clear at the moment yet, and that at the beginning of the season the show seemed to be going downwards and it seemed to me that it had lost direction but the last 10 episodes of so have mostly been stunning. I don`t like Jack though, he`s such a straight guy, so boring, Sawyer is way better, and even Desmond has some charm. I kinda like that this show doesn`t have much love stories in it.

A quite realistic story about a cop in Westindia in the middle of the 20th century. Some people die, some people don`t, the main character although being middleaged and married falls in love with a young but not pretty woman, has a difficult relationship with an influential Syrian merchant etc. It`s a book that can be read easily but that doesn`t stay in the memory for too long. Not first rate literature by any means - which is a clear indication that it won`t be found on the list of the best books the last century has given to us.

I went there on a mission to write about this exhibition. Here you can see the original artefacts from an era in which most of us (the post-Soviet people) were living quite a long time. Pictures of Lenin on the wall, posters instructing people what to do and what not to do, red banners, and that kind of stuff can be found here. What I liked was that such an exhibition was made and that it didn`t only provide information on the KGB, concentration camps, etc, but also showed some moments from the everyday life of a typical soviet person. But it still seemed a bit tendentious - you could feel that the people who created this exhibition weren`t really neutral when choosing the objects - they wanted to show how grey and uninteresting life was in the Soviet Union, despite the fact that being in danger is a great adrenalyniser, that there`s no way the government can make people to have no fun at all (if it is not a concentration camp, a gheto or a prison we`re talking about, and despite what nationalists say nowadays - people didn`t live in a prison in the soviet times).

I won`t try to impress anybody with my knowledge of Mr. Steiner`s work. Why? Because I have none. As far as I can understand the music of his is called something like electro jazz, techno jazz or that kind of noise that your recordplayer produces with a Rubin Steiner record inside. Why this has something to do with jazz is a riddle for me. The music is heavily based on samples which tend to go a bit overboard. I`m not gonna say that this is a bad record, but this most certainly is not my kind of music. My ears are simply unprepared for something like it. Listening to this record for the first time it sounds quite fresh and unexpected, but as I listened to it over and over again I thought my brain would explode. By the way I`m still listening to it now. Oh god!