Gaw-aw-awd. Every year, the same excruciating ritual. I already knew I wasn't totally a girl full of "clichés" since the day I discovered I was incapable of eating a full plate of chocolate. But every year, I have another confirmation with the horrid mechanism which usually sets off in France around late June: sales. Rabjas. Soldes. Whatever you call them.
I like shopping, once in a while. When I need things. But really, those herds of men and women waiting behind the fences of department (deportement, maybe) stores, braying and neighing at the sight of reduced prices... And I'm utterly incapable of choosing something right for me among all this abundance of silk-Polyester-extra-woolly tank tops, I shrink from the armies of stilettos that assault the innocent fashionista at the entrance of her favorite store.
Still, I usually buy one thing or two, in the end. And the irony of it all is: it's still an expensive. That's why I stand in front of another excruciating dilemma which, you, brave OK Cupid user, are going to help me resolve! I've bought this dress... But it's still expensive (hush, it's a famous brand) and I have to ensure my investments, hell! So tell me...
1. Is wearing this type of thing compatible with being a Socialist?
2. Ought I to keep it?

Photo on my profile. Thank you OK Cupid.

... in my brain!

I took a Brain Test right here on OK Cupid and it says I'm "well-balanced":

Well Ballanced

You scored 75 %Lefty and 74 %Righty!
Congratulations, you have well developed skills in both hemispheres. You see an abundance of ideas and you can easily make plans without getting lost in possibilities. Both the details and the bigger picture are obvious to you. You can relate to almost anyone, and understand their perspective. Undoubtedly you are good at anything you set your mind to. It may also be possible to hypnotise you.

...Yeah, anybody interested by such perfection?

Some incredible thing just happened to me on OK Cupid!

I took the "Beautiful Faces" Test and the result was 100% accurate.

Indeed, Keira Knightley definitely is my ideal woman / face.

Yep. Another one.

More than ever, the screen appears to us as a threshold. We are warned, as if hearing a low, hoarse voice: this is no country for ol’men. "Leave every hope, ye who enter!" And yet we do not enter a world of confusion and movement, the spherical world of Renaissance, like in Dante’s Divine Comedy; on the contrary, everything around is flat and quiet. Everything is silent. From lame country music to second-hand soul records, the seventies remain associated to the image of transistor sounds and local radios blaring from the cars driving through shallow and nondescript strips. Here, both nature and urban landscapes seem to be mute and immutable, except for the weather. Every single object in a room (a glass of milk, dirty dishes piled up in the sink, brownish envelopes), every single natural element (a tree, a river, a rock) seem to be mute and immutable. This is a land that stands between a Stephen King novel and a Goya painting. There seems to be a certain obviousness of the violent vignettes that are continuously exposed to us; and for once, even the glimpses of humour that keep the Cohen "brand" alive for the fans are of no use here. They are nothing but faint echos of some deeper, more velvety and shadowy force that physically acts on the film. For the movie presents itself as one of those endless and traditional fights against Evil with a capital E, as what could irrationally be called the "villain", played by Javier Bardem, seems to be Evil incarnate, in the proper and most literal meaning. Evil made flesh and bones, from rotten flesh that becomes sourer and sourer in the Southwest sun, to bones obscenely piercing through the arm of a man on a sidewalk. Yet there is a major difference, perhaps the mightiest between the Cohen brothers and the televangelist prophets of all kinds of "wars against the Axis of Evil": Good cannot create a balance in this world, because there is no valid Good. If the "old men" are that of the Bible, they do not belong here. They’re forced back to a manichean universe to which the Cohen brothers are strangers.
This might be the greatest force in the film: the meandering path through which it shows Evil creeping its way with slow, yet sure motions. Towards the end, as the rhythm starts getting more talkative, this dark sense of fate seems to shrinken a bit, despite the clockwork-like storytelling. The temptation of showing themselves as virtuosi of the wit, throughout a collection of sharp, refined lines and dialogues, strangefully prevents the two brothers from thoroughly bringing the viewer’s eyes on the kern of their mastery in the movie, that is to say aesthetic composition. The latter is far from being a sort of fortuitous and pittoresque gallery of well-photographed shots; it conveys a strong narrative meaning, from the loneliness of the main protagonists (through the presence of unchanging, unmoved and unmoving landscapes such as the desert and its adjacent road) to the quizzical questionings of Tommy Lee Jones’ character, a soon-to-be-retired police guy (how remarkably he passes from a hackneyed scenery, that of the epic western town to an intriguing meadow with one single tree in the middle). Keeping this slow, heavy pace to the end would perhaps have rendered a still more serious tone. On occasions during the movie, we might find ourselves grinning, thanks to the performances of Bardem and Brolin, inimitable in their cat-and-mouse chase; yet even the absurd has a definitely bitter taste. If we come to laugh, it is most likely that a shocking shooting, a cold-blooded manslaughter or the glimpse of a rotting corpse will force us back into the true matter of things. You cannot laugh at death and decay, even when playing your life on a "heads or tails" game.
There is perhaps one paradoxical issue, or more surely one that may appears as such: in the end, there is no lesson to be remembered. The Vietnam war is mentioned, a chronological and psychological landmark, more than a topic of discussion. Same thing with Llewelyn’s dull unemployment and his petty place. As the credits start, surprinsingly silent again, we do return to reality, while experiencing an unknown sort of break. The film definitely closes on itself, echoing the first lines: the Coen brothers refuse the idea of a "to-be-continued" ending. The pseudo-metaphysical thoughts on life are more part of the crumbling down of the pionneer philosophy than of a deep debate. We viewers have had our share of the drama, and must be content with it. Still there remains, beside the shock of the storyline, what could be the best achievement for such a film apparently so focused on narration: the shape of an atmosphere, hovering over our mind for an hour or two. Bardem’s character’s blunt and brutal method of killing is in fact deceptive: No Country For Old Men does not act upon us as a direct punch in the stomach. Its poison slowly emerges from every corner of the screen, both infecting and intoxicating whoever falls into this desert of silence and absurdity.

Let us hear saint Bernard now.

"Quid vero agimus ex quo primum incipimus vivere, nisi morti appropinquare, et incipere mori?"

You, reader, you most probably began your profile description with:
"I'm a pretty laid-back person..."
Then, why, as I suppose you could be my neighbour or my fellow traveller in the underground or even any damned passerby on the street, why do you keep shouting at me if I deviate from your carefully-managed production plan for the day? You had predicted and worked everything thoroughly to walk directly and on the straight line from the stairs to the door; if someone, especially this exquisite bitchy 19-year-old girl from the 6th floor (i.e. me, you silly sleepyhead) crosses your path and creates a two-second span of void and useless time in your schedule, then the mechanics go wrong, the day goes mad! Because of me, you will be humiliated at the coffee machine, for the last person before you will have taken to the very last drop of orange juice in the device. Because of me, you will have to suffer the February cold because the bus driver will have - "for once", or that is something you would mutter - started on time. And at the end of the day, when returning back home you will think of all these discrepancies between what would had been (at least in your nerdy brains)your perfect ingeniously-wrought Stalinian day and what has actually happened, you'll see me again on the stairs and mentally curse me, with a rudier state of mind that you think you are capable of. Cheers! You are most probably a pretty laid-back person, and I thank you for that.

Another question, but I guess the answer is: fate, luck, un-luck, non-luck, void of luck, lack of luck, and the whole series of "Gad, I ain't damn winnin' anythin'".
Why are there so many Democrat / Socialist results in "OK Cupid's Politics Test" (wait, keep on reading, the question has not been yet uttered), whereas (this is a turning-point. Be very, very aware) in real life (whether you stand for a noumenal or a phenomenal point of view, I don't really care... let's say: the outside ordinary world, that of the pretty laid-back people that we all are, citizens of the world, etc.) I mostly meet right-winged, brutal, narrow-minded persons? Oh, perhaps because a small number of them declare they're socialist too. Holy me. Come what may.

Okay, I have to go to Latin class now. And I've got an exam this afternoon.

Yea, please note, Saturday afternoon. Philosophy (a text eommentary on Aristotle's Physics, sounds great). This life is a ten-million dollar Peripatetician (and this is a crappy play-on-words... whoever may understand it is allowed to shout at me).

I hate "over-ego"-focused pages. So this is a movie review I tried to jot down after having seen David Fincher's Zodiac. Writing in English is not a piece of cake for me. So please feel free to comment: I'm only at the beginning of the Pilgrim's process...

It all begins with something obvious. Californian suburbs, at night. Moist, warm astmosphere. From its very first scene, Zodiac reaches the meeting point between two Americas; the first one spreading itself on the wide colourful pictures of the ads from the 60's and the 70's; the second one lying under – subconscious America, where every pulsion and fantasy is expressed – . Throughout the movie, we witness this intertwining; but the contrast between the two visions doesn't simply fit the typical opposition "Good versus Evil", "Police and Journalists versus the Serial Killer". The Zodiac himself is part of mainstream America: every decade since the 50's has had its shadowy murderous figure – everytime a dense and tense symbol for a complete reversal of moral values – . The Zodiac echoes with Ted Bundy, Charles Manson; his very essence implies many followers. This is the kind of natural born killers who have become the dark side of American culture – and consequently, are still part of this culture. So that the truly dark, deeper, subconscious kern in the movie lies in every element, symbol, line, prop, which sets our mind on fire. The perpetual ringing of a phone, in a neon-lit vacant press office. The unexplored shadows of a cave, on the borders of the screen, isolating the character in his sheer terror. Pearls of sweat shining on a student's glasses, under the sunshine. Beyond the mere suspense movie it seems to be, Zodiac proves to be sending tiny signals to what lies under our main thoughts. Sometimes the cinematography reveals its withered aspect, as if the whole memory of the 60's and the 70's only existed through a blurred, pastel-hued impression, whose density would be an illusion. Zodiac questions the images: not only because its plot deals with the relationship between the medias and the information, but also because the spectator can dimly perceive glimpses of the veil – perhaps, in a more ambiguous way, the screen – that falls on a period of time, from the very moment it becomes part of History. A perfect rendering of the 60's and the 70's? Like Summer of Sam by Spike Lee, this is more of a fantasy, shared by many people, decaying before our eyes through the movie's unforgiving scheme.
Despite its "Based on a true story" label – a tag that usually condemns a movie to the ultimate comparison with reality and facts – , the script comes to a quite refined point, where the usual tips and tricks of the typical suspense narrative do not vanish, but still melt in the flow of the story line. The scenario seems both dense and diluted: at the very moment we spectators think we caught the spirit of it and pierced the top layer, the movement goes on, leaving us behind. We find ourselves staying at the same place where the characters stand – except perhaps the Zodiac, whose omniscious figure looms everywhere in the movie – : there flees before their eyes all the facts; no one is a hero, and no one can be, because no one can clutch chance or fortune. Amid the main opposing forces in the movie, the struggle between a complete randomness – how can we account for this wanton violence? How come every glimmer of hope gets totally ruined throughout the movie? – and the definite impression that things happen as planned. Fincher appears as a sort of master of his poor puppets: we see all the threds, and yet the vision is truer than our own reality. He seems to have found what was totally absent of Panic Room, and was terribly missing in Fight Club: a sense of elegance. Even when drunk, Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal remain sober, going through the ages. On the contrary, Mark Ruffalo's attitude belongs to this time bracket, half-real, half-dreamt: Bullitt, Columbo, Dirty Harry, all of them, none of these, giving himself a role in the role.
In the end, every character, every line – almost – , every shot is a different layer of meaning, or even of dream. The result is far from being perfect; but the movie's surface, as felt from the tip of the spectator's fingers, is flawless, in the most literal sense: soft, smooth, straight. Sometimes our hand meets a deeper hole; shall we dive into it? There lies all the danger of being too much mesmerized in front of Zodiac clever spell: let's remove ourselves from it, lest a dark shadow – the unsuspected side of the screen – should clutch us.