Another Shooting

What the hell is going on in this country?!
I think this year alone, there have been 4 shootings all over the US.

Shooting in Atlanta Middle School

Iraninan journalists

Iran is not the best place to be in right now.

Execution in public has become a regular thing to do…and watch as if it is some kind of a Shakespearean street show! Recently for the first time the arm of a thief was cut in front of the public eyes (imagine the kids!) in Shiraz, a city that has peace loving people and the place that gave birth to many artists and poets.

 The currency has been devaluated drastically during the past few months. Power to buy (is this a correct term to use?!) has declined considerably.

Since last presidential elections many activists have been taken to prison, making other people scared to do anything and many have fled the country, so there are less people to criticize the government and the ones who have been freed are now closeted and try not to do anything for the sake of their families' safety.

The rate of road fatalities seems to have increased (if possible!).

Many other horrible things have happened since I’ve come here last August. A classroom in a small town had caught fire, resulting in the death of two very young girls and injuring many others.

And two days ago, the news of arresting about 15 journalists came out.

I remember about 7 years ago, when the idea of becoming a journalist first got into my head, I was telling everyone that yeah, I’m going to become a journalist, and I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that and all that stuff! And then, one of our family friends, with a grin on her face (not to mock me, just to be frank with me) bluntly told me “A journalist…in Iran?!” and that was when it hit me that how stupid my idea was. It is hard to be a journalist in Iran…you can’t write about all the things you want, you will get censored, you will be limited to the topics that you want to write about, there are a lot of topics that girls/women are limited to write or interview about.
Back then, I wanted to become a sports journalist! Because I was crazy about soccer. But it would’ve been impossible as women are not allowed to attend matches in stadiums (one of the reasons is that male spectators are “foul-mouthed” and it’s not a suitable atmosphere for ladies! Although, many argued that the ladies’ presence in stadiums would make men behave themselves! But the more important issue was that many clerics said women shouldn’t watch men with shorts THAT live! I mean seeing it on TV was OK but seeing it first hand in the stadium, even from yards away was poo-poo!), let alone go to trainings or whatever to get interviews and first hand news! And it’s getting worse every day! In recent years, there were talks of even stopping showing wrestling on TV because the wrestlers aren't dressed properly!!!
 Anyway…I just wanted to give you a gist of how awful things were. And back at that time, a plane carrying 40 journalists had suspiciously crashed in Iran so…that was what you could expect after becoming a journalist…dying in a fatal crash!

After the presidential elections back in 2009, everything got even worse. Quite the opposite of what president Khatami had done and given freedom of speech that had never been seen before in Iran, journalists in 2009 were thrown in jail and newspapers were shut down and… you can imagine the rest (or not!). Many journalists fled the country in fear of getting arrested and started working abroad in other networks and newspapers but they couldn’t speak as freely as they wanted to because their families were kind of “hostages” back in Iran. They weren’t actually arrested or anything, but as it says in the link I am going to share at the end of this post, they were harassed and taken for questioning.

Now in the latest raid, many were arrested while they were at their homes. I was reading a piece by Masih Alinejad, one of the journalists who has fled the country, on Facebook that said how one of the journalists was arrested in front of his mother. It’s really heart breaking. I imagined my own mother and how she would’ve felt if something like that happened to me or any of my siblings, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up!

Everything is getting worse. I don’t know where they are taking us but it’s not a good place!

One of my friends who had recently been to Iran and back, the things she was saying were unbelievable. I couldn’t believe that it's only been a few months since I’ve left and things have got this bad. She was telling how the foreign money dealers and currency exchanges were closed in her city and they were illegal unofficial dealers in the streets who were selling foreign money, especially American dollars, and she said that it was illegal to buy from those dealers and if caught, not only they would've taken away the money you had bought, but also would've fined you three times the amount you had bought!!! Of course, I know where this kind of behavior is coming from. Now with the sanctions, there is less money coming into the country, therefore they are trying to control the amount of dollars that people are taking away with them from Iran.
Not only the price of dollar has tripled, but the amount they allow for travelers to buy has fallen from $1000 to $300!!! I mean, even if you have the money to buy it, what can you do with $300 when you leave the country?! You would starve! And to make things worse, as far as I know, they only sell this amount to those who are going to visit the “holy” places, like Mecca or places like that. For those who are traveling for pleasure the amount is a big fat zero…zip…nada…nothing!

I usually digress a lot! The point of this entry was to say how sad it is to see all these journalists arrested without any legitimate reason. Guardian says they were accused of cooperating with foreign media like BBC but many speculate the main reason was to scare the journalists’ society and prepare them for the upcoming presidential elections, so that they wouldn’t even dare to write anything unpleasant (of course from the government’s perspective) and you can imagine how sad this makes me, an Iranian girl who dreams of becoming a journalist. There! In that sentence alone, I used 4 tabooed words! Girl, journalist, and to put Iran and dream in one sentence!

Iran needs a miracle. But it helps if more people are aware of what’s going on, in that now miserable place. My beloved.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/27/iranian-journalists-arrested-raids-newspapers

Elie Saab - Spring, Summer 2013

I know everyone expects mainly movie reviews from this blog...well, it's called movie-ism, duh! But occasionally there are going to be some other material posted here as well.

I just watched Elie Saab's fashion show for this year. Needless to say, he's my favorite designer. My other favorite designer is Valentino but since his retirement, the designs of the Valentino house of fashion have become kind of...meh!

I try to convince myself that clothes aren't that important in our lives and it's more important to feed those in need than spend our money on expensive clothes. But who am I kidding! First of all, I am a girl and the clothes are pretty! Second of all, it's really art. You look at the clothes and all you can say is WOW! And there is no harm in making money off your art. He's so good at it. Give me the same material and I can't do much with it! But these people are brilliant. He somehow manages to top himself and surprise us every year! Here's the link to the show, if you are interested (I liked all of them but for some reason I fell in love with the second dress...don't know why!). Enjoy:

Elie Saab Haute Couture Spring Summer 2013

The Hobbit

"3 stars out of 4"

You might be wondering why I don't write reviews about newly released movies. I have watched a lot of new movies recently, however since all of them were before I started this blog and I don't remember the details enough to write a complete review about, I would have to wait for a time to see them again to write in the blog.

One of the movies I watched a few weeks back was Peter Jackson's The Hobbit. I am a big fan of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Unfortunately, I never got to read any of Tolkien's books. The main reason was probably the fact that these books were not available in Iran. I remember The Hobbit was translated into Farsi and published after the LOTR movies were released and my brother had bought it but I never got around to read it. Tolkien was a brilliant man. To create a whole world and languages and characters is something that only an exceptional talent like his would be able to make. As you might know, many other authors have got many of their ideas from the LOTR books, namely J.K.Rowling and Harry Potter books (a book from my generation!). Anyway, these films were fantastic. I have watched these movies many many many times, with detail and bought the DVDs with the behind the scenes...and as if it wasn't enough, I went to the LOTR marathon back in December (during the weekend before the exams...I know I'm crazy, don't remind me!) and sat in a dark theater for about 12 hours and boy! What an experience. Watching it at home on a TV is one thing and watching it on the big screen is another. I have not had enough! I am definitely going to watch them again...probably a few months later when I have more time and I've put the experience behind me! (though it was amazing and I had a big stupid grin on my face the whole time, you can imagine what sitting in a theater for that long does to you and it is associated with LOTR in your mind so you need time to recover!)

Back to The Hobbit. It was better than what I expected. I was ready to be let down because the LOTR trilogy was so great that it's hard to live up to it (you compare it to LOTR unconsciously for many legitimate reasons! the author, the characters, and more importantly the director were the same). It wasn't as good as LOTR of course but definitely a film that the LOTR fans will love (if they have reasonable expectations. I am old enough to have met people that are not easy to please). The movie is long, but it kinda has to be, doesn't it, when you decide to make 3 movies out of a teeny book?! For example, the scene at the beginning of the movie where the dwarves are gathered in Bilbo's kitchen and are singing and eating, runs for long and is not that vital for the course of the movie! And I couldn't help but think, what a vision the director has! I can't imagine anyone else being able to have such imagination and at the same time knowledge of the books to make the best movie out of it. The part where they are chased by the orcs in the cave, and every scene is portrayed with such detail, I was just thinking to myself all that time that this couldn't have been possible if it wasn't for the director. I haven't read the book but I don't think Tolkien had pictured that scene with such detail. It was all Jackson.

I am now going to share a link that Roger Ebert had shared in his blog today. He writes there about one of the...well it's not a gaffe...but it's just a general wondering, that had caught my attention when I saw the movie as well: Why couldn't the eagles have just taken them to their destination instead of dropping them off not even close to their destination and especially at a mountain top?!! This one I think is Tolkien! He could have either not included the eagles or could have had some other kind of creature rescue them that at the same time was unable to go all the way to their destination!!

Anywho! I wish I could've written a better piece but as I said I don't remember all the details. Maybe I'll write about LOTR when I see them again but then again, maybe not! Because it wouldn't be the same as seeing them for the first time, many things might be overlooked for I have seen them over and over, during the past few years. We'll see what happens!

I don't know how many stars I want to give to this movie. Definitely not a 4! It was a good movie but not a four star movie. It was 3 I guess. I think 3.5 wouldn't be fair to many other movies that are much better than this. Yeah...I think 3 is fair!

Here's the link:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/foreignc/2013/01/out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-more-orcs.html

3:10 to Yuma

"4 out of 4 stars"

I haven't watched a lot of Western movies. I am unfortunately not that familiar with this genre since they were mostly made a long time before I was born, but I absolutely loved this movie. I think anyone who loves this genre or in general likes watching a good movie that has everything a good movie needs: acting, good story, good characterization, will enjoy watching it.

It is the story of a rancher named Dan (played by Christian Bale) who is about to lose his land that is claimed by railroad makers and who are attacking his ranch to make him and his family evacuate their land. At the same time we see an outlaw named Ben Wade (played by Russell Crowe) who attacks stagecoaches with his gang. We see him as a fast shooter, and a merciless man and at the same time a charismatic one as well.

The movie starts with a well-made chasing and shooting scene when a stagecoach is attacked by the gang, which got me interested in this genre (if of course all of them have a chasing scene like this!). When Wade is captured and needs to be delivered to a train station to be taken by the 3:10 train to Yuma prison, Dan volunteers to be one of the people escorting him for the money he will get as a reward if he manages to deliver him, that will help him keep his cattle and ranch. In this journey, the interaction between the two main characters begins which shows us how Dan wants to do what he thinks is morally right and his attempt at doing good in life. He tells Wade that he is leading an honest life, and in response Wade tells him it's honest but not a life! We see how law, which is supposed to act as the good and morally, is disrupted. When the Sheriff of the town where the train station is, tells Wade that there is law and order in his town, Wade mocks him by telling him "That's reassuring!"

Wade doesn't simply want to be good. When Dan's son tells him there is good in you, he says "I wouldn't last 5 minutes if I wasn't as rotten as hell!" Again, as I said in my last post, people have a story for being "bad"! Although this is a fictional story, Wade describes how his father had died when he was 8 and how his mother had abandoned him back then (the way Crowe plays this scene is absolutely amazing to watch and has a deep impact on me, the viewer).

Dan is stuck in a moral dilemma. When Wade offers him $1000 to let him go (which is much more than what he has been promised to receive for delivering Wade), he gets tempted to take it, because it would change his life and he would be able to help his family but as he had said before he wants to have an honest life but this time, the thought of people finding out what he had done makes him refuse it. At the same time, when everyone backs out in taking Wade to the station when his gang comes to his rescue and threatens to kill everyone, Dan is the only person who steps up. He says he wants to be a hero, because he has lost his leg in a retreat by their own army in the civil war and he can't tell his son about it and he wants to become a hero in his son's eyes, who doesn't have faith in him (when the ranch is attacked in the beginning of the movie, he tells his dad that he wouldn't be able to do anything and he doesn't believe in him).

When he is offered money by the sheriff to walk away and let Wade go, he says he finally sees the world the way it is. He got money for the leg he lost in the civil but it wasn’t so he could walk away...it was given to him so that the government could walk away and now he was offered the same amount of money that was initially supposed to be given to him to deliver the prisoner but this time for him to walk away. He found what was right. A simple story of moral.

Wade finally helps Dan in becoming a hero. Maybe he pities him. Maybe there is good in him as Dan's son had told him or maybe also because he had escaped prison before and he knew he could do it again, so why not help another man by doing so?!

I loved the ending. Can’t give more details if you haven’t seen the movie yet (which is unlikely since it was released back in 2007!) but still…would recommend this to those who like to see an entertaining movie with A class performances.

The director of this movie, James Mangold, is also the director of Walk the Line, Identity, Kate & Leopold, and Girl, Interrupted. I have seen them all which are great movies, especially the first two. So, it wasn't surprising to see another great movie of him, and it shows how brilliant he must be for making such a good movie in a totally different genre.

Capote

"3 stars out of 4"

Capote is rather an old movie but I only got to see it for the first time yesterday.

I know that Philip Seymour Hoffman has won almost all the awards possible for this movie back in 2005, including the Oscar. So, there is no need for me to tell you how brilliant his transformation was into Truman Capote, the writer who wrote about the killings that took place in Kansas back in 1959. The course of writing this "non-fiction" book called "In cold blood" and the impact that it had on Capote was so overwhelming that he never got to finish another book after that.

 The story of this movie takes place between 1959 and 1965 when he finished this book and mainly shows us how he gets dragged into this story and changes his life, leading to an early death in 1984 due to alcoholism.

The film starts by showing how Capote usually tries to "steal the show" in parties and how he entertains people and wants to be the center of attention. Later on we understand that he had been abandoned as a child and this characteristic was probably because now he tries to compensate for all the attention that he hadn't got as a child.

He hears about the killings in Kansas, where 4 people from the same family were killed in their house. He calls the editor of the newspaper he works for and tells him that this is the next thing that he wants to write about. He goes to Kansas in search for what these killings have done to the people living in the town where the killings took place. When he reaches there we see him tell one of the officers in charge of this case (played by Chris Cooper) that he doesn't care if they catch the one who did this. However, after two people are arrested for the murders, he goes to meet them and instantly decides to write about them. In one scene we see him tell his childhood friend, the famous author of "To kill a mockingbird" Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener, who was also nominated for an Academy Award for her role in this movie) that the suspect is a gold mine and "when I think how good my book can be I can hardly breathe".

He meets with the prisoners and mainly with the first suspect Perry Smith, and gains their trust in a way that he even gives Capote his notebooks.

Capote sees many similarities between himself and Smith. In his notebook Perry writes "...if called upon to make a speech..." which means that he also seeks (or at least sought!) fame as Capote did, or how Perry's brother and sister had killed themselves as had Capote's mother. At one point we see Capote telling Harper "It's like Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front"! But he hides this from Perry to find the perfect ending for his book. He also hides the title that he had chosen for his book from Perry because he didn't want Perry to think that he saw him as a cold-blooded murderer and to keep the trust he had gained. Capote was raised with the same surroundings as Perry and maybe if put in the same situation, he would have done the same thing! There's a thin line between bad and good.

Perry tells Capote that he and his accomplice thought there was ten thousand dollars at the house where they had murdered the family and they had tied them up. He had even prevented the accomplice from raping the daughter of the family. But when Perry had been talking to the father of the family, he says that he thought the man was a nice guy up until he slit his throat! I think this means that he was angry...at the world for not being fair! And killing them was his revenge. I think he thought it wasn't fair that he was abandoned as a child when there were families like this that cared about each other. So he loses it in a moment and goes on to murder them all. This movie shows what I believe, that there is no such thing as a bad person. It's just the environment where we grow in that makes us who we are and it depends on the way we are brought up, the things that happen to us that makes one become a famous author and the other a notorious killer. Maybe it also depends on the strength of each individual as well and how he reacts to what happens to him in his life. Maybe if Capote hadn't become successful and thought the world hadn't been fair to him, he would have done the same thing if put in the same situation.

He promises perry to find them a good lawyer and postpones their execution so he can write about it and obviously enough he doesn’t keep his promise and after four years of dragging the case through supreme court, he fails to find them a lawyer or simply doesn’t want to after being done with the book. When he tells Harper that he had done everything he could and couldn't help them, Harper tells him "Maybe, but the fact is you didn't want to". Although we see how deeply he was affected by this. He even lies about Perry's sister missing him, just to keep the trust or maybe keep interested in helping him finish his book. But he abandons Perry after the book is finished. He is depressed, probably from feeling guilty because deep down he knows that he has betrayed Perry and it could have easily been Capote himself waiting to be executed.

We see Capote say he will never get over it...and he never did.

I give this movie 3 stars because while it had an amazing performances aside from the leading man, such as the guy who played Perry Smith, Clifton Collins Jr, it lacked consistency. It jumped from one scene to a whole other one that left you lingering with the feeling you had from the previous scene. Also, while it was able to keep you interested to see the course Capote was going through, it wasn't...how should I say it...as "interesting" as it could have been! But after all, it's a very good movie to see if you have the time.

Hope you enjoyed my first review!

A little footnote: Ebert has given this movie 4 out of 4 stars and says "If "Capote" had simply flipped the coin and told the story of the Clutter murders from Capote's point of view, it might have been a good movie, but what makes it so powerful is that it looks with merciless perception at Capote's moral disintegration."