A Series of Unfortunate Events - vol 1 - The Bad Beginning

If you were interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.
In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.

There has been some noise around a movie, I think this was at the beginning of this year, name in French "Les désastreuses aventures des orphelins Baudelaire". So I've read an article about it and it said it was like Harry Potter, but for a younger public. Since I am quite naive and usually trust something when I read it, I've done a bit of search and I've found that the movie was adapted from books. And since I always say (annoyingly?) that someone should read the book before watching the movie, I've applied my annonying rule to myself. So here I am with volumes 1 to 3 of "A Series of Unfortunate Events" by Lemony Snicket.

First things first, this book really is for kids. It's short, well illustrated and well written, in a simple, nice and modern style.

Reading about the first calamities in the life of the Baudelaire orphans (14 years old Violet, 12 years old Klaus and 1or 2 years old Sunny) was a really pleasant experience; the tone is always light and amusing, although the kids really are unlucky; and there is always an expression or a little surprise hidden in a page. OK, some expressions (some even rather simple) sometimes are very heavily explained: it somewhat gets tiring but I guess this is OK for kids.

My conclusion is that there is nothing absolutely groundbreaking but that the reading is so pleasant that it compells me to read the other volumes.

Monster

Charlize Theron's performance is incredible! She is so transformed in the movie that I couldn't even recognize her at the beginning.

However, her performance is the brighest spot of the movie and since I do not feel like starting a blog entry on death penalty or even on the case of Aileen Wuornos, I'll just say that I was expecting a bit more subtlety in the way the subject is treated. It seemed so entrenched in black-and-white-ness and so quick at switching from one to the other that there simply is no place for subjectivity or personal reflexion. too bad.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is a movie with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet (and, for the viewer's sake, it's Jim "Truman Show" Carrey, not Jim "Dumb and Dumber" Carrey).
It's a movie with a story to tell (and a beautiful one too).
It's about love, human nature. It tells us how love is both strong and fragile; how you should live it everyday and not discard it lightly; how words and acts can hurt the other one and how they can be regretted.

The story is rather simple: Joel (Jim Carrey) meets Clementine (Kate Winslet). She has temperament and he's an all around nice guy; they quickly fall in love. Then you learn that she has had him erased from her memory. This is the starting point of the story and once you've accepted it (which you do surprisingly well for the sake of a great story and great actors), you follow all the steps of Joel and Clementine's relationships, complicity, clashes, tenderness and anger. The pictures are superb and both main actors are at the top of their skills.

I recommend this movie to everyone. Everyone will learn from it. And even if you don't think so, you will.

Hellboy

I'm fireproof, you're not.

First: I've never read the comic so, I cannot say if the movie is faithful to the original comic.

That being said, there's nothing much left: the special effects are up to today's standards, the movie is efficient. That's what I was expecting, that's what I got.

[ironic mode] Oh, and as usual, there's Hollywood's superb -oh-please-save-my-pet- scene, but here, you get more, you get ... several pets... Cats actually. Waooo, Hollywood's writers always find something subtle to have me shed a little tear. [out of ironic mode]

The Wind in the Willows

The world has held great heroes,
As history-books have showed;
But never a name to go down to fame
Compared with that of Toad

Several years ago, I've been offered, for a birthday, a very beautiful comic book entitled "Le vent dans les saules" (French traduction for "The wind in the willows") by Michel Plessix . At that time, I've read and enjoyed it very much, both because the story is very simple, calm, pleasing and enchanting and because the graphics are very much in adequation with the text.

Although it is obviously stated on the cover, I had not noticed that this comic was in fact an adaptation from someone's tale. So, a couple of months ago, I bought this book, Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows" and at first, I did not connect it to the comic that was sitting in my living room. I think it took me at least a 50 to 60 pages to realize that I knew the story from somewhere...

[digression mode] I sometimes read too much and it seems that my memory is not extendable at will and it will not remember everything that I try to cram into it. Moreover, the time between complete knowledge, vague remembrance, and complete forgetfulness seems to be auite random and not always related to the quality of the book or the pleasure I had to read it... [out of digression mode]

So the story is great, the atmosphere is simple and calm and radiate something that we humans seem to have all lost: a simple, naive and entrusting relation to nature. I feel happier now that I've read this book and I would recommend it as a remedy against excessive sullenness.

Oops they did it again

Yes, it looks like half of France is on strike again... My first half says that they are taking me (and quite some other railroad/subway users) hostage and my other half grants them the right to show their anger and just gives in.

The saddest about this is that whatever the number on people on strike, it will not have the slighest effect on the course of humanity. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, I'd say that "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"...

The Kingdom (Riget)

I've just finished the second season of this TV series and all I can say is this: Why oh why is there no third season?!? I've been looking around for rumours on the net, and I found that a "Riget III" has indeed been prepared but abandoned since the actors playing the roles of the professor Helmer and Ms Sigrid Drusse both died in between.
The Kingdom is a TV soap opera about events that take place in a hospital that is built aver an ancient cemetary. As a movie by Lars Von Trier, you of course get the Dogma unstable DV camera but you also get all the characters, the whole depths of their relationships, and all the shades of grey between good and evil that he brings to his movies. The movie looks grainy or dirty sometimes, which gives it a more "organic" look, rather suited to the goofiness or spookiness of the characters, and the uncharasteristic other-wordly events.
Everyone will love the danes-hating, faeces-sinking, swedish professor Helmer and its danish counterpart, the loony, fresh-aired, always misplaced professor Moesgaard.
Half touching, half gory, half surprising and half ghostly: 200% strange but always interesting. It may not be as long or as elaborated as "Twin Peaks" but it misleads you all the same.

You have to see the Kingdom!

From Hayao Miyazaki to Lars Von Trier and current reading

Well, last month, I had decided to catch up with Miyazaki's movies so I ended up watching successively "Princess Mononoke", "Spirited away" (Le voyage de Chihiro) and "Laputa: Castle in the Sky". Although these were great, I was in need of something a bit more "spooky" so I decided to watch "The kingdom" again (in Danish with English subs... Danish sounds funny). More to come about the Kingdom and its inhabitants when I'm finished with the second season.
As to my reading, I read "Cyrano de Bergerac" (which is hands down the best book I've ever read) last week and I'm now in the middle of "The Wind in the Willows"... more on that later.

Summer is definitely over

In my yard, there is a lamp that is triggered by a motion detector when it's dark. When I left home this morning, for the first time in months, the lamp has lighted up. Sigh... summer is already over, welcome to autumn.

A rainy moment

Today was beautiful a day, sunny, not too hot, about 25 degrees (well, since I was in my office, I didn't enjoy much of it).
As I left the building after work, a small rain started to fall. A fine, tepid and very pleasant rain. It has lasted 30 seconds. How great!

I tell you : it's the little things that count.

De l'hypocrisie des décisions politiques

[Mise à jour] Et voila le résultat, le premier ministre retire ce projet après avoir été ridiculisé par tout le monde

Pour ceux qui voulaient savoir jusqu'où ce gouvernement était capable d'aller pour ne pas gouverner, voici la nouvelle trouvaille des "autorités" françaises: si on baisse la limitation de vitesse sur autoroute de 130 à 115 km/h, le gain sur la consommation d'essence contre-balance la perte de pouvoir d'achat due à l'augmentation du prix de l'essence. Une fois l'annonce lancée, le gouvernement se justifie par le fait que les associations de sécurité routière voient cela d'un bon oeil.

Juste quelques remarques pêle-mêle, qui me viennent à l'esprit après cet effet d'annonce:

• Le président Chirac a fait de la sécurisation de la route un de ses objectifs de mandat : on pouvait difficilement faire plus ridicule comme objectif ^[1]. Est-ce là pour cacher une incapacité à trouver des solutions aux vrais problèmes?
• Le prix de l'essence est constitué à 74% de taxes. N'y aurait-il pas un effort direct faisable plus simple (et plus apprécié)? C'est une réponse tout aussi pathétique aux préoccupations des gens qu'une éventuelle redistribution (entendre: redistribuer à ceux qui crient le plus fort) du pactole pétrolier que l'état va récolter.
• Pour une augmentation que je gouvernement juge circonstancielle, ils iront jusqu'à changer tous les panneaux de toutes les autoroutes de France, ainsi que tous les manuels d'auto école, etc... Quel est le coût global de cette décision soudaine?
• Aujourd'hui le pétrole augmente alors on propose de baisser la vitesse. Personnellement, je pense que le prix de l'essence ne va faire qu'augmenter encore pendant un certain temps (note: après tout, cela fait bien le jeu des compagnies pétrolières) alors je propose de diminuer la vitesse limite sur autoroute à 50 km/h tout de suite, cela fera faire des économies d'échelle sur les achats de panneaux successifs (je savais que j'avais l'âme d'un politicien!)
• Une telle décision doit être prise pour une vraie raison (pour la sécurité routière justement), mais pas pour des raisons politiciennes!

^[1] Je ne juge pas le bienfondé de la cause, bien au contraire, mais l'effet poudre-aux-yeux: on aurait pu utiliser la sécurisation de la route par le cancer ou les suicides des jeunes dans la phrase précédente.

A Tale of Two Cities

The latest book in my series of English (and sometimes American) litterature classics, and my fourth or fifth Dickens (one of these days, I'll make a list..). I think I'm developping some sort of passion for Dickens'storytelling.
For this one, there was a difference though: since I began reading it just a week before Harry Potter HBP hit the shelves, I had to stop in the middle to read HBP and finish it afterwards. Well since I've been a little disappointed in HBP and went on vacation, I had a sort of reading hiatus.

I shouldn't have.

This book is just great, and as much as I love the way Dickens depicts characters and their miseries, I found the way the story intricates into the French revolution made it an even better read. My oh My! How he depicts the violence and cruelty of the events through the eyes of Lucie beholding the carmagnole dance, and how this violence is rationalized by Sydney Carton in the last scene...

I'm French and I was 14 when France celebrated the 200th anniversary of its revolution, singing "la carmagnole", and wearing these red hats and tricoloured cocards. At this time, the motto of the nation was, and still is "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" (which can easily translated ;)), but is was not "Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death!"! When you're at school, you learn about kings and serfs, about the dates and personnalities of the revolution, about the Bastille and the guillotine, but there is no teacher to explain the violence of the revolution, and the daily life in those troubled times, no one to make it interesting. To make history (or whatever subject) interesting to kids, you have to have it intertwined with real world facts, something that can easily be grasped and remembered; anyway, I wish I had it explained that way.
But this is what history is about: it is a rationalizing process, always keeping only the big picture and the big changes and sending the costs and experience of these changes into oblivion. Everybody knows Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette were closely shaved by the "great sharp female" but who remembers how many fell under the blade of "Little Sainte Guillotine" and the atrocities of the people against itself...

All in all, a great book, sometimes difficult to read (for a non native English reader, I thought it was harder than "Hard Times" but hey, still nowhere near "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"...) but very interesting. What is the next Dickens on my list? ;)

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Like lots of persons addicted to Harry's adventures, I received my copy of HBP in my inbox on Saturday morning, and then read it in two days (yes that's long but it's a week-end and someone's gotta take care of the kids).
So I've let the impressions sink and here are my conclusions:

- The introduction is great, Snape is definitely the best character of the series
- There's way too much snogging for me but since the teenager are the main target, I shouldn't complain about that
- The conclusion (understand: the last 5 chapters) are great and I couldn't put the book down
- I still think JKR didn't keep me as eager to read as in the previous one (which I re-read before reading HBP) and that the main plot is less breathtaking. In Order of the Phoenix, Harry was in the middle of a worldwide plot, the whole school was concerned with what was happening and Harry's mood was all the darker; in contrast, HBP is only concerned with a potions book, the whereabouts of Draco and its hard to have Harry's mood reflect on the whole with all the snogging happening (yes I know, shouldn't complain). I didn't say I was bored but simply a little disappointed.


So, with the great ending, I think I am like everyone who read the book: I do not know what to think about Snape; I wish he was a good guy but I think he really is a bad one. I guess I'll have to wait.

First entry

So, this is it, I've created a blog. I can feel that I now live in harmony with my internet-addicted fellow humans...