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.

This is the only blog that tells you the end.

This is the only blog that tells you the end. They always tell you to build up the suspense. To leave them waiting for the end. For all the lazy person in us that doesn't want to read the book or  see the movie. I tell you the end. And you know it. You're just a click away from that story you never read or that movie you never saw.

Cloud Atlas + Sorry for not posting

Hi Readers! I am  sorry for not posting, and I just wanna say: Well... Here's a new Post.

Basically, it's all really complicated. It starts in 1849 with this person, Adam Ewing, crossing the ocean, and then, it fades into a story where a person writes a piano partition called Cloud Atlas. One of their Very good friends was Rufus Sixsmith, who is then murdered because he didn't like an atomic reactor and was about to reveal everything about it to Luisa Rey, a jounalist. Then, an old editor, Timothy Cavendish, reads a book called Luisa Rey's Detective story. It all fades in to Sonmi 451, a rebelling humanoid robot. Then it's Hawai, and Somni is the goddess of a middle ages type of world. So it's all interconnected very weirdly, and all the characters come up again and again, and the intrigue builds up, and then ta-dah! It's the end.

The movie is a must-watch. It follows the story quite well, and the transititons from one story to the other are very fluid. Some things change, but they don't matter much. The spirit of the book isn't lost, it's actually even more present. If you haven't read the book, you might be lost at first, but then you understand everything, and you're really surprised. And at the end, everything is clear. They all know everything.

And as they say: Everything is connected! The  movie is great but a bit long, but so is the book. You'll love it.

And here's a character map, which might help you or mess everything up in your mind even more.

PS: All the readers, thanks for getting me more than 2000 views. This is what keeps this blog going, and all other blogs too.

Rain Man

Rain Man.

Note: I think this is like, the second post in a month, which is not a lot, but I promised to myself I'd write at least two posts a month, so - there it is.

This is one of the weirdest, yet best movies I've seen so far. It's about a young man whose father died, and he's surprised to have received only a car and a few rose bushes as an heritage, because his father is a multimillionaire, and the young man, Charlie, wants to find out to who the rest of the heritage went.

He then stumbles upon Raymond, who is his brother, but who is an autist. He lives at the Walbrooke Institute, a place where autists and other people with mental handicaps live. He then tells Raymond they're going for a drive and kidnaps him.

Meanwhile, while Charlie is at Walbrooke, Charlie's car company has to pay back a gigantic debt, and Charlie's girlfriend disapproves of him kidnapping his brother.

This is Raymond.

This is Charlie.

Raymond is having a crisis.

Charlie wants to take Raymond to Los Angeles by plane, except that because Raymond remembers everything, he is scared of the plane because at least once, every company had a plane crash. So Charlie is forced to bring Raymond to LA by road, and by tiny secondary roads, because Raymond is scared of the highway. They stop at a tiny hotel and, when Charlie turns the hot water on, Raymond breaks into a crisis. Charlie asks him why.

Raymond: Raymond burn Charlie!
Charlie: Raymond, calm down. I'm not burnt, see.
                                                                Raymond calms down.
Charlie: Why do you say I'm burnt?
Raymond: I burnt you when you were a baby with hot water.
Charlie: You lived with us? So you're who I called Rain Man and sung me songs so I wasn't scared?
Raymond: Yes.
                                 Charlie is surprised.

When they depart from the hotel, Charlie teaches Raymond to play blackjack and they go to las Vegas. Charlie buys Raymond a new costume, and tells him his old ones are POO. Raymond thinks this is a joke, but agrees.

They play blackjack and win 80'500 dollars. Charlie's girlfriend arrives and gets stuck in an elevator with Raymond. They kiss. She asks him: How was it?
Raymond answers: Wet.

They leave las Vegas and arrive to LA. There, there is a trial because Charlie kidnapped Raymond and Raymond has to go back to Woodbrooke. Charlie promises Raymond to come see him in 2 weeks.

THE END.

BONUS

This elevator scene is also in another movie, The Hangover. And in the Hangover Elevator Scene, the guy with a beard and the grey costume is also kind of an autist.

Happy Womens' and girls' day!

Happy Girls' and Womens' day, on the 8.03.13.I bet that now you can guess that I'm a girl. ;-)

Fahrenheit 451

... For Guy Montag, a firefighter. But not the normal kind of firefighter. In the future Ray Bradbury imagines, firefighters don't save houses from fires anymore, they burn them if anyone in them has books. Guy is one of them. He hates book, lives with a wife he thinks he loves. But his life just flips over when he meets Clarisse, a strange girl that still walks home and looks at the tiny things in life, like the taste of rain when you look up and open your mouth or other people. She's seventeen, and is soon run over by a car. But Guy remembers her for ever. He realizes his wife is actually like a stranger to him and starts to hate her.

He continues to burn books. But one day, when a woman burns herself with her books, he manages to steal one. He reads it and doesn't want to burn them anymore. His wife reads it too. We learn the books is not the first one Guy stole. His wife reports to the firefighters that he has a book. Guy has to burn his own house. Guy kills his boss with the flamethrower he used to burn his own house down and also kills a first mechanical dog that is supposed to kill him with poison. Another 'dog' is sent after him to kill him. The war of his country with another begins.

Guy runs away from the mechanical dog that has to kill him and finds people walking along the railway line, that also love books and remember them. Bombs are dropped on Guy's city and his wife is killed. He's not sad and the war is over.

The book ends with Guy thinking that maybe after the war, books would be okay again...

I just loved this book and hope the world will never be like that - and if it will, I'd have been killed straight away because I love books so much. And you?

I keep on thinking about this book and I think it'll just keep on thinking about it until I read a book that makes me think about the future and books just as much as this book. :-(

I also think that what happens in this book could happen, and easily! Would you like a future like that? I guess not. At 451 degrees Fahrenheit, paper burns...

In that future, all the books have been banned. Some have already been banned now, and I know there are good reasons for it, but still... Here is the link for the list of banned books (not by the whole world, but by some governments; plus, I can't know if it's true because it's Wikipedia) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments
and also, just as an ironic fact, at some point in history, the books Fahrenheit 451 was banned.

Firmin - or the Adventures of a Metropolitan lowlife.

Firmin: Is he a human? A rat? Well, if you guessed so by looking at the picture you're right. Firmin is a rat.

But not an ordinary one. He is a Reading Rat. Let me tell you his story, which is also the story of the book. Firmin is the 13th out of 13 siblings, and the weakest because he gets no milk. The only way he can survive is by eating the litter on which they have to pee and poo. But this is no normal litter - it's made of books! Firmin, eating books to survive, ends ups learning how to read. He lives in a library.

His siblings go away when their mum dies, and Firmin is left alone. He then sees the owner of the bookstore, Norman and Firmin kind of falls in love with him. But when Norman sees Firmin for the first time, Firmin's happy days at the store are over. Norman tries to poison Firmin and Firmin realizes at last humans hate rats.

So he runs away from the shop, luckily, to be taken as a pet by a nice author called Jerry that loves him but doesn't understand Firmin can read. So Firmin reads the newspapers with Jerry and reads that the square where they live, and the bookstore is, is going to be destroyed. A theater on the same square burns down. Firmin lives on, being loved by Jerry. He goes to the Rialto cinema and falls in love with a human actress.

One day, when Jerry isn't at home, Firmin dies, thinking he is being hugged by the actress. It's pretty sad for a book. But I really loved it, even though it's not the normal kind of book. It's actually super weird, but when you start reading it, you kind of get pulled in and you can't come out until you're finished reading. So, I actually do advise you to read it, because it might become one of your favorites. Especially if you're someone that loves reading. Like Firmin... Except you're human. Or are you?

I wonder if any rats like Firmin are reading this... No, joking. I don't really think rats can read. Well, you never know.