Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

Sometimes it just happens that you watch a film like this one. This was a very crappy comedy about cheerleaders, boring and silly. Lots of shabby humour, useless sacharine and everything else one can expect from a comedy that went straight to video. By the way, this was a sequel to another crappy film - "Bring it On", that had at least Kirsten Dunst in it; and it also has a sequel "Bring it on: all or nothing" which seems to be even worse than the one I watched.

This was my second meeting with Mr. Werber`s writing and I must admit that after "The Empire of the Angels" I was expecting a litte more from this book. The main question of the book seems to be - who killed a famous doctor of medicine after he just has won a battle of chess agains the best computer in the world? A certain Miss Anderson who he had an affair with claims herself as the one responsible - after all he died at the moment of having an orgasm. Yet a couple of journalists don`t believe that everything is that simple. Only with time they discover that this fellow (I`m terrible at remembering names) had come into posession of the "ultimate secret". The nature of the secret isn`t such that various groups of very serious persons (VSPs) would want to take hold of it (actually they would, but it`s not the question here), it`s the secret itself that can make one die. The book contains a list of motives that drive peoples actions: 1. stopping the pain; 2. getting rid of fears; 3. primary needs of survival; 4. secondary needs of comfort; 5. duty; 6. anger; 7. sex; 8. drugs; 9. personal interest; 10. religion; 11. adventure; 12. promise of the ultimate secret; 13. the ultimate secret itself. What is the ultimate secret? It`s pleasure beyond imagination, it`s something that can make you climb the highest wall, forget about your fears, forget about all the first 11 motives on the list, and it`s something you`re ready to die for. Yet it`s so strong that you get addicted from it and there`s no cure for you in this world. That`s why it is the ultimate secret. And it is hidden in your brain.

I don`t mean to be rude but I`m just too lazy to say much about this book. It is a somewhat creepy story about 5 people being put inside a building which hasn`t been used in decades. They have to find the sun or something like that inside. One of the fellows dies very quickly and the job they have to do suddenly turns into a nightmare. Still there`s a problem worse than one of your fellow dying under bizarre circumstances. It`s your book being boring. And that is just the case of Georg Klein. I got so bored with the book that I really read it just to read it till the end, not caring about what was going on. So if you`d ask me what the moral of this story is or what happened to each of the characters I`d tell you - I don`t know. I only know that 3 of them stayed alive, one of the three - partly alive. So did I.

Iain Banks is a strange bird I hadn`t heard about until I bought this book of his. As I just read in Wikipedia he writes under two different names - as Iain Banks he`s a regulary literary fiction writer while when he takes the name of Iain M. Banks his books are pure science fiction. Still I guess that "Walking on glass", even if it isn`t science fiction per se owes rather much to this genre. The novel as three separate plots - one about a young wannabe painter named Graeme who has fallen in love with Sarah ffinch who`s dating a stupid biker (a perfect place to quote "Fountains of Wayne" with "Leave the Biker": "I wonder if that guy’s read one word that wasn’t in a porno mag") and who also has a very explosive homosexual friend named Slater who only talks about gay sex and gays all the time. Then there`s a story about Steven who has been building roads until now but he had to leave the job because of an accident where he got angry and slaughtered a cat and attacked a colleague of his. Steven believes his being on Earth is some sort of punishment for doing something bad in the intergalactic wars and now he only wants to come back, meanwhile he`s paranoid about everyone being out to get him (he`s surely more than one card short of a full deck, he`s not quite the shilling). The third story takes place in a strange castle where an elderly man and a woman are playing games and trying to solve a riddle: "What would happen if an unstoppable force encountered an unmovable object?" In the end everything doesn`t exactly come together as a piece of puzzle but everything becomes at least rather clear. A very entertaining book, although I`m not sure what the author meant to tell.

It`s hard to imagine a band more disgusting than "A.C." I mean, can one get more offensive than this band? First - the title of the band itself is ugly enough. Then come the song titles including "All our fans are gay", "Limp Bizkit think they`re black but they`re just fucking gay", "You were too ugly to rape so I just beat the shit out of you", "Even though your culture opresses women you still suck, you fucking towelheads", "You converted to judaism so a guy would touch your dick" etc. Actually I`m not sure that they`re singing anything that can be found on the lyric sheets - since the band prefers evil screaming set to a fast and furious metal music it would come to me as no surprise were they in fact spreading a second message with their music. The best thing about this record is its length - 8.5 minutes. Were it longer, it would have sucked. At this length it was rather refreshing. I`ll never listen to it in my life again though.

Sean William Scott is so cute! Don`t you know him? His mom rocks! You still don`t know him? Why, it`s Stiffler from American Pie, of course. At the beginning of this film it seemed somewhat unexpected - mr. Scott doesn`t usually participate in serious action movies, he`s more of a silly character, and my theory wasn`t proved wrong. Of course, Scott`s character acted kinda silly. Beck (played by The Rock) is a cool guy for the most difficult missions, he`s sent by Billy on his last mission to find Billie`s son Travis who keeps looking for some artifact in the jungle of Brazil. To do what he`s supposed to do Beck must overcome a villain named Hatcher who runs a gold mine in Brazil, and Travis himself, who is a real dork most of the time. There`s also a sexy chick, who`s name I`ve already forgotten. Was it Michelle? No, but close to it, I guess. She`s the leader of local guerillas, who fight Hatcher. And there`s also a cool scotsman, who plays bagpipes. There are pretty good action scenes, the humor is mostly silly, but not offensive. Overall this is a nice film for relaxation when you don`t need to follow the plot or anything.

I only read it because Bergengruen was born in Riga. I never thought that this book would be good. But it amazingly is. Some parts of Bergengruens biography aren`t particulary interesting but the way he describes some episodes is just brilliant. For example, his family left Riga for Germany in early 1900s, so when Werner was to go to WW1 his father said to him: "You see how good it is that you are not in there anymore, in that case you`d fight against your own people." So Werner says that he sees no big difference on which side to die, and his relationship with his father is never really good again. Then there was one interesting thing about Knut Hamsun (the Norwegian writer) - when during WW2 he expressed his support for the Nazis it became a good style for the people of his hometown to throw books written by Hamsun into his garden, and even pilgrims from other towns came to do the same thing. I have to admit that the book isn`t really evenly written but the good things in this case make up for the bad ones and I really can`t say that this book is no good.

I guess I can say that I read this book in attempt to find a better understanding of Japanese culture. So far I`ve been rather far from getting a clear idea what`s so cool about it. I mean - several horror movies and lots of books by Haruki Murakami (who`s very much west influenced, as you probably know) don`t actually do the trick. The essence of Japanese literature lies, of course, in books about samuraii and geishas. This novel by Nagai Kafu doesn`t speak much of the former but has the latter in the title. Actually, there`s not that much of geisha rivalry in this book - I guess it could be better described as series of events that were important in the life of a geisha. Komae is a 25 year old geisha (which is considered pretty old, by the way) who wants to find a good patron, or - that would be better - get married to a rich patron. She was married already once but her husband died and she had no other option but to return to her former profession. She finds such a patron she wants in her former lover Esigawa (I`m sure that`s not the correct name, I`m not very good remembering how everyone is called in Eastern works of art), but she doesn`t really want him, instead she also has an affair with a rather popular actor who likes her but doesn`t want to marry her, and marries a woman with a big wallet instead. The book is full of parallel stories that aren`t too close to the one of Komae, but I guess that`s no surprise in a book like this one. It`s pretty, but it`s pointless, perfectly flowing with my understanding of the beauty of Eastern art.

This book is supposed to be if not an equivalent to "100 years of solitude", then pretty close to that. In fact, it`s not bad but I didn`t like it at all. The book is a story of a German nobleman going to find the House of the Sun (also known as Eden and Eldorado). He is a man of a pure heart and of rather tolerable morals, yet in early 16th century such people weren`t really demanded. Oh, no, it was the time of Cortes and Lope de Aguirre (who I am familiar with from the Werner Herzog movie) who went to America in order to kill the natives and get lots of gold from them. In the spare time from killing and spreading the word of God there was always some time for raping the women and killing the hostages. Those were the days, my friend. Yeah, there are rapes, there are witch burnings, there are murders of whole tribes and extermination of villages in this book - you name it. Therefore I can`t really say that it was a pretty book. I have no doubt that it was rather realistic yet I`d be quite happy without reading it. Most of the characters are too creepy and too disgusting for me to be able to enjoy a book like this. On another note - this is surely the first time I`ve read a venezuelan book. For memory: the book is titled "The Moon of Faustus" for the following reason: Philipp von Hutten, the main character is warned by a seer named doctor Faust (the same character Marlowe, Goethe and others used and who was at least partly a historical person) not to go to America for he will find his death her on a night of full moon. This Faust is quite a fellow - he has sold his soul to the devil who now resides within his dog and he enjoys doing sodomic tricks with young boys. This doesn`t mean though that his vision is wrong. By the way most of the events in this book are historically accurate, which is no surprise for nasty things are usually true.

Now there`s one thing I can`t deny even if I want to - it`s that Duerrenmatt is one of my favourite writers of all times. He`s funny and he`s smart, he`s witty and his joke is never a fart. "Der Meteor" is an absurd story about a nobel prize winning writer who rises from the dead. The only problem for him is that he doesn`t believe in that. He only thinks that he`s gonna die very soon and comes back to the place where he once lived when he was young, thinking that it would make a good place to die. Yet he not only doesn`t die but drives many other people into graves - by scaring them for him being alive, by doing what they don`t want him to. He`s a real asshole so to say. "Dichterdammerung" is a really twisted play - it`s basically a play where we see a play being played on a stage in some low quality theatre. It`s a play about a nobel prize winning writer who is visited by a great admirer of his who has found out that in all the authors book he writes about killings he performs himself. This admirer of his doesn`t want no money he just wants to be able to follow the master and look at his work. Yet since the writer is famous only because everyone knows that he does murder people the admirer can`t succeed at his wish. I don`t even want to comment the high rating, for Duerrenmatt it usually goes without saying.