Who's the fairest of them all?

Brothers Grimm - Children's and Household Tales
★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

                The visual appearance of women plays an important part in Grimms' tales filled with beautiful princesses and ugly witches . It's almost always connected with personality traits like in The Three Little Men in the Wood where one step-sister is "pleasant and pretty" and the other "ugly and hateful", or Mother Hulda where the women are "pretty and industrious" and "ugly and lazy". It seems that good traits are connected with having a good appearance and bad traits with having a bad one, but it's more complicated than that.

One book a week

                I've recently started with a course called Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World on Coursera. It's a course based on reading and interpreting 10 fantasy and science fiction books. Every week we must read one book and write a short essay concentrating on some particular thing we found interesting in it. Even though they're not reviews of the whole books, those essays still reflect my impressions so I've decided to put them here for your consideration and I hope you'll find them interesting and revealing.

A little change is always welcome

★★★★★★★☆☆☆

                Often these days prominent filmmakers decide to tell a story already told. Sometimes even a story told multiple times. Whether it's for a lack of ideas or because of their love of the subject and confidence they can make something special out of it is debatable, but whatever the reason the expectations from such endeavour are always high. That was also the case with the latest of that kind, Tom Hooper's Oscar hopeful "Les Misérables".

Hey, let's be positive

★★★★★★★★★☆

                It's hard to make a good romantic comedy. There are dozens of them every year and they (almost) all recycle the same formula: guy meets girl, they fall in love but won't admit it, encounter some obstacles, and overcome them all to live happily ever after. There's often a little drama too, added to make for some serious moments, but rarely it bares any real weight. Seeing the trailer it was obvious to me that the same is the case with director David O. Russell's new film "Silver Linings Playbook" so I wondered how can it be that the film was nominated for an Oscar in all important categories, counting the nominations to eight. I've recently watched it and stopped wondering. Sure, it has the same formula, but Russell (who also wrote the screenplay) and his cast make all the difference in the world.

The price of success

★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

                On May 2nd 2011, SEAL Team Six of U.S. Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden. That messed up plans of director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal who were working on a film about a years-long and unsuccessful hunt for the man. They of course changed the story and reportedly scrapped all of their previous work to start anew. The result is "Zero Dark Thirty" (a term marking time between midnight and dawn), one of the most lauded films of the year with five Oscar nominations but also one of the most controversial with its depiction of torture at CIA black sites.