I spent a large part of the last few days watching movies I’ve been wanting to see for a long time. One of them was A Very Long Engagement, which I had missed when it was in theatres half a year ago. The film is the most recent work of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet of Amélie fame and features Audrey Tautou (=Amélie) as female lead Mathilde who is embarking on a long journey to find her fiancée Manech who disappeared in the Great War.

As far as Tautou’s portrayal of a young woman holding on to her dreams, the long list of characters whose lives we get to peek into, the witty dialogues and the inventive twists and turns are concerned, the movie is just as charming as Amélie. However, A Very Long Engagement’s scope is ultimately much larger, be it in the depressing and disturbing setting of the trenches and the bright, sun-flooded fields of rural France, or in its themes of how inhuman and absurd wars are, how even people who fight on the same side deceive and betray each other, but also how love drives people to do the most irrational, unreasonable things and how hope can motivate you to dedicate your whole life to one thing.

The cinematography, set designs and computer animations are absolutely fantastic. The score is wonderfully moving in a non-pompous way which suits the film perfectly. The narrative is always gripping and keeps a fine balance between its elements of realistic depiction of the war, suspense, light-hearted comedy and romance.
A highly impressive movie! I’m really glad I bought it and urge everyone to do the same :)

New layout, which marks the return of the almighty sidebar! Tweaking the original theme to suit my layout was so much easier than I’d thought. The comments page doesn’t look just like it’s supposed to but it’s just a minor thing and everything else works so well, I’m even a bit surprised about how smooth the layout change went.
I suppose this means I’ll never ever switch back to Blogger because now I am 100% sure I’m fully able to modify WordPress on my own.
And look, we now have a sexy little Firefox button on the left to spread the love :)

Today is Jean-Paul Sartre’s 100th birthday, worth mentioning and remembering because Sartre was a truly brilliant man, someone I absolutely admire. We should all go to our bookshelves now and take out a worn copy of our respective favourite Sartre publication and brush up on our French :)

Feels like I’ve been away for ages but it’s only been two and a half weeks. The days go by really fast when you’re busy, but looking back at them now they seem like an endlessly long line of work-filled hours. But all’s good because I love what I’m doing.

This place needs a new layout. I started working on one a few weeks ago but never got round to finish editing it because other things seemed more important. I’ve been meaning to write about a couple of things here all the time (mainly political rants of the “Oh Europe, where are you going? Bureaucracy will be the death of you” sort) but, obviously, I never got to post them.

I was supposed to go on vacation with some friends tomorrow but I cancelled everything a few hours ago. (I still have so many things to do!) My parents are abroad at the moment, too, so with most of my friends being away from tomorrow (technically, today) on as well, I’ll be all alone for the next week and a half :( No cool people around me to distract me from work… it’ll also help me sort out everything on the internet front, like this site and my Fairy Cube site (I’m three chapters behind with translations!).

PS. What a game, my highlight of the day! Watching the Japanese team do their wee bit of magic was just so much fun :)

The first 20 minutes were terrible. When I think back now, they just blur into this mess of silly dialogue (although that was to be expected, it’s Star Wars after all ;) ) and fight after fight after fight. But it was absolutely worth enduring it all. Absolutely. Because that looong first part was followed by some of the best scenes not only of the “new” trilogy but in all of Star Wars.

That scene with Anakin and Padmé looking out onto the city in different buildings at sunset was absolutely breathtaking! It was probably the quietest scene in all 6 episodes and made it perfectly clear that it marks the turning point in the first (chronologically speaking) trilogy and is, after all, the reason for the existence of the second (”old”) trilogy. So atmospheric and touching. It was absolutely amazing.

I simply loved the last third (or second half?) of the film. It was dark, visually impressive and surpisingly violent; fatalistic in the sense that it was obvious how everything would end, you could see everything coming (because we know “the future”, episodes IV-VI) and just had to accept everything. No happy end could spoil this, although there is hope and, of course, knowledge that everything will turn out well in the end.

Yoda, Anakin killing the children, the whole volcano and “transformation” scene, Padmé’s funeral… highly impressive stuff.

My temporary Star Wars chart (subject to change):
Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
Episode VI – Return of the Jedi
Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
Episode II – Attack of the Clones
Episode IV – A New Hope
Episode I – The Phantom Menace