Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

This film made a lot of fuss in Russia a few months ago. And not without a reason - I doubt you have seen many Russian films with pretty good special effects. And it`s a thing you can`t denie about this film. There`s this fellow Erast Fandorine who fights for the Russian against the Turks in the Russian-Turkish war of 1960s. After being captured by the fiend he manages to flee and it turns out that as an extra to his very solid skill as a soldier he`s also pretty good in solving crime. And the crime is an interesting one - there is a fellow in the Russian army who works for the opponent on a very high level yet Fandorine can`t really find out who this fellow is. One thing about it that you should know is that this film basically is based upon the method "The Usual Suspects" provided, if you want to find the villain. Apart from that the film is interesting to watch, it has nice colours and pretty good acting, but no lasting value at all. You can probably call it a Russian historical action film and a no-brainer. Still some no-brainers aren`t really bad.

This is a satirical novel about a rich peasant who wants to become even richer. It`s written in a manner that would presume the book to be funny, yet it doesn`t achieve much for the author`s humour is rather clumsy and sometimes even lame. I guess this thing could be also understood as some sort of left wing propaganda, making fun of the stupid bourgeous lard asses, but even as propaganda it`s rather weak.

Some months ago I tried to read the novel of the same name written by Jane Austen. I found it rather dull and boring and never made it to the middle of the book. I don`t like this kind of sentimental literature very much. By the way I have already almost perfectly forgotten what was happening in "Pride and Prejudice", another film version of an Austen novel. This film though has a few bonuses in comparison with that other one. Most of them lie in the casting department. The film is directed by Ang Lee, who has also brought "Crouching tiger" and "Brokeback mountain". In "Sex and Senility" he doesn`t choose to be daring, on the other hand there`s as little sex in this film as you can imagine. Still what this film has is a set of noteable actors including Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Imelda Staunton and others. Some of them became famous due to this film (mostly Kate Winslet), while others were already established in the world of films, take Imelda Staunton for instance. The story is as boring as it gets - a widow with three daughters has to leave the house of her deceased husband as everything has gone away to his son from the first wife. One of the daughters is still a child, while the others need to get married to rich fellows quickly. Elinor, the older one is the sense of the family, yet she developes a love story with Hugh Grant (known by the name of Edward Ferrers), yet he has to leave for London, so she remains broken hearted. Meanwhile Marianne (Winslet) falls in love with a southern type gentleman named Willoughby about whom the viewer would have no doubt that he`s going to be the villain of the book. He doesn`t marry Marianne, of course, for he needs money and she doesn`t have it, yet he doesn`t get her pregnant, so I can say that he just doesn`t use his chances. In the end both sisters get married, Elinor - to Hugh Grant, while Marianne marries colonel Branden, played by Alan Rickman (isn`t he a bit old for Winslet - he was 50 and she was 20 at the time the film came out, don`t you find it a bit too much?), who happens to be the good guy. You know the certain type of character whom everyone uses for the doormat but who marries the prettiest girl in town (or in the village in this case) in the end, when she`s impregnated, broken hearted and has no one but him to save her from total disgrace. And in the end she eventually starts to love him, for she`s such a pure character that she would never marry for money. Isn`t it pathetic? I think it is. Apart from the ugly 19th century costumes and brilliant acting there`s nothing outstanding in this film. First you watch it, then you forget it.

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.