Wednesday, 17 July 2013

The Best Offer


This is a movie about art and love. Virgil Oldman is an art collector and an art auctioneer. He has a secret room in which he keeps portraits of women - an obsession of his. He was never married, can't bear to be touched and always wears gloves. On his birthday, it is a tradition that he takes the first call. The first caller is a young woman. She asks him to evaluate her collection. When he comes to her house, he finds out she has never gone out of a secret room in the villa. He talks to her through the wall.  He wonders why, and discovers she has agoraphobia. One evening, he hides in the room to see her and falls in love with her. When she discovers that he has been hiding, she starts fearing him less. In the meanwhile, he found pieces of clockwork and asks his friend for love advice, and fixing the clockwork. That's what the friend does. The woman, Claire, seems to fall in love with Oldman too. One evening, when he comes to visit her, he is beaten up by a group of boys. She runs to rescue him - and suddenly her agoraphobia is cured. She comes to live with him, and he shows her the secret room. When he leaves for an auction in another country, she steals all of his paintings from the secret room. When he finds out, he goes on a search for her, and finally ends up in the bar across the street from her villa. There, he sees a very small woman, who tells him that her name is Claire, that she owns the house and that she rents it to "the cinema people". He realizes that the Claire that he loved didn't actually love him. He becomes solitary and dies old, heartbroken and alone.


You have to see this movie, because even though there are not many action scenes, you feel as though you are involved in the story, and you can feel all of the feelings that the characters feel, which makes this movie amazing.

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Of Mice and Men

I'm sorry I haven't posted in so long! Well, I've read around 5 books since I went on vacation, so I have lots of things to post about!

Well, this post kind of has a story behind it.



On a lazy summer afternoon, I picked up a book that my friends had often spoken about and which has been lying in my bookshelf for over a year. As I had nothing else to read, I decided to take it with me on vacation. It was Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. 




Lennie and George have been walking around the country, finding a job on a ranch. They want to buy a piece of land. Lennie wants to buy rabbits, pet them and feed them alfalfa. When they arrive on the ranch, the trouble starts for Lennie. The owner's son, Curley, is small. He doesn't like big people. Lennie is big, tall, and very simple-minded. When Curley hits him, he doesn't know what to do and crushes his hand. In the meantime, George helps Slim, and important guy on the ranch, and Slim gets puppies. Slim lets Lennie pet a puppy, and kills him. He didn't want to. That's when Curley's wife barges in, and sees that Lennie killed the puppy. He doesn't know how to explain it to her. George got friends with Candy, and older person. Candy wants to go with them at the end of the month, go buy a piece of land. Candy has an old dog. The other people that live on the ranch kill it with a bullet in the back of the neck. Candy is very sad. Lennie tries to stop Curley's wife from yelling, and shakes her so she stops yelling. He kills her, but he doesn't mean to. Lennie runs away, and George finds him. He thinks that the best thing to do is to shoot Lennie in the back of the neck, just like a dog. He doesn't feel anything.

This is a book everyone should read, because it's going to make you feel differently about all those people that you think simple, because they're not.