Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

This is a B cartoon, according to the budget, according to the participants and according to the animation. To be honest, during the first minutes of the cartoons they eyes just cringe - there`s very little polygons involved, models move in strange ways and the face of Little red riding hood is just awful. But when one starts to accept the visual style as "an artistic decision" the cartoon starts to improve. It has a rather interesting story about who and why crashed Granny`s house and who and why made all the candy makers leave the market. It involves Little red riding hood, Wolf the reporter, a x-sports performing Grandmother, an Austrian woodsman who drives "The schnitzel truck" and a group of detectives, one of whom is played by Xzibit. In the end it`s funny, if not particulary stunning to the eye. I`ve seen far worse cartoons with far bigger bucks involved, and I have no reason to dislike Hoodwinked just because "Shrek" had better animators.

This is a band that (as far as I know) hasn`t sold a single record, hasn`t recorded a single album in a major (even by Latvian standarts) studio, a band that`s only popular in very special circles. I personally found it in a web site where bands could upload some of their songs, so the world would have a chance to know them. The song that I listened to first happened to be "Pavasaris" and it totally stood out among all the crap that was on that site. Music was rather silly and vocals were sung/spoken in a particulary goofy manner. In short it`s quite similar to the legendary NSRD. The band itself claims that the kind of music it performs is called "depressive synth-pop", and it may be quite true. Some of the songs despite the low individual levels of musicianship rule totally. For example, the sad "About a crow" is both funny and catchy. "The Moonlight Sonata" has a good refrain. The opening "About a bear" is a bit dadaistic. I probably won`t be listening to this record for years and years and it won`t last as long as Depeche Mode in the field of synth pop, yet among most garbage Latvian musicians tend to offer to the listeners this is so untamed that I can`t just classify it as shit and forget about PK-25. I would really like to see them perform life, yet I doubt that it would be possible.

I`m not really sure whether I can call myself a particulary big fan of sitcoms, but I`m completely sure that I can call myself a big fan of John Cleese. Therefore a sitcom staring John Cleese is a must for me. In `Fawlty Towers` he plays a gotel owner who doesn`t have particulary strong nerves and who doesn`t have a particulary good relation with his wife. In episode one - "A touch of class" he has placed an advertisement in a newspaper for snobs hoping that some high class people will arrive to the hotel. He`s proven wrong when the only lord turns out to be a fraud. In "The Builders" Basil Fawlty doesn`t want to spend money for high quality workers and lets dumbasses ruin his hotel. "The wedding party" is probably the best episode. It has a young couple arriving at the hotel for their wedding but Basil with his stupid morality and suspicions ruins everything for himself, as he sees sex,sex, sex everythere (that`s all kids talk about nowadays). "The hotel inspectors" goes basically in a similar way to episode one - once again Basil mistakes a person for what it`s not. "Gourmet night" has the chef too drunk and no food for anyone. And "The germans" has germans arriving at the hotel and Fawlty speaking about the war, making them feel miserable. Cleese did this series with Conny Booth - his wife at the time - but the weird thing is that it isn`t Booth playing his wife, she plays Polly, the waitress/maid. There`s also a Spanish guy working at the hotel who speaks nearly no English, while Fawlty thinks of himself as Spanish speaking. I don`t mean to say that this ranks as high as the Flying Circus, but this TV series surely did have it`s charm, although particulary inventive it wasn`t.

I`m not exactly crazy for sci-fi literature, nor am I a fan of Michael Chricton. To be honest, I didn`t even know that he was some sort of a celebrity and had even written "Jurassic Park" and "Sphere". That doesn`t say that it makes him a brilliant writer. The biggest problem with science fiction quite often is the lack of depth in a book. You have to be truly great - like Bradberry or Vonnegut - to succed in this genre writing something trully outstanding. If you`re not - you can always have a good story but it won`t shake the world. "The Andromeda Strain" is a rather typical work of the genre. It does have some "bonus" points for adding diagrams and supposedly precise description of some technological equipment (one can`t deny that Chrichton did his best to convince the reader that this book is meant to be serious), yet his writing technique isn`t too bright. He ain`t no Azimov for sure. The andromeda strain is a deadly virus that has come to Earth from a space capsule and a group of scientists tries to find out how to fight against it. If I tried to find the ingredients of the Strain, I`d say that it owes some 50% to "War of the worlds" (in the original Wells incarnation, not the Tom Cruise film of course, which wasn`t a chef`d`oevre in the first place), then it has a component of typical Hollywood-ism including a time bomb that has to be dissactived in the last seconds, the closed environment of a laboratory with a group of scientists in it was later reused by Crichton himself in "Sphere", and it was also similar to "Evolution" in terms of the virus (ok, it`s a bacteria but I prefer calling it a virus) being capable to evolute rapidly in a nuclear explosion. A very forgettable book indeed.

I don`t really know what I expected it to be - since I had only heard a few MM songs before and never ever cared much about the band. The record itself is no big deal - it ain`t very heavy or any memorable but it isn`t very bad either - completely average - that`s what it sounds like.

Do you remember the band? The one that sung "I wanna sleep with common people like you"? I guess you do. And here it is. The best part of the album are the lyrics, while musically it`s sometimes a bit dull. Highlights include the already mentioned "Common People", "Disco 2000" and "Underwear".

Since USSR collapsed the Latvian cinematography has been struggling - there`s not enough money, there`s not enough ideas, there`s not enough anything. The expectations before watching the film weren`t especially high but the first minutes sent them below the ice mark. First, there was some shaky camera work, even if it was on purpose, it still looked like shit. Then, the actors - the leading male actor Regnars Vaivars who appearantly is a scandalous theatre actor and director wasn`t impressive at all, and his female counter part didn`t seem to be much of an actress either. Then there was Uldis Dumpis - quite a famous Latvian actor whom I never liked, and my attitude didn`t change during this film. What about the story - a poor guy from the country marries a rich girl but the day of their wedding turns into a nightmare for he employed an undertakers agency for the job. And in the end he sued the agency for not doing their work right. This is a comedy, so they say. To be honest - the jokes are there, and if at least 10% of them were funny it wouldn`t be such a disaster. But they are not, most of them are flatter than the Earth in the minds of medieval people, and much flatter than the singer of "No Doubt". Throughout the film only one idea constantly arose - how much longer is this nonsense gonna last. 80 minutes, if you want to know. But it`s very much.

I never thought that PJ Harvey was this good. Her songs aren`t catchy in the Beatlish meaning of the word, but she`s an extremely powerful and independant woman. Songs like "To Bring You My Love" remind me of a younger (and living) Janis Joplin and now I don`t wonder anymore how come she had that song together with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Of course Janis was much more of a band blues singer, while PJ is a typical singer/songwriter.

Since I`m in Andromeda state of mind I just couldn`t resist from reading another science fiction novel with the "A" word in the title that I found on by wife`s book shelf. It`s a book of her father`s, as I would presume, for she has never expressed much interest for sci-fi herself, as far as I know. In comparison with that "Andromeda strain" novel this one has some advantages. First, those two British fellows write much less "generic" than Michael Chrichton - of course, every sci-fi book has its share of cliche`s but this one seems to be in a better position than the other one. Then there`s another advantage - the story is organised in a more intriguing manner. Everything starts with a huge radio telescope detecting a signal from outer space. The signal is recorded and a scientist named Flemming decodes it as an instruction for building a huge computer that would be able to solve lots and lots of problems. The problem is that when the computer is created it starts taking over the people for they are willing to pay almost everything for the power the computer can give. One of the things He (the computer) does is creating a nearly human replica of a woman He has killed - a woman named Andromeda (or Andre). This Andre has much better capabilities than the average person yet she is a bit too human in order to work perfectly. Flemming tries to stop the machine for he realises that it`s only giving something to people, so it could take much more ir return. Flemming comes out as the winner in the end, while Andre dies, although she`s become almost 100% human in her behaviour and her death doesn`t come as a relief. One thing was very funny about this book, of course, for the super advanced computer used punch cards and teletype and communication with it was done by typing lots and lots of data through the binary code. That`s a thing most sci fi books suffer from - the employed technology becomes ridiculous quite fast, never mind how great it seemed at the time the book was written. Overall: the book ain`t bad at all, once again I can say that it ain`t no Vonnegut, yet it ain`t no Michael Crichton either - it`s better.

"Love", "Love", "Love". "Love" is all you need. "Love" live, "Love" live. Life is "Love" and "Love" is live. "Love" me do. There`s lots of songs that one could interpret as praising this band from California, yet there ain`t much to praise it all about. I have no disbelief that the leader of this band - Arthur Lee - did have some sort of a musicial vision, yet at least this record seems to be rather disturbing to me. Lee`s voice totally turns me off, some cool guitar riffs are buried among piles of garbage and there are only a few memorable songs on this record that aren`t completely ruined by the singer`s performance. Why Love is considered to be one of the greatest "Lost" bands of the sixties, is beyond my understanding.