Follow-up to the Oscars 2013

If you have a dream (which I guess everybody willing to live does!) please take the time to read this article (link below), written by Ang Lee back in 2006 when he first won the Oscar for directing for Brokeback Mountain. It shows how he became the great director he is now (shared by Roger Ebert on his Facebook page):

Ang Lee Dream

Never give up on your dreams. There might be a few bumps ahead but keep dreaming and you will get there. (And if you're lucky as he was, you'll have a partner you can lean on along the way).

Speaking of dreams, today is Elizabeth Taylor's birthday, which would have been her 81st.

In a caption Huffington Post had today for this occasion, they had quoted her saying:

"Follow your passion, follow your heart, and the things you need will come."

Here's a link to a collection of this beauty on IMDb:

Elizabeth Taylor 

On another note, I saw Paperman yesterday (the winner of this year's Best Animation Short). I was kinda let down. It was somewhat mediocre. Compared to the previous years' winners like For the Birds, the ChubbChubbs and Lifted (which didn't even win!).

Here are the links, see for yourselves!

The ChubbChubbs
Lifted- Pixar animation short
For the Birds- Pixar animation short
Paperman- Disney animation short 

Post-Oscar Trauma!

This is going to be a rather long post, but bear with me!

First off, let me clear something up. People (actually friends since I don't have any other followers yet!) have been asking me why I hadn't written anything after the Oscars. Well, I've been horrifyingly busy! Last week my adviser dumped a whole new project on me and after finishing that I had to study for my midterm, and as you know I was also hosting an Oscar party, so I had to take time to prepare for that one too! But believe me I was killing myself to get back to my blog as soon as possible. So here it is:

The shock of the evening was the directing category. After the front runner of many other awards, Affleck, was not included in the Oscar nominees, everybody was rooting for Spielberg, or even O. Russell and Haneke. But no one saw this coming! (Maybe they did but I don't know of).

After they announced Ang Lee's name, it was like I had an epiphany! I said DUH! I should have known! He had directed the "un-directable" movie...a movie that no one thought could be ever made. And of course that is something that should be celebrated. And I congratulate the Academy for doing so. A rightful choice.

By the way, I just read that the visual effects artists of Life of Pi have been criticizing Ang Lee since Sunday night, for not acknowledging their work. I am sure he must have been more than grateful since the movie was nothing without the effects. But just put yourself in his shoes for one second and imagine how it must feel like getting up there. You are excited, overwhelmed, you try to remember everyone while digesting what has just happened (which in this case since it was unpredictable must've been harder to digest!), and it is basically impossible to remember all the names unless you have written them down before hand. So give the guy a little break, will you?!

I've come to learn in life that whatever you do, no matter how much you try to keep everyone pleased, there still will be a fair share of people who you will make upset unintentionally! So, we have your back Ang! I feel for you!Why is everyone hating Anne Hathaway?

The second shock of the evening was Michelle Obama announcing the best picture of the year. (I am not going in any kind of order here...just jotting down whatever I remember!) I was disappointed when she showed up, since I thought this must mean that they have picked Lincoln! But as one of my friends reminded me, they had done the same thing with president Clinton showing up at the Golden Globes, and still Argo had won!

And what a reflection Iran's "coverage" of Michelle Obama had in the press here! :D

Iran covers up the first lady!

The funny thing is that I had the weirdest dream last night. I saw that I am at the airport with my brother and we are picking up Michelle Obama and Malia at the airport! While her younger daughter is waiting for them to arrive! And it was obvious that it must be a few years back since they were both kids! Then I turned to my brother and said wow, how could he let such a young girl come to the airport without any escort! And he said well they are not famous yet! I said what?! Has he become a senator yet?! (As if we were from the future!) He said I think so...or maybe not yet...it's still '99! (And may I remind you that I didn't know and still don't know when exactly he had become a senator, and I know this doesn't make sense since her second daughter wasn't born yet I guess! But it was a crazy dream as I said!) And then we were on a ship together, where Obama had joined us, and I have no idea where we were off to!

Anyway, enough with the crazy!

Moving on, I've gotta say I really likes Seth MacFarlane as a host. He is one of the funniest men alive in the US (second to Louis CK who I believe is the funniest of all!). Although, I've gotta say, in the last ten-something years that I have watched Oscar every year, no one has been able to match up to the first time Jon Stewart hosted the show (I think it was back in 2006). Even Billy Crystal's (first time in the past 10 years (I think it was 2005), though very funny, was a little behind Stewart's. But still second best in my opinion. But compared to Hugh Jackman,Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg,... Seth MacFarlane did an awesome job.

And I also reaaally liked how they celebrated music in movies.

On another note, how cute was Jennifer Lawrence and her falling down?! She is adorable no matter what she does! She has taken the definition of tomboy to a new level! :D After watching the clip showing her part in the movie, I remembered how great she was in the movie and how much she deserved this award. But at the same time, I had tears in my eyes while watching the clip-role for nominees. What an amazing array of actresses and performances! Wow! Gotta see them all.

I used to like Anne Hathaway A LOT! I found her funny and amiable, based on her roles in the Princess Diaries and the Devil Wears Prada, and her appearance in SNL, and I always thought she was extremely talented. But throughout this award season, my fondness of her gradually faded away! I thought she would be more interesting but as a person didn't seem like she...how should I explain it...she didn't have much to offer! Don't know if she used to be like this but at least has become unappealing, at least to me! And I never have liked people whose behavior is "exaggerated" and she's one of those kinds (like Golshifteh Farahani)! Of course I still respect her as an actor and still think she's talented but...not one of my favorites anymore! And seems like I am not the only one feeling like this:

Why is everyone hating Anne Hathaway?

And as someone says in this link, she is an actor, she is supposed to be dramatic. But I don't think so necessarily. I prefer my actors to be humble, not that she isn't, but be less dramatic!

Just to clarify, I don't hate her! I just used to like her more, that's all! And I love her haircut! If I didn't have curly hair, I would've totally gone for it!

Now the fun begins! The biggest name of the night: Argo!

I have been hearing a lot about this, especially among Iranians, about whether or not it deserved to be the best picture of the year. So I am going to share a couple of links on the way and give some explanations of my own along with them.

First of all, one of my friends shared this link after the show which talks about how much of Argo had actually happened:

Argo: True story?

But I say whatever! It was a good movie and it had served its purpose well, which was to show how Hollywood can play greater than life role in real life, and show Canada and US's relations on solving each others' problems and lean on each other in hard times (as Affleck had explained in Toronto film festival when they had first debuted the film). And might I remind you again that this was NOT a documentary.

Another thing that I saw in the media was Ali Moallem's article on his Facebook page. He is the editor-in-chief and the owner of my favorite Iranian movie magazine, Donya-ye Tassvir (as I had mentioned before in my previous posts), but unlike his magazine, I have never liked him and his articles! First of all he has an evil look on his face, the same as Pope Benedict's! :D

But joking aside he has some weird, harsh, Islamist kind, opinions about cinema which I detest! Of course, as I have said so many times before, you should be in that person's situation to know what their line of thought is coming from. You might not know this but this magazine has been shut down a few times over the past few years by the Ahmadinejad government, so this might be his way of appealing to the government so that they let him keep on publishing. This is just a theory but I never want to accuse anyone for what they say or do.

As for Argo, he has written after the Oscar night that politics helped Argo win whereas Life of Pi should have won! And he has tried to justify this by counting the number of Awards each movie won that night which is a weird, unprofessional thing to do! But I agree with one part of his article. He said that Argo is not a classic movie and probably will be forgotten in a year or two, which I agree. But this doesn't mean that all the movies that have won before were classics and at the same time it doesn't mean that it wasn't the best movie of the year.

If you know Farsi, here's the link:

Ali Moallem

But as Nikahang Kowsar (the Iranian cartoonist) mentioned in his status on Facebook, why didn't anyone say anything about politics when A Separation won an Oscar for Iran last year?! Now that Hollywood has shown Iran in a new light, which was a fair one in my opinion, now you say it's all politics?! No, no. That couldn't be it.

I also like how Ben Affleck had done his research about Iran and how he tried to show Iranians in a good way and make them better known to world in all his interviews and acceptance speeches. I appreciate what he's been trying to do, which so many people have left unnoticed.

But the best opinion of all (closest to mine! :D) was Tahmineh Milani's (a well-known Iranian filmmaker). On her Facebook page, which turned out to be a very controversial comment she's made since many Iranians are angry with Argo for some reason, she says Argo is a good movie but not outstanding, and since there weren't any "outstanding" movies this year, Argo with the plot it had, had a better chance of winning. She says unlike many people, she doesn't believe that this movie had antagonist approach towards Iran and Iranian politicians, and if there was any approach, it was to serve as an ameliorater (I just made up a word!) between the two countries (Iran and the US). And she says that if Hollywood wanted to make a movie against Iran, it could have done so easily with the power it has. And Argo, except for a few scenes, has shown a rather "mild" view of the way Iran was back then. She also says to choose the best picture of the year, one should see them all (which she claims to have done so) and says maybe Django was better if we look at directing (which Tarantino failed to get a nomination as had Affleck!), but definitely none of the other nominees had anything better to offer than Argo did (in her comments she mentions that she hasn't seen Life of Pi yet, so I don't know if she'll change her mind after that, but by far, this was, in my opinion, the best of all among the ones I have seen from people involved in cinema).

I hope you've survived this looong loooong post! :D

I wanted to break this post down to two, making one about the Oscars in general and the other one about Argo, but since I wanted to post them both at the same time and I knew that the viewing of them wouldn't have been fair to either one (as many might have skipped one!), I kept it as a whole.

Stay tuned for another post coming soon! (hopefully!)

It's Oscar night! :D

What's the point of this blog if there is no Oscar predictions?! :D

So here we go!

Best picture:

Amour, Argo, Beasts of the southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty

My prediction: Lincoln. (My hope: Argo!)

Although from the ones I've seen, I've really liked Silver Linings and Django as well, but I've gotta say I really hope Argo wins. I think it deserves it. But I have this uneasy feeling that the Academy will want to honor Spielberg's movie. First of all, it's a Spielberg movie. Secondly, it' about Lincoln. Furthermore, president Clinton showed up at the Golden Globes to introduce this movie! But we'll have to wait and see!


Actor in a Leading Role:

Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook), Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln), Hugh Jackman (Les Miserables), Joaquin Phoenix (The Master), Denzel Washington (Flight)

My prediction: Daniel Day-Lewis.

Before seeing Silver Linings, I had just seen Words from Bradley and I remember telling my brother that he doesn't play from the heart and his performance is completely textbook! But when I saw Silver Linings I changed my mind about him. He obviously has passed the textbook point. But still, to win the best actor of the year...I don't know! I think Daniel Day-Lewis should win. I must say I haven't seen Lincoln yet but he has the character of a winner! :D And based on what we have seen from him before, he can't do wrong when it comes to acting or any other thing for that matter!
But if they give the Oscar to Hugh Jackman, I've gotta say, I'd be really disappointed!
And what a come back for Joaquin Phoenix; after he announced he was done with acting about 6 years ago, with this nomination he showed that he's certainly not!

  
Actress in a Leading Role:

 Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty), Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), Emmanuelle Riva (Amour), Quvenzhane Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Naomi Watts (The Impossible)

My prediction: Jennifer Lawrence

What can I say?! She stole it! The role, the movie from Bradley! Everything! And has swept all the awards this season for her role in this movie. Amazing. No doubt about it!


Actor in a Supporting Role:

Alan Arkin (Argo), Robert De Niro (Silver Linings Playbook), Phillip Seymour Hoffman (The Master), Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln), Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained)

My Prediction: Christoph Waltz

When I first saw Inglorious Bastards, it was after I knew that there is an actor in it, who's Austrian, new, and has won the Oscar and all other awards for this movie! And boy did he deserve it! Inglorious Bastards is one of those movies that I've watched like a hundred times and the main reason for this was to watch his performance over and over again! It's acting in its best class!
As for this movie, if I watch Django again, one of the main reasons would be to watch Christoph Waltz. I absolutely love him!
Alan Arkin was also good in Argo, but no one can match Waltz. I want him to win so bad! Even more than Argo for best picture! 
The list of nominees in this category makes you say wow! All of them have won before. As Seth MacFarlane said when announcing the nominees, "a breath of fresh air in this category"! :D


Actress in a Supporting Role:

Amy Adams (The Master), Sally Field (Lincoln), Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables), Helen Hunt (The Sessions), Jacki Weaver (Silver Linings Playbook)

My Prediction: Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway's preformance was really good in Les Miz, but I never thought that she would be the Oscar favorite! Since I've only seen Jacki Weaver's performance among the other nominees, and Anne's performance was definitely better than hers, I'll just assume that it was also better than the rest! So the Oscar rightfully goes to Anne Hathaway!

Animated Feature Film:

Brave, Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Wreck-It Ralph

My Prediction: Brave (My hope: Frankenweenie!)

Have seen none of these, but being an avid Tim Burton fan, I hope his wins. But I've heard a lot of good stuff about Brave, so be it!
I'm just glad Hotel Transylvania didn't get nominated. It was the first movie that I saw when I got here, and it sure as hell didn't deserve a Golden Globe nomination, let alone an Oscar! It wasn't bad, it was just "OK"! 


Directing:
 
Amour (Michael Haneke), Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin), Life of Pi (Ang Lee), Lincoln (Steven Spielberg), Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell)

My prediction: Steven Spielberg

What a shame that Ben Affleck didn't make the cut. However, my other prediction is that they would make Spielberg the best director and give the best picture award to Argo, to be fair!
David O. Russell is another favorite in this category...at least a favortie of mine! ;)


Foreign Language Film:

Amour (Austria), Kon-Tiki (Norway), No (Chile), A Royal Affair (Denmark), War Witch (Canada)

My Prediction: Amour

Do I even need to explain?! It is as obvious as A Separation was last year!!!


Music- Original Song:

"Before My Time" from Chasing Ice, Music & Lyric by J. Ralph
"Everybody Needs a Best Friend" from Ted, Music by Walter Murphy & Lyric by Seth MacFarlane
"Pi's Lullaby" from Life of Pi, Music by Michael Danna & Lyric by Bombay Jayashri
"Skyfall" from Skyfall, Music & Lyric by Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth
"Suddenly" from Les Miserables, Music by Claude-Michel Schonberg & Lyric by Herbert Kretzmer and Alain Boublil

My Prediction:  Skyfall (Adele) 

Again, it couldn't be more obvious! I hate to make predictions when I haven't seen or heard all the nominees but Adele's Skyfall was so good that not even it had a post exclusively for itself in my blog (!) but also it is so good that tells all the other songs "Bring it on!"
No question about it!
Good to see our host nominated by the way! :D


Adapted Screenplay:

Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook

My Prediction: Silver Linings Playbook

Absolutely loved this movie and its script, the dialogs, just everything! Gotta give it to O. Russell for writing and directing this brilliant movie.


Original Screenplay:

Amour (Michael Haneke), Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino), Flight (John Gatins), Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, Roman Copola), Zero Dark Thirty (Mark Boal)

One word: Tarantino!





Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to attend to my Oscar party! :D
Can't wait to see MacFarlane as host.
I just learned that the cast of Chicago are reuniting for a music and dance number after the last award is presented.

I had no time to write about the technical awards, so sorry about that!

IMDb's Road to the Oscars

If you are a follower of movies, you are most likely to follow IMDb on one of the social networks or the website itself, as well.

And if so, you probably know that each year, when the award season begins, it has this segment called "The road to the Oscars" where it posts these interesting photos and trivia about the Oscars.

A day or two ago, they posted this collection of important moments in the Oscar history. In case you haven't seen it yet, this is the link to it:

The road to the Oscars

Also, this year, the Academy decided to do something really interesting in my opinion. Instead of using models as carriers of the statuettes to the presenters of the award, six film students will do this task.

The eligibility of these students were decided based on the answer they gave to this question: ""How will you contribute to the future of film?"

The Genie!

Last night I was watching Robin Williams's trip to the Inside the Actors Studio (from now on we'll call it IAS!), where one of the things they talk about is the genie in Aladdin.

I knew that there was a debate back when it was released that if he should be nominated for an Oscar for this role! But since he was playing or "dubbing" a cartoon character he didn't get one eventually. However, this is the part that I did not know, he'd won a Golden Globe that same year for his role in this cartoon! I praise the Hollywood Foreign Press for boldly doing so.

As James Lipton explained, someone had counted the number of characters Robin Williams had created while playing the genie. You're not gonna believe this! The number was 52!!! And frankly, after seeing him on IAS, it wasn't that surprising. If you are a follower of the series, you must already know that each episode spans for about 40 minutes. In rare cases you would see an hour and a half like in George Clooney's case and because he had only recently been there after a long career, so he had a lot to talk about!

But Robin Williams was there in 2000 and the reason why it took so long was because he wasn't answering almost any of the questions straight up! After each question, he would get up, improvise a character, and act the answer to the question and it was amazing! To improvise something that fast and keep going on and on and on...it was mind blowing!

Anyway, the point of this post was to remind you of this cartoon, which is one of Disney's best ever made, and invite you to watch it again, as I will too! Interestingly I have found out over the years that many people can't watch a movie if they have already seen it before! I couldn't believe it, because in my case, if I am at home and want to select a movie from my archive to watch, I will most likely choose from the ones that I have already seen and loved! I usually watch movies at least twice! It's the only way to really pin the points you've missed the first time. I think I have watched my favorite movies like Forrest Gump and Amelie more than 10 times! And if it's just a comedy with a simple storyline which doesn't need any interpretation (!), I would watch it again just for the joy of it! (Probably the reason why I am a "neurotic filmaholic" and they're not! :D )

Back to the cartoon! As I have mentioned in one of my previous posts, I used to read this magazine back in Iran called Donya'ye Tassvir and read the review of the new movies there, written by Bijan Ashtari (an Iranian film-critic) religiously! I remember when he was writing about Rango (and in many of the other reviews he had written about cartoons), he mentioned that how he missed 2D cartoons and the ones that were not digitally made and were made the old-fashioned way without the use of computers, and how invaluable cartoons like Rango are these days. And I couldn't agree more!

Watch Aladdin and you'll see what I mean! It is a timeless classic!

Here's the link to one of his improvisations on IAS (fast forward to 40'):

Robin Williams - Inside the Actors Studio

Contagion

“2 out of 4 stars”

This is another review that I will call unbiased. Though it had been released a few years back, I hadn’t heard or seen any reviews and ratings on it.

And coincidentally from Soderbergh again! Which I didn’t know until the credits started rolling! I kinda got disappointed in myself for not knowing who the director was beforehand. But eh…I don’t care…I’m still a trivia god! :D

It starts with a virus being spread from Hong Kong through Gwyneth Paltrow, who brings it back to US. An epidemic starts and as the number of those who’ve contracted the disease rises and so does the death toll, chaos takes over the major metropolitans. The government thinks this might be an attack of swine flu but as evidence unfolds of the origins of it, everybody’s quarantined and their only hope is developing a vaccine which even if developed, will take 3 months to be manufactured and distributed worldwide to stop the virus from spreading, but we don’t know if they can make the vaccine in time…

This would be more suitable to be a TV movie. It is an OK movie for its genre but nothing we haven’t seen before. Actually a kind of movie we have seen a lot before! But without any moving story. You don’t care for the characters. There are so many story-lines and the leading role of the movie seems to be the virus!

I don’t know how they got to attract all these big movie stars, maybe by paying them a lot in hopes of it bringing in blockbuster type of money. Besides from Gwyneth Paltrow, you can see the names of Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Lawrence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Bryan Cranston,… to name  a few.

I waited for a twist right up until the end, thinking that might be the reason why they had accepted taking part in this movie. A unique script. Which never happened! Or maybe they thought since this is a Steven Soderbergh movie, it's going to be great no matter what. Which wasn't the case either.

I should probably take back what I said in the previous post, that a Soderbergh movie with many big stars is a must-see. But still, you'd get tempted to watch it, though your expectations might not be met. Also, many critics have given this movie at least one thumb up! Including Ebert who's given this movie a 3 star rating.

If you have some extra popcorn at your house that is going to be expired soon, some extra time on hand to kill, and no other movie to watch, you can watch this. Of course, it’s still better than so many movies. I wouldn’t have recommended this at all, even at the cost of your pop corn being expired, if it wasn’t OK enough to watch! But this wouldn’t be my first choice if I am in the mood for an excite-stimulating movie!

Side Effects

"3.5 stars out of 4"

Yaaay! Finally! A review on a new movie! We went to see this movie last night and let me just tell you that it exceeded my expectations! Although I was expecting a good movie but I didn’t see this coming!

This must be the most unbiased review I’ve written so far. Because it’s a brand new movie so there hasn’t been any award shows to include this movie and I have resisted really hard on reading the critics’ reviews and I haven’t heard anything about this movie. I just saw its trailer on IMDb and it seemed so fascinating that I said to myself I have to see this movie...and kept bugging everyone to go see it with me until they did! (By the way, a Soderbergh movie with Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jude Law in it…it’s a must see regardless of the trailer!) So, here we go!

The movie starts with a scene showing blood on the floor and flashes back to 3 months earlier. Emily is a 28 year old woman whose husband of five years, Martin, has been in prison for 4 years for insider trading. He is about to be released but she seems to be having a severe depression, coping with all the things that have happened in her life, “rug being pulled out of her feet”, as she describes it. 

She looks fragile (and actually looks like the young Kristin Scott Thomas!) and after a suicide attempt starts seeing a psychiatrist, Dr Banks (played by Jude Law), who prescribes her antidepressants that don’t seem to be working. He talks to her previous shrink who is played by Catherine Zeta-Jones and she tells him that there is this new drug called Alixa that seems to be working. Everywhere Emily goes, she as well hears about this new drug. So, she starts using this drug and it seems to be working, except there is a small problem. That’s right, it has a side effect! She starts sleep walking and does strange things while she’s sleep that she doesn’t remember when waking up. Martin asks the doctor to take her off the meds and Dr Banks seems to agree, since he doesn’t know that much about this new drug, but she insists on continuing to take them on the grounds that nothing else has helped her before. 

One day while sleep walking again, she kills someone. When a detective talks to him, she says hysterically that she doesn’t remember anything, but the detective sees that marks of blood on her feet and arrests her for suspicion of murder. She goes on trial but since everyone testifies that she was depressed and on meds with side effects, she is sent to a mental hospital instead of jail. Some fingers are pointed at her shrink since he’s the one who has prescribed the meds and he’s in a moral dilemma for who should get punished.

He has a wife who’s recently lost her job and has a son in a private school, so he tries everything he can to keep his job, but after the revelation of a past accusation of sexual assault on his account and surfacing of pictures taken of him with Emily that suggests he might have had an affair with her, his wife leaves him, his name gets stained and he loses his practice. He starts seeing some clues on the case that don't seem to be right. Now he should solve the mystery of this drug to win back his life.

The first half of the movie has a slow rhythm, but the second half…wow! Suddenly, with a simple bluff from Dr Banks, the movie takes a whole other turn. It got more and more interesting as it moved on. And more and more unpredictable (the way I like movies to be!). With the first surprise of the film, I was like, okaaay, it’s one of those movies! Nothing we haven’t seen before! A 3 star movie since it doesn’t have any new element to offer, but boy did it! Right to the end of movie you couldn’t see what was coming. I changed my mind and said definitely a 3.5! I didn’t care for the ending scene that much...not the ending itself of course…the ending itself was a surprise! It kept you at the edge of your seat right up to the end. Definitely compensated for the first slow half! Right when you thought that everything was over, there would be a new turn in the plot that you didn’t see coming.

Although I didn't get some parts...like how he was able to go see her in the hospital she was being kept and still be her doctor after all this scandal, and even decide on who she is allowed to visit. But maybe it is possible. I don't know!

Very good job on the actors’ part. Rooney Mara wasn’t as good as Dragon Tattoo, but she has a very bright future ahead of her. Have to wait and see what she will do next. The range of the movies that she’s played in so far is really remarkable.

I would definitely recommend you seeing it. One of the reasons is that I saw this movie with one of my friends who’s not a big film buff and there aren’t that many movies that would make her say WOW at the end…but this movie was one of them! So, I am sure all movie lovers and those who like seeing a good movie in general would enjoy watching “side-effects”.

In one word: entertaining.

85 statuettes!

Illustrator Olly Moss has made this highly detailed poster in honor of Oscars' 85th birthday. You can see the statuettes in the form of the Best Picture for that year. Here's the link. Enjoy:

Olly Moss's Oscars tribute

My ticket-stub collage!

So, I had had the idea of doing this for quite some time now!

The idea occurred to me when I went to my brother's house here for the first time. He has this great idea of putting together small, personal, every day stuff and basically filling his home with them. To give you an example, he had made a collage of the Starbucks zarfs he had collected over the years and had thrown some paint on them to give it kind of an artistic look and hung it on the wall! I liked the idea. (By the way, if you're wondering what zarf is, I learned this word based on a link that Roger Ebert had posted a few months back, where it said the things we use everyday but don't have a name for, actually have names! And one of them was the paper/carton thing that are used around the coffee cups in places like Starbucks, that protects our hands from burning, which is called, guess what?! Yes, a zarf, which in Persian means a dish!)

I had also seen Nate Berkus (the interior designer) on Oprah, use these personal things to decorate people's houses.

I have been keeping the ticket-butts from all the movies that I have seen since I've come to US. So, after seeing these I had this bingo moment when I finally knew how I can put them into "good" use and also show them off! :p

I planned on buying a frame and putting the ticket-butts in it and it finally happened tonight! I was so excited that I wanted to share it, and mostly brag about it to someone! And as my roommate said, the eventual plan is to make this frame get bigger and bigger and bigger over the years!

We were initially planning on watching "Side-effects" this evening and I was going to finally write a review on a recent movie but the plan got cancelled (or postponed...whatever!)! I'll probably write about it after I see it over the weekend. After I got home, I was planning on watching a movie to write about it in the blog but I had bought some things to finally decorate our living room and I got so occupied with it, and with this frame that when I finally got the time to get up, it was 1:30 in the morning!

So anyway...this is the best I could do for tonight! :D

Later dudes!

BAFTA 2013

The BAFTA awards was held tonight in London, where Argo topped the list for best film of the year.

So here's another win for Argo which seems to have swept all the awards of the season for best picture of the year. I really wish I could say that now we can be 100% sure that it'll also be the winner at the Oscars, but the BAFTA doesn't seem to be very reliable as the outstanding British film of the year was awarded to Skyfall, ahead of Les Miserables and Anna Karennina (though I hadn't liked the latter that much either but it was surely better than Skyfall).

And I have this uneasy feeling that the guys at the Academy will want to honor Spielberg's movie. We'll have to wait and see.

Here's the link to the list of BAFTA winners:

BAFTA 2013

By the way, speaking of Argo, I was watching the Golden Globes with a few of my Iranian friends here (with whom I've seen Argo), and one of them kept saying that it's not fair for Argo to win and Lincoln is the one that deserves it and stuff like this. Then I turned to him and asked him what he had against Argo! He said that it said based on a true story but not all parts of it was real! For example, the scene where they were chased by the guards in the airport in Iran or the way the guy yelled at them at the airport. Not all of these things had happened.

Let me tell you that my mind was ready to explode when I heard his argument! I said "Exactly! It says "based", it doesn't say we chronicled all their movements. If they had, it would've been called a documentary, not a movie! And yes not all of them had happened in real life, the chasing part was so obviously unreal, but we have this thing called "dramatized for TV" and they have to do that, otherwise the film wouldn't have been as exciting as it was!". And for the guard's behavior at the airport, I told him that all of us have encountered someone like that in Iran. The Basiji militia are usually like that!

And he said "No, take Lincoln. Everything was exactly the same as it had happened!". I asked if the conversations between Lincoln and his wife in the movie were "exactly" the same as they had happened in real life! He had nothing to say but he kept arguing that Argo shouldn't have said "based on a true story"! Well, I only have a few explanations for myself for his behavior. Either he's a Basiji himself (which I highly doubt), or he pretends to know all about movies while in fact he's just someone we call "jav-geer" in Iran! Who watches one movie and thinks he knows all about them but in fact is not able to interpret their value and message and at least what I can say for sure is that he doesn't know the meaning of "based on a true story"!

GOD these people who think they are always right make me mad! But I refused to argue with him any further. For three reasons. Firstly, I didn't wanna bring myself down to his level. Second of all, what's the point of arguing with someone whose mind is set up. Arguing is only valuable when both parties have doubts in their minds and are open to change. And the last and most important part is that one of our family friends back home, who loved me like his daughter, once sat me down and said "I have 3 advices for you that will help you be calm and happy in life" and one of them was not to try to prove anything!

So, there you go!

And that's all folks!