Sunday afternoon, the guy is lying down on the grass, enjoying his B.D. In this world where we can order movies via pay-per-view, our books online and our pizza on the phone, it’s nice to go out to read, to sit in a café to write and to walk, outside this stupid metallic cages we call “our convenient cars”!

A Scanner Darkly

I do not recall the last time I’d seen so many geeks together in one place! Was it in the screening of the last Harry potter or the third episode of Lord of the rings?! Anyway, the theatre was more like an international Geek convention! It reminded me of Sharif University’s faculty of software engineering, except here, girls were slightly prettier!

The latest work of Richard Linklater, A Scanner Darkly, which is an animation based on Philip K. Dick’s novel with the same title, is the story of an undercover detective, played by Keanu Reeves, living in Orange County in the near future, fighting against the traffic of a brain-destructive drug called “substance D”. This hallucinogen, is an organic substance, derived from a blue flower, and unlike the novel, this fact is disclosed so early in the movie.

The rest of the story is the interaction between this undercover detective with himself and also with his girlfriend (Winona Ryder) and his two roommates, all of whom severely addicted to the Substance D.

A scanner Darkly is an irritatingly dark movie with a seriously gloomy and depressing atmosphere that perfectly suits the style of the animation being used. The story is surly, and to me deliberately, hard to follow and to be honest, boring at some points due to the excessive use of dialogues, but has its own hilarious moments and also moments to ponder about.

Robert Downey Jr. who plays a mentally damaged, always high, comically wise-guy addict, shows a spectacular performance. I don’t know whether playing in an animation qualifies someone for an academy award, but this magnificent performance certainly deserves to be considered.

And I don’t want to begin talking about my lovely adorable Winona Ryder. I enjoyed every second of her presence, even as an animation character. In fact, when she’s high, she’s even sexier!

Finally, the idea of the scrambled suit, a dress worn by detectives that covers their identity was a marvelous idea in the novel which has been executed stunningly brilliant in the movie!

It should be noted that A Scanner Darkly is the first movie that has been worked entirely by the technique called Rotoscope, in which a motion picture, made by real actors, is sketched on later and turned into animation. The technique has been used quite frequently before, even by the same director in the movie “Walking life”, but never so comprehensively to generate an entire motion picture.

Altogether, an unforgettable experience, a masterpiece which will give an ultimate pleasure to anyone with a bit sense of fantasy, interested in comics or animation, or anyone tasteful enough to appricaite so much talent that has been used in making this breathtaking piece of work.

And a word about this director. What amazes me is how someone could be able to make some of the sweetest, most romantic movies of all time (before sunrise and sunset) , the way one feels he’s been deeply in love his entire life and yet have the ability to enter such gloomy, geeky, dark science fictional realms ( Scanner Darkly and Walking life) like he has been a nerd, or more, a nerd with severe addiction to narcotics all along the way! Add to this, some fantastic comedy like School of Rock and Voila, you have a genuine genius indeed.

I can’t wait to see his latest, “fast food nation”, which is a loosly based on Eric Schlosser's great work.

If you think money can’t buy happiness, you don’t know how to spend!

From a gorgeous brunette’s T-shirt, in the bus

Life is short, Play more

A commercial for Lingerie

This one is a piece of art. Magnificent!

Another one!

Blow job

Scoop

Tonight was the premier of Woody Allen’s latest work, Scoop and what a delightful experience.!I’ve had missed Woody on the screen, his nervous tedious nagging and his stupid monotonous remarks. I’ve had missed a genuine Woody Allen movie with all those glorious sophistications for so long, and tonight, like someone who’s seen his beloved after a while, I could have danced all night!

It was brilliant two hours that erased the fatigue of a week of hard work. I wish he could make a movie, every week. Wouldn’t life be great then?!

I don’t mind if he wants to work in London instead of Manhattan or get involved with British aristocracy instead of New York’s upper class. I don’t care if he’s got so intrigued by rich people getting involved in murders and I certainly understand if he’s in love with Scarlet Johansson and her chubby but extremely sexy body, but containing all these elements, he still can make a Woody Allen movie and not that Match point crap! I was screaming this all these months and tonight, he proved that I was right all along!

Final word, there is something about New Yorkers, which seems interesting to me. No matter how proud they are of Manhattan, no matter how much they adore this island, no matter how confidently they believe (and I absolutely agree with them) that they are living in the center of the world, deep inside, there’s always something they profoundly envy and it is British aristocracy with all its sophistications. From their posh accent to their elegantly decorated mansions, from their mysterious private clubs to all those meticulously kept traditions, they want to be a British aristocrat, even for a day, or in a movie.
Well, honestly, who could blame them?!

When the grass is not green enough!

The angel is standing on top of a building in Berlin, watching people on earth. Everything is in black and white. That‘s how “The wings of desire” commences. Later on, he falls in love. He blinks, and as he opens his eyes, the world is colorful.

I lived a good portion of my life in a beautiful dream, dominated by this visual poetic perception, Wenders has created.

Now, after years and years, I still refuse to believe that the notion is too unrealistic, too dreamy or even too poetic to be true, but what life forced me to believe is, the colors won’t last very long. It’s not too poetic but it certainly is much too momentarily. In a quite unpleasantly non-poetic example, I may say it’s like an old color TV. Sometimes it does what it should do, but all of a sudden, right in the middle of an important football match, it loses the colors and turns into a stupid black and white TV. You can smash it on the head occasionally and you might even get some colors back for couple of minutes, but you’ll lose them again soon, guaranteed!

There’s a technique, used to bring old black and white movies to color, and it simply is to colorize every frame, one by one! Maybe it works in big Hollywood studios, but in real life, manually colorizing every frame is not an option. It’s much too time consuming and the final result always looks disgustingly fake!

A good alternative would be to enjoy life in black and white. The reality is, most of the masterpieces in photography, and to some extend in cinema, are in black and white, where there is no color to distract your eyes from the beauty of the shades, shapes and the compositions. In fact, sometimes you have to manually get rid of the colors and that’s when the colors are weak, unappealing and simply don’t worth to be kept.

You select your poorly-colored picture and then select, Image-mode-Grayscale from the menu! Photoshop will ask “you’re going to lose the color information, are you sure you want to continue?” you pause. You think. You look again. You see that pale blue sky and those unflattering colors, covering your potentially nice image. You remember how unsuccessfully you tried your best to edit the colors. You exhale and click “YES”!

You blink and as you open your eyes…Voila…it’s Black and white.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOPHjNL9BCk&search=mylove%20blair%20bush

I watched this almost 2 years ago for the first time. But due to this new scandal in the recent G8 summit, it’s still hilarious to watch!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlYkwgIcd_0&search=nomad

This is amazing...don't miss it

Understanding Engineers

(A funny article I recieved today)

Take One:
To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Take Two:
What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers?
Mechanical Engineers build weapons and Civil Engineers build targets.

Take Three:
Three engineering students were gathered together discussing the possible designers of the human body. One said, "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints." Another said, "No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections." The last one said, "Actually it was a civil engineer. Who
else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?"

It takes more than a Leica to become Bresson

Every time I see Sam, I realized how lazy photographer I am. We were doing the same thing, taking pictures, in Paris. He had a huge, at least 10kg backpack on his shoulders, filled with accessories, lenses and stuff, including my favorite, a magnificent super wide lens, and I, on the other hand, was walking around with a 220g camera, no accessories, nothing! To make the matter worse, I had even forgotten to bring my 200g tripod with myself to Paris! And as if it’s not shameful enough, that was the only thing I forgot to bring with myself!!! And then, he was running around, taking pictures, walking around the monuments to find the good spot, changing lenses one after another, and I was gossiping with Talayeh and taking some shots once in a while, as I was talking (my favorite activity!) between several proposal to sit down somewhere and have a coffee or a drink! You know, carrying around a 220g camera is not easy at all!



As a huge fan of Henri-Cartier Bresson, I was always so tempted by the idea of walking around everywhere with a tiny Leica and freeze the moment, that when Leica introduced a new fully manual D-lux 2, I didn’t think for a second to order it. Well, back then, I had no idea that you can do the same, with your bulky SLR and all those sets of lenses, but to be honest, I’m not that devoted anyway.

I mean, apart from a long list of problems and short comings, including inferior picture quality, not being able to use different lenses or filters, specially the one that I miss the most, Polarizer, and awful a lot of others, it gives you a huge advantage: it is not as intrusive as a SLR with a bulky, photo journalistic lens! and if you want to be a people’s photographer, it worth all the pain indeed.

There are a million ways to declare your love to your beloved, but I don’t know why most of them involve a sort of vandalism and destroying public properties! and almost all of them are somehow lame!



This one in particular, I don’t care how lame it is, has been executed quite tastefully. It caught my eyes, somewhere near the Seine.

What a useless habit…

Thinking I’m talking about. Wired but true! I mean, seriously, unless you’re trying to find a solution for the world’s hunger or global warming, do we need to spend hours and hours thinking? In the real life, do we really need to think that much?!

Personally, I never had any problem in life, required more than 10 minutes of systematic thinking. The rest, were always, trying to find an alternative that didn’t exist, were the excruciating pain of representing the problem in a way that the desirable solution could fit in, were to justify the errors, created by using those favorite answers!

Think about your thinking procedures! and try to be honest with yourself, aren’t you doing the same, almost all the time?! Take a look at this guy! Most of the time we’re just like him, well! not as handsome and muscular but anyway! Are we really waiting for this guy to find any solution for any problem whatsoever, no matter how deep he thinks?!



We think when need to think, which is fine, but when we found the solution, we think just a bit more to buy time before applying the undesirable solution, and then, we think more to avoid doing what we know we should, but we don’t want to. And we think again, waiting for a new alternative, suddenly comes from the above and reveals itself to us. Even sometimes, while we’re resisting doing the right thing, we think again, cause we don’t have anything better to do!

Here comes the worst, when we think we’re thinking, but what we’re really doing is subconsciously complicating the problem in way that the simple, obvious but disliked answer can’t fit in anymore! Then we can sit down, thoughtfully ask our friends “you see! I’m telling you, my problem is so complicated, what the hell should I do?!”

The harsh reality is that the gangrenous leg should be cut! Brutal but inevitable! The more you think about it, the more limbs you’re going to lose.

Sometimes, as soon as the thinking procedure yields a reliable and convincing result, no matter how harsh it is, we should stop thinking, go out, lie down on the green grass and just look at the deep deep blue sky. Just looking!

Please accept the apology!

Israel’s ambassador to UN: “We’re doing the people of Lebanon a favor. Most of them don’t like Hezb-Ollah and appreciate what we’re doing!”

I heard it, 2 minutes ago from BBC with my own ears!

Well, Mr ambassador, Lebanese are busy, burying their dead children, otherwise, they would thank you in person. Please accept the apology!

Alley of lost time!

When I was reading Marcel Proust's "a la recherche du temps perdu", I never thought I would find it in this cute little village in Rubelle, near Paris. I have to admit that my condition was as mysterious and strange as the name of this alley. I had 37 glass of champagne the night before (till 6 am), but I was as good as can be and I was doing photography at 9:00 am, the same day. No headache, no hangover!

Tonight I went to see the new Linklater movie, A scanner darkly, which was a masterpiece. The guy is a genius. Whatever he does is a masterpiece. I’ll write about it later. But before the movie began, there was a trailer for this new horror movie, Pulse, that seriously scared the shit out of me! I mean, the trailer was screaming that the movie is bullshit but GOD it was scary!
Now I came back home, and there’s this dramatic weather and thunderstorms, and I’m so happy that I didn’t watch Pulse instead! I’m so gonna watch it but definitively, I’m gonna check the weather forecast beforehand and certainly, I’m not gonna watch it alone! Anybody in?!

To the land of burnt Cedars...

I was visiting Jardin des Plantes in Paris. I sat down under this massive, beautiful tree to rest for a minute. I raised my head to read the label. As much as I adore nature, I’m clueless about the name of the trees and the flowers! On a small bronze label, it was written: “Le Cedre du Liban!”

I thought to myself, how I wish visiting Beirut sometimes in the future!

Since I had deliberately disconnected myself from the world, I had absolutely no idea that at the same time that I was enjoying the peaceful shadow of this gracious Lebanese cedar, the land of the Cedars is falling into pieces. Karl Marx once said: “History always repeats itself twice, first time as tragedy, second time as farce!”. At least in the case of Beirut, the only thing to laugh about is the world’s reaction toward this tragedy!

Oh…the Glorious Jarret!

About six years ago, I went to this cute little restaurant in Place des Vosges, and I had a dish called Jarret de porc, which simply was a peasant dish, braised porc leg shank with beans. It sounds crazy but to repeat that unforgettable experience was one of the things I was fancying the whole time I was planning revisiting Paris. First time I went there, it was with Marjan. But since we were kind of full for such a heavy dish and also she was willing to try more of the French cheese, we sat in another café on the other side of the square and had wine and cheese instead. Did I mention that I spilled red wine on her white skirts?! Thanks god it was not a first date! Anyway…




Couple of days later and after hours of walking in Paris, I went back to that square, as hungry as possible. I went to that restaurant and asked “six years ago, I had a magnificent Jarret de porc here. Do you still have that on your menu?”

With a half a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape , one of my favorite French wines, and in this magnificent old square, I can put the experience somewhere between watching Annie hall for the first time and a very good sex! I think the rating was clear enough !