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"...