Good insight, mediocrely written

Book Title: Brave New World (1931) by Aldous Huxley
Score: 6/10

A rather dystopian futuristic world reminiscent of that in Orwell's 1984 but milder. A little outdated by today's norms. I enjoyed the didactic parts that characters debated various essential points. Bad story and character development. I couldn't connect with any of the characters (perhaps it was intended). Could have been better as a long essay. The idea for conditioning and breeding human beings was fascinating and horrific. IMO, it failed to show a fully vivid picture of its world.

Again, a touching relationship

Novel Title: Diary of a Bad Year (2008) By J. M. Coetzee
Score: 8/10

An old writer is commissioned to write his strong opinions for a book. He asks the young pretty woman upstairs to edit his text. A subtle love triangle ensues. Each page of the novel is divided in 3 parts: the opinion, writer's POV, and the girl's POV. As the story develops it becomes more engaging. The old man's otherwise soulless and rigid opinions become softened by girl's influence. Refreshing narrative style. Few opinions less interesting. Recommendable. The girl's last pages are touching.

Another Holocaust story

Movie Title: The Reader (2008)
Score: 6/10

It's obvious it had a difficult source material to adapt. Perhaps a first-person narration would have helped. So focused on Hanna's (Winslet) conflicting character that Michael's (Fiennes) later years is poorly handled. Emotionally detached which seems deliberate. The affair between Hanna and young Michael is intriguing but its length is unnecessarily long. By choosing English over German gains more audience at the cost of losing credibility.

Yet Another Oscars Hype

Perhaps one of the most intellectual years for the Academy Awards. No epic movie, no big productions save a few. Slumdog Millionaires is a decent movie but obviously overrated. Unfortunately, few mentions of The Wrestler, Revolutionary Road and Dark Knight in main categories. Doubt did a great job in acting categories. Benjamin Button will have the upper hand overall. Frost/Nixon will be the dark horse. I'll root for Ledger, Rourke and... WALL-E.

Obama's Inauguration...

The specter of optimism is haunting West*. Yesterday the Emperor of Hope officially entered Oval Office. He has lots of demands to be fulfilled, none trivial. If I sound cynic, it harks back to my experience with Iran's reformist president, Mr. Khatami, who brought new hopes but proved incapable to live up to the expectations. Only time can tell if Emperor Obama can succeed or his widely praised clothes turn out to be non-existent.


* Borrowed from Marx' and Engel's Communist Manifesto: "A spectre is haunting Europe- the spectre of Communism."

A Road to Hell

Movie title: Revolutionary Road (2008)
Overall score: 9/10

The reunion of three main actors of Titanic(1997) made me skeptical about this movie. But Mr. Mendes' way of directing and telling the story of Mr. Yates is impeccable. Winslet has perfectly dissolved into her character while DiCaprio has some very good moments. Music is a loyal companion to the purpose of the movie. Subplots converge seamlessly at the end. As with American Beauty, Mendes proves his deft in telling suburban American stories.

"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." --- Woody Allen

Living circumstances of 21st century leave us less time to spend casually. The chances of reading a good lengthy article from a respected columnist/critic on a daily basis (or even weekly), for me at least, are becoming more and more unattainable.

The idea of creating this blog came to me while I was reading a film review and was constantly interrupted with various things (new Emails, sms, phone calls and steam coming out of the kettle with its funny yet menacing music). For a while, I was flirting with this idea of having an English blog and at that moment I told myself, "Why not a blog with posts too short that can be read with very low chance of interruption?".
So here it is. Except for this introductory post, you won't see a post longer than 451 characters (yes characters, not words). I'll keep that promise even if that requires butchering my writing either in content (by taking out less essential lines) or in presentation (by using POV instead of point of view, for example). For an average human, reading each post shouldn't take more than a minute. Hopefully, it'll give you more than what reading War and Peace in 20 minutes gave Mr. Allen! In exceptional cases, I'll allocate more than one post to the same topic. In this blog I'll express my opinions on things as wide as books, music, movies, and news in a very succinct style.

Welcome to the TerseLand.