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François Truffaut's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic S.F. novel Farenheit 451.

The story takes place in an oppressive future, where written text is banned and people spend their free time watching TV, taking part in silly TV games and taking drugs. Firemen don't put out fires anymore (since everything is fireproof), but burn books instead. One day Montag, a fireman, meets Clarisse in the monorail, a girl who looks strangely like his wife, the dullness removed. She asks him if he ever reads the books before burning them. Montag then starts stealing books when he and his crew are in action and reading them. One day, the firemen are searching the house of an old lady that contains a huge amount of books. Montag's boss describes it as one of the hidden libraries used by rebels. The firemen are prepared to burn the heap of books in the house, but the lady refuses to leave and sets herself to fire. Later, as Montag wants to visit Clarisse at her house (of the same kind as the old lady's), he sees that the doors and windows have been barred. A neighbour informs him that the police has taken the inhabitants the previous night. Montag then searches his boss's office, hoping to find where Clarisse has been taken, but discovers that she was not taken. He later meets her, hiding near her house, and he helps her enter the cellar and retrieve and destroy a list of illegal libraries. She tells him about the book-people, who live far away in the forest, away from the oppression of the city, and tells him she's leaving to join them. Later, Montag and other firemen are sent to burn books to a place which turns out to be his own home, just in time to see his wife leaving him (she was the one giving him away). Montag then fights and kills his boss, and flees. He's followed for a time by the police, but he manages to escape them (the police will afterwards kill someone at random and claim it was Montag) and rejoins the book-people in the forest.

Spoiler: do not read if you don't want to know!

© IMDB.com

Marnie makes her living by getting hired as a secretary in places dealing with money. She then steals the money and disapears, changing her identity and her city of residence. One day her scheme is discovered by the boss of the firm where she works, who gives her the choice to be sent to jail or to marry him. She goes for the latter, but the husband discovers that his wife has psychological troubles (fear of thunderstorms, of red color, of being touched by men, recuring nightmares). He wants to help her, and gets information on her past. He then drives her to her mother's place to face the truth about the trauma she had lived during her childhood: her mother was a prostitute, and one night of thunderstorm Marnie was being abused by a client. Her mother tries to protect her, hits the client with a poker, and gets injured in the process. In order to help her, Marnie kills the client who ends up in a pool of blood. Due to the shock, she kept no memory of the event, and her mother raised her to despise men.

Spoiler: do not read if you don't want to know!

© IMDB.com

A remake of Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. A rich (but soon to be ruined) husband wants to kill his wife in order to inherit her fortune. He pays his wife's lover (who has seduced her only to take her money) to murder her. The lover hires a former prison mate of his to kill the woman. The killer fails and gets killed in self-defense by the woman. The woman then discovers several clues that her husband is actually the one who tries to get rid of her, while the lover tries to blackmail the husband. The husband kills the lover while he tries to flee with the blackmail money, and the wife eventually kills her husband in self-defense when he discovers that she knows about his plot.

Spoiler: do not read if you don't want to know!

© IMDB.com

I just watched Dr. Strangelove (Docteur Folamour in French), by Stanley Kubrick. The movie is a dark comedy about a crazy general launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. They manage to call off the attack, except for one bomber the radio of which got destroyed and could not be contacted. The bomber destroys its target and triggers the Doomsday Device that the Soviets just finished to build, provoking a nuclear holocaust all over the Earth.

© Amazon.ca

I just watched the four first episodes yesterday, subtitled in Finnish. It was pretty easy to understand, but then again, the story is not of the difficult kind: a guy moves in as the janitor of a home for young girls, pretending to be a student (whereas he already failed twice the test for entering the university of Tokio). At the same time, he remembers that when he was a small boy he made a promise to his sweetheart to meet again at the university of Tokio. He didn't remember the name of the girl, though but surprise, surprise! she's one of the girls living the the home.

Nice to watch because it's so easy to follow, but it really looks like as series for post-teen geek boys who fantasize on finding a girlfriend but have no clue as how to do it.

© Amazon.co.uk

Cowboy Bebop is about a bounty hunter roaming the solar system. I watched a couple of episodes, and until now, the hero does not seem to be very efficient in his job, since he did not catch his preys (they didn't escape though, the first one got shot by his girlfriend, and the second crashed on the parking lot of the police station). The series is quite violent but probably no more than your average action TV series (big guns shooting all over the place, fast vehicles crashing, this kind of things). One good thing is that the characters do not make stupid faces when they are feeling emotions, on the contrary to most of the previous japanimation series I've watched. That's a definite good point for the series. Also, the episodes seem to be quite independent from each other, there is no long-running story to keep the viewers hooked (maybe this would develop in later episodes?)

Probably the series I enjoyed the most among the ones I recently discovered: it's not all about feelings and relationships between people, but on the other hand, the stories don't fly very high either, which is one drawback of the format (you can't put much in a 20 minutes show meant to be a complete story).

© Amazon.co.uk

One more anime series, again quite different from the others. Gravitation is about a rock band trying to become famous, and the lead singer of which falls in love with a famous love-stories writer. The main character is impredictible (some would say “crazy”), and the story is therefore full of surprises. This makes the series watchable even if romance is not my cup of tea.

© zstore.com

Another series of which I watched the four first episodes last evening, subtitled in Finnish as well. Much more difficult to understand than Love Hina, this series is more about the description of weird characters. The story goes like this: an orphan girl lives in a house with three mysterious boys. The boys have been victim of a curse of some kind, because when touched by a girl, they they turn into animals: a rat, a dog and a cat. The problem is that the cat is not part of the Chinese Zodiac, and it makes the character very angry because he feels inferior to the rat. Then appears a girl who is madly in love with the cat-guy (“madly” is the right word, because she annoyingly keeps on beating him up) and who turns into a wild pig when touched by a man.

This series is about the hero discovering hidden aspects of the various characters and the characters being able to overcome their fear of being touched by other people. I think.

© dvdpris.com

One more anime series I discovered yesterday, again subtitled in Finnish. This one takes place in feudal Japan and is about two samurais (who want all the time fight each other) helping a girl to find a mysterious “sunflower-smelling samurai”. They agreed to help the girl after she helped them escape from the claws of a tyranic local governor who blamed them for killing his son. Later on, they join two gangs of Yakuza who fight against each other for the control of a city.

Samurai Champloo is definitely a different genre than the two other anime I recently watched. The setting is more or less grounded in Japanese history (but there is a warning at the beginning not to consider it as a historical document), and can be enjoyable if you don't mind the katana slashing and the blood stains. One thing I hated about it was the opening titles music: who the hell decided that rap is a suitable kind of music for feudal Japan stories?

Recettes à essayer :

• Whole wheat-banana pancakes (pancake au blé complet et à la banane) (Runners, ep. 4x13)
• Eggs with chocolate sauce (œufs brouillés au chocolat) (Jack Dalton, Mask of the Wolf, ep. 3x17)

Les cookies façon MacGyver :)

De plus en plus souvent de par le Web, je lis des remarques exaspérées de personnes qui se plaignent du niveau abyssal des chaînes de télévision généralistes. Mais en même temps, il semble que les gens regardent la TV plutôt que de regarder des programmes soigneusement choisi. Étant donné que 90% des programmes sont bons à jeter, il n'est pas étonnant qu'en allumant la TV au hasard, on tombe neuf fois sur dix sur un tel programme.

Il n'est pourtant pas difficile de choisir à l'avance ce qu'on veut regarder, l'enregistrer et le regarder quand on a le temps. On évite ainsi deux tracas liés à la télévision : les mauvais programmes diffusés lorsqu'on a le temps de regarder la TV, et les horaires impossibles des programmes intéressants.

Regarder la TV intelligemment est donc possible. Mais ça ne change rien au fait que 90% des programmes sont bons à jeter.