Black Horoscope

Gemini

It is said that you are curious about everything and highly adaptable. Actually, it is a lack of profundity and consistency that characterizes you. You are absolutely unable to focus on anything, and your intellectual process is very superficial. Everything you say is totally uninteresting. It’s just hot air in any case. You don’t believe a single word you utter, and you forget everything you say a few minutes later. You hop from one subject to another to carry out a conversation in order to appear knowledgeable and interesting. However, it is quite clear that, under your scholarly veneer, you are a mediocre and shallow person. You have no emotions and no compassion. You resemble an intelligent robot, which repeats what it has been taught, or what it has experienced, without thinking by itself.

Source: http://www.astrotheme.com/files/black-zodiac.php

Source: http://www.cinematical.com/2010/02/27/review-the-ghost-writer/

Review: The Ghost Writer

by Dawn Taylor Feb 27th 2010 // 1:03PM

 Roman Polanski’s latest thriller, The Ghost Writer, is a fascinating mash-up of homages, cinematic in-jokes and self-references, the sort of film that tends to either delight or irritate film buffs — sometimes inspiring both reactions silmutaneously — while leaving more casual viewers a bit flummoxed. Surely Polanski couldn’t have meant for his green-screen backgrounds to be so patently false! And oh, the performances are stiff and self-conscious! Almost immediately, the arguments begin in one’s own head as to whether this movie is deliberately, stylishly melodramatic, or a tad clunky by accident.

As good as The Ghost Writer is — and it really is quite good — the film itself doesn’t seem to know, either. Part of the problem may lie in the road it took to the screen, what with the director finishing the film while under house arrest in Switzerland, and additional studio meddling which resulted in a painful number of overdubbed line-readings turning effing F-words into “soddings” and “buggers” in order to acquire a PG-13 rating. What’s left is the feeling that this could have been one of the director’s great films, in the same league as Chinatown or Knife in the Water, but the distractions of Polanski’s personal life, and other forces behind the scenes, kept it from reaching masterwork status.

The plot, adapted from Robert Harris’ novel The Ghost, is a clever bit of nouveau noir: A professional ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) is offered a truckload of money to complete the memoir of former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) after the original ghost dies under suspicious circumstances. Isolated at Lang’s coldly modern beach house and warned by Lang’s assistant (Kim Cattrall) that the manuscript must be kept under lock and key, the ghost slowly pieces together a puzzle that connects the memoir, Lang’s involvement in a CIA torture scandal, and his predecessor’s death. McGregor’s wide-eyed, “who me?” demeanor brings the right note of dewy dimness to the role, playing as he is a man who should have heard klaxon horns as soon as he was offered $250,000 for a month’s work.

The heaviest handed of Polanski’s homages comes with the way he fashions his picture as a modern-day Hitchcock film, with Cattrall standing in for Hitch’s signature icy blonde (and doing a fine job, despite an accent that veers wildly from upper-crust British to mid-Atlantic and back again) while Olivia Williams, as Lang’s wife, fills out the darker side of the neurotic-noir-gal quotient. A propulsive, orchestral score by Alexandre Desplat evokes Bernard Herrmann’s music for North by Northwest without being nearly as memorable. Polanski is at his Hitchcockiest in scenes that involve driving (a long set piece that has McGregor following the directions on a car’s GPS recalls James Stewart tailing Kim Novak in Vertigo) and an almost-final sequence that follows a note, passed hand-to-hand through a party, that goes on for about six hands further than it should.

The Ghost Writer also suffers a bit from overall tone, in that Polanski’s best films have had an intimate, close-in, almost claustrophobic quality to them, while here the action takes place in a glass-and-concrete mansion and outdoors on windswept winter beaches. All this chilly expanse is intended to create a sense of isolation, but unfortunately it also fails to draw us into McGregor’s increasing peril, as does Polanski’s insistence on presenting a couple of key plot turns via characters watching the news on enormous plasma-screen televisions — it keeps us at a distance, where the Hitchcock films on which Polanski is obviously basing this picture all become tighter framed, more entangled and tense as the story gallops toward conclusion. Despite a lot of wonderful imagery and a smart screenplay, the film is just too visually expansive and laconic to inspire an overwhelming sense of dread.

It’s interesting to note that one of the better references in The Ghost Writer is to Polanski’s own work. As McGregor’s writer unravels the unsavory facts about his new job and his employer, we return two or three times to shots of Lang’s groundsman, a middle-aged Asian man, attempting to sweep off the deck outdoors next the beach. The wind whipping around him, he keeps adding detritus to a wheelbarrow only to have the wind blow it all back out onto the deck again. It’s a clever visual metaphor, and also recalls the Japanese gardener in Chinatown, who provided a key clue when he told Jake Gittes that his employer’s salt-water pond was “bad for glass.”

Almost any film by a master director offers moments that delight and illuminate, even when the movies themselves are minor offerings in the director’s oeuvre (see as well: Scorsese’s Shutter Island). The pace of The Ghost Writer is deliberate and assured; the performances by the actors are wisely considered. It’s a good-looking film that feels as if it could have used a bit of tightening up, as well as an R rating to avoid the unfortunate overdubbings — but there are moments of brilliance that make it more than worth tolerating the missteps.

Victor Pelevin “The Sacred Book of Werewolf”

In speaking of intelligentsia’s debt of guilt to the nation, he kept using two terms that I thought were synonyms – ‘intelligentsia’ and ‘intellectuals’.  After a while I just had to ask:

‘But what difference is there between a member of the intelligentsia and an intellectual?”

‘There’s a very big difference,’ – he replied.  ‘I can only try to explain it allegorically.  Do you understand what that means?’

I nodded.

‘When you were still very little, there were a hundred thousand people living in this city who were paid for kissing the ass of a loathsome red dragon – which you probably don’t even remember…’

I shook my head.  Once in my young days I really had seen a red dragon, but I’d already forgotten what it looked like – the only thing I could remember was my own fear.  It was unlikely that Pavel Ivanovich had that incident in mind.

‘Of course, those hundred thousand people hated the dragon, and they dreamed of being ruled by the green toad who fought against the dragon.  So, anyway, they came to an arrangement with the toad, poisoned the dragon with lipstick that they got from the CIA and started living a new life.’

‘But what have the intell – ‘

‘Wait,’ he said, raising his hand.  ‘At first they thought that under the toad they would be doing exactly the same as before, only they’d get ten times as much money for it.  But it turned out that instead of a hundred thousand ass-kissers there was only demand for three professionals working in three eight-hour shifts to give the toad a never-ending blowjob.  And which of the hundred thousand those three would be, would be decided by an open competition, in which candidates would not only have to demonstrate their advanced professional skills, but also the ability to smile optimistically with the corners of their mouths while they were at work…’

‘I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread.’

‘Well, this is the thread.  Those hundred thousand people were called the intelligentsia.  And those three are called intellectuals.’

So, back to writing.  I already took some courses at DeVry Institute of Technology, in particular.  Even though, my specialty was computers (Information Technology), I had to take general educations courses.  That included writing.  So, there.  Checkmark.