Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

What do you think of teen comedies? Some of them are quite good, and I`m not sure about this one. Let`s try to determine what my attitude towards it is. First, there`s this guy Scotty whos girlfriend dumps him and he decides that Mike - his female German e-mail friend is the one for him. But he has already screwed up - thinking that her name Mike was a male name when she tried to hit on him, he pushed her away. And now together with three of his friends he goes on a eurotrip to save what can be saved. Unexpectedly there`s not that much cliches in the film as I could have expected - at least all Germans don`t walk around in lederhosen and there aren`t that many french people in striped shirts with a moustache and a piece of long bread walking around. But of course, there is a German kid preparing to be Hitler. In the end Scotty of course gets the girl of his dreams, and so is everybody else happy as well. There are lots of gross jokes in this film, as you could guess, and there are a few good jokes as well. First, the English football hooligans are cool, then I liked the way Bratislava is shown in this film, and, of course, this guy telling that Europe is so small that you could actually walk from London to Berlin - just what you could expect from an American. For a teenage comedy it`s not bad, although the story is an exact copy of "Roadtrip" but who cares?

In the gospel according to IMDB this is a great film. Apart from dreadful acting the first half of this film seemed to be good - a guy named Klaatu arrives to Earth from outer space to bring to the nations of the Earth the message that if they will use nuclear power they will be killed by the more advanced races. After being injured he ends up living together with some normal people because he looks just like one of them. After that as in any film of the cold war era and especially in a film from the Communist-hunt days you will find a lot of pathos and patriotic gibberish. Klaatu visits the statue of Abraham Lincoln, he tells to the people that the universe needs a world police that would keep order and that you`re either with us or against us. George W. Bush, what was your favourite film when you was a little boy? I bet I know, you even have the same haircut as Klaatu. Yeah, the ending is about as good as the words "terrificly bad" charactarise it. Screw IMDB, watch "Flying Saucers: the true story" instead. Or find yourself a rainbow.

This bands` main strength lies in the title. Actually, it`s also its only strength. The sound is too messy and too dissonant for my taste. Some songs like "Mark David Chapman" are at least listenable, while others are not. Trail of the Dead are the very essence of indie, of course, not caring about selling too many records, yet I prefer my indie music to be more listener-friendly. In the case of this band I just can`t enjoy their music, and that`s a serious drawback.

I tried my best to accept this film as a very good comedy, yet somehow I couldn`t achieve that. And why is that? Because the film takes a very good premise and turns it into a blank slapstick comedy. Dick (played by Jim Carrey) has just been promoted to VP when his company suddenly collapses just like Enron did. He and his wife Jane (played by the not particulary famous Tea Leoni) who has quit her own job because of Dick`s promotion now have no means of supporting themselves and their Spanish speaking kid Billy (who`s probably the funniest character of the film). Dick has no way of getting a new job for nobody wants a vice president of a company that proved to be made out of shit. Why can`t Jane find a new job is beyond my understanding for she wasn`t involved in her husbands affairs, probably it`s just so we would have more fun. When they see no way out, they turn to crime and start doing more or less funny robberies. From this point the film could have evolved into something reminiscent of "Bonnie and Clyde", yet it still remains a silly comedy, in which when you give the money of a bad guy to the good people in the end no one cares that you have performed various acts of crime along the way and in which there`s no way the same bad guy can retain his money when Dick and Jane have used a fraud paper to transfer his money to a different account. I guess were in not for the ending, I would have little trouble giving this film a good overall rating, yet I hate this Hollywood habit of ending a film with the least logical sequence just so the viewers would feel good after the film. And so they could believe that you can arm a drug store armed with a plastic squirt gun and that the drug store employee will be too afraid to take his double-barreled gun from the back of the counter and blow your brains out.

Welcome to a brand new genre in my factoid - a theatre play watched not on the stage but on the screen. This was performed in 1987 by the most notorious Latvian theatre at the time - the Latvian Theatre of the Youth. So, this is a play by Gunars Priede, the same fellow who wrote "The blue", but this is surely his most famous work (in Latvia, of course, for outside nobody knows his name). There`s this woman who once was a teacher (before WW2) but because she was leftist she couldn`t go on with her job during the German occupation, neither could she do it after WW2 in the Soviet days (I`m not gonna say "Soviet occupation" just because I`m an asshole, so buzz off!). She met a man named Sergey who was a war prisoner and who was given to her as a servant by the Germans, something similar to love developed between them, but in the midst of the centrifuge WW and Stalinist terror brought there was no real place for love. The play was lovely performed, although a bit too realistically for me, but I know that no cool expensive decorations were available in 1987 in Soviet Latvia, so I won`t mind that, and the choice of the actors was also quite good. At least it shows history the way I want to look at it and not in the way it is seen by silly commies or silly Latvian nazis.

Two years after we never got the reply to the question who killed the Zutons they`re alive again and kicking. From the opening "Tired of Hanging Around" till the ending "I know I`ll never leave" they remain the same Zutons some of us learned to love. The title track itself is very similar to "Dirty Dancehall" from their debut album. The first single of the record "Why Won`t You Give Me Your Love" doesn`t sound that much like the Zutons of old but sadly it has nothing to offer apart from the chorus - the verse part is rather boring and only the title line is very powerful. I like the second single of the record - "Valerie" - more, I know that it`s much more typical for the Zutons, but since I really liked their debut album it`s only logical that I like them when they`re closer to their former selves. At the moment the band is planning to release "Oh, Stasey, look what you`ve done" and I`m sure that it`s gonna be quite a big hit, yet for my taste it`s too slow. But at least it`s not as slow as "How does it feel" which is the closest thing this band has come to a ballad. The way their singer David McCabe is spitting out words is cool. Yet I`d prefer them to have more zuton-y songs, such like "Hello Conscience" and "Tired of Hanging Around" and less compositions in the vein of "I know i`ll never leave." I`m a punky person after all and not a sissy who enjoys Bon Jovi.

I can leave my signature under the statement in the title. Rubbish! What a British word! Blur! What a British band! The Kinks of the nineties, the Jam of the Ninenies and even XTC of the nineties (although I haven`t listened to the latter at all), Blur have some charm that Oasis couldn`t even hope to have. They are perfectly capable of writing brilliant choruses without any remarkable lyrics - like the "La la la la la" on the opening "For Tomorrow". Overall this is a very listener friendly pop album despite the agressive title, with cool songs like "Star Shaped", "Chemical World" and "Sunday Sunday" rocking my life.

Quite good, but no total breakthrough. Some quotes may be coming up later. I really liked the idea but at some times the story got over the top.

Our excursion in the German literature continues. We enter one of the weird rooms. Its entitled `Thomas Bernhard` - and provides us enough material to break our heads. Four plays can be found in this collection of works. "A party for Boris" is the most unpredictable one - out of the 16 characters 15 have no legs. Most of the time one of them - The Good One talks a strange monologue which is directed towards Boris - her husband and her servant that has legs unlike everybody else. "The ignorant and the lunatic" is the most boring of those plays - there`s absolutely nothing going on but a doctor telling lots of stuff about diseases. "The hunting society" is about a wife of a dying general and a writer playing cards and discussing the life. Last but not least there`s "The power of the habit" is about a circus director named Caribaldi who forces four of his artists to practise a musical quintent for two decades, never achieving a perfect performance, and always complaining. What`s weird about these plays - it`s the language. I`m not really sure even - is it poetry or prose. It`s something in the style of Samuel Beckett, only less intriguing. On the other hand, maybe it`s elss intriguinging because I already have read Beckett - I`m not really sure for how much time absurd plays can attract ones interest.

Now that is a surprise even for myself - once again I`ve read a book by a Japanese writer. This one - Mr. Oe - is a Nobel prize winner (in Literature if you really didn`t expect that). If you know me you probably also know that authority isn`t authority to me. So he is a Nobel prize winner. Why would I think that Mr. Oe is better than the beggar I saw two hours ago eating cookies at the local supermarket? Probably because Mr Oe is a good writer. He created the story of Mitsu and Takasi - two brothers living in the Seventies Japan. Mitsu is the person from whose point of view we see the way story develops. He and his wife are dragged by Takasi to the village where the brothers spent their childhood. They come back to relive in some way the lives of their ancestors - Mitsu is the renewed his great-grandfather, a rich landowner, while Takasi is great-grandpas younger brother who lead a revolution in the First year of Mannen (1860). Nowadays Takasi starts training the local football team and makes out of his youth people that run over the local Korean supermarket. Still it ain`t 1860 and you can`t possibly win, and you don`t win at all. I read that this book is similar to the "Karamazov Brothers" by Dostojevski but I haven`t read that (I`m an ignorant punk) therefore it`s all I can say on the subject. The book i good, but not great. I wouldn`t give a Nobel prize for that but I wouldn`t say: "Shut your freakin` face uncle freaker!" either.