#third millenium

...or the male population of Sunnydale:

Dawn makes an entrance and Harmony is adorable.

Do you give yourself any New Year’s resolutions? I usually don’t. It’s just a New Year’s glass of champagne for me. However, I have goals too. They just aren’t related to starting a new year. I want to get better in German and Swedish. And get a job. I know boring. But it turns out I don’t feel like I need anything else:-)

Christmas are over, New Year’s Eve too. When thinking about this I realized there’s no Christmas or New Year’s Eve episode in Buffy, at least I haven’t seen any. Well, Buffy manages without something like that, but I think It’s a pity considering that special episodes give shows special atmosphere.

The fifth season of Buffy begins with the episode named Buffy vs. Dracula, in which this legend enters Buffy’s little town. It was an entertaining episode and Dracula was powerful enough to mind-control even our mighty vampire slayer...:

...or the male population of Sunnydale:

Oh, Zander will always be my favourite kind of annoyance.

But the one of the biggest WTF of whole series was the very end of the episode.

When there suddenly appears an unexpected yet close family member, who hasn’t existed until the season 5, it usually means that the producers just don’t understand that the best time to end a show is when it’s still on top. I was actually worried that Buffy might have gotten to such a ridiculous phase and that the creators already exhausted all the good and SANE ideas.Nevertheless, from the first episode of the season 5 Dawn is here to stay. She’s 13 years old and she has a loooot on her mind.

Well, when I was her age, actually a little older, I had my own blog where I used to put all my god-awesome thoughts. Yes, online. Well, that’s one good thing about growing up at the end of 1990s for Dawn – her angsty bullshit was not out there, but in her diary instead. Now with Facebook and everything, the world has become a really embarrassing place.

While the episode Real me does a good job showing us the horrible-terrible-megawful relationship between Buffy and Dawn it absolutely doesn’t explain what the hell the kid’s doing there.

In another episode named No Place like Home Buffy gets into trance hoping to find out what magic makes her mom sick. She accidentally looks at the picture and sees this:

Buffy realizes that something’s wrong with Dawn and not in a sibling-rivalry/hatred kind of way… I’m not going to give spoilers, but the trance moment was very spooky and it’s really worth watching it.

However, what I want to point out and worship before I finish this post is Harmony. She’s not a new character but she hadn’t been extra entertaining before so I’m introducing her now. She went to the same high school with Buffy and used to be in a clique of popular. She wasn’t the most popular but certainly the dumbest. After the graduation Spike turned her to a vampire and it didn’t make her any smarter.

I suspect she somehow wants to prove herself so in Real me she decides to kill the slayer (= Buffy), which would certainly make her respected. She gets herself some minions and she’s amazing leader of the evil gang. Her plan consists of throwing a brick to the window of Buffy‘s house with this beautiful letter attached...

...to get her out and kill her as Harmony and her minions wait outside.

When Buffy and Harmony meets this conversation follows:

Have I already told you about how I met Stalin? Seemed nice at first but then got pissed off and and spitted a lot. What about Truman? Good lad, we had a drink or too... I met Mao Ce-tung and we got along well together. Except for the political topics. I really dislike politics. I’ve always known that Kim Jong-il, that little boy who cried sitting in my lap once, would make it big. Yeah, I met him as well. Also de Gaulle, Churchill and general Franco, well actually everybody except for Adolf Hitler or Pippi Longstocking maybe. But only because I was in USA making coffee for the scientists, who were trying to invent an atomic bomb. Gave them some pointers too. I know I talk too much. I’ve always been too chatty… I can speak several languages too. I learnt some Spanish during blowing up things in Spanish civil war (they allowed me to wear my own sweater instead those annoying uniforms) and also Russian (a school named gulag)…

Does it sound at least a little bit believable?

I don’t know…

Does it sound like fun?

I think so!

WARNING! When reading this book you might experience some uncomfortable feelings caused by all the adventures Allan Karlsson, aged 100, experienced and you did not.

“Even if you’re well bundled up, it is bold to cross the Himalayas with only the help of a homemade map of the world and a compass. In fact, Allan could have walked north of the mountain chain and the Aral and Caspian Seas, but reality and the homemade map didn’t exactly match up.”

Because he really lived a rich life. Even his family was little quirky, so we know where did he get his impeccable personality.

“For Allan’s father, the whole thing had acquired a personal dimension since Lenin had forbidden all private ownership of land the very day after Allan’s father had purchased twelve square metres on which to grow Swedish strawberries. ‘The land didn’t cost more than four roubles, but they won’t get away with nationalizing my strawberry patch,’ wrote Allan’s father in his very last letter home, concluding: ‘Now it’s war!’ ”

So the whole book is like this. You read something like this and you don’t even know what to say. Swedish strawberries? What? Growing them in Russia? What? But then you go like awwww.

Some say that Allan Karlsson is like something between Forest Gump and the good soldier Schweik. Allan also seems/pretends to be a little dumb while being extremely cunning at various crucial points in his life when making the history and somehow everything works out well. Only he doesn’t run as much as Forest does. And his life philosophy seems very similar to Schweik’s “It has never happened before that the things wouldn’t result somehow” – my attempt to translate my favourite quote from Schweik and “Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be” – from The 100-Year-Old Man…

Allan lives through a lot of good things, lots of tragedies as well, but his life is never boring even after he gets old, which is the usual age for people to stop doing anything remotely entertaining and start spending all their time praying and discussing one’s diseases. Because of that Allan decides to climb out of the window (he lives on the ground floor) and leaves the retirement house without mentioning his plans to everyone. Not that he has any. To make it short soon he has pretty pissed off Swedish mafia at his heels, dead bodies are piling up but Allan is always fresh and well disposed.

“Bucket was the leader; he decided which newspaper kiosk was to be robbed of cigarettes next. He was the one who had chosen the name – The Violence, in English, not Swedish. And he was the one who unfortunately asked his girlfriend Isabella to sew the name of the motorcycle club onto ten newly stolen leather jackets. Isabella had never really learned to spell properly at school, not in Swedish, and certainly not in English. The result was that Isabella sewed The Violins on the jackets instead.”

One of the Jim Carrey's good ones.

I've seen Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber and The Mask. While they aren't completely bad, unless one is a child, they might not win Jim Carrey a lot of respect and credit for his acting skills. Sadly when I hear the name Jim Carrey many people immediately think of these... eh... simple films. The thing is he has some good ones too. Maybe I'm gonna start a new project on my blog: The good films of Jim Carrey.

One of them is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:

Considering that it is a drama about a relationship, it is actually good. Even awesome. I'm not a fan of romance and I don't watch nor read anything like that at all. However, if you've seen this film, you will probably agree with me that a love story can be engaging and non-sentimental.

For those who haven't seen it – we have a protagonist named Joel (Jim Carrey), who met strange but endearing Clementine (Kate Winslet). The first time I saw her in the film I fell in love with her and her hair and everything about her. I don't like tasteless experiments and attention grabbing fashion choices but there's something that melts my heart when I see Clementine. She steals a lot of scenes for herself.

It seems that she and Joel obviously fell in love and are about to start a relationship,but waaait. 18 minutes into the film there are suddenly opening credits and Joel is crying. When he gets home, he takes an unknown pill and fall into a some kind of trance. Some guys arrive into his flat, including Frodo Baggins and Kirsten Dunst, and strangely mixed but still easily comprehensible collage of scenes of their lives begins (or Joel's live, because even though Clementine is a big part of the film, she's still a little mysterious and most of the time we don't know what's on her mind despite of her constantly talking). I love how the whole story is chopped and shuffled and the one thing that enables you orientation is Clementine's haircolour.

What we learn during following scenes is the fact that Joel decided to erase his memories of Clementine and their relationship. During the erasing process he experiences many scenes from various phases of their relationship in non-chronological order and the guys on special effects team had a show-off party or something because it looks super. Pat-pat on your shoulder. I cannot describe it, one needs to see it themselves. I also love the camera work. It's shaky, which creates documentary atmosphere, and differentiates it from big fake hollywood blockbusters.

Welcome to the third millenium.

Third Millennium with muse, Pia Miranda