There are two aspects to religion: faith and affiliation. Faith is the aspect that has to do with the tomes of literature owing to the perpetually fecund imagination of people throughout the history of mankind. It is fun, like it is when a million fans filled with Pottermania cast spells on each other and go [...]
Posts from ‘February, 2010’
PIFF 2010: Crazy Pete
Around the same time that Alain Resnais portrayed the innovative use of flashbacks in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Jean-Luc Godard discovered jump cuts with Breathless. I haven’t watched Breathless, but his Crazy Pete serves as a good enough example for understanding jump cuts. Other than that nugget there is not much I can write about the [...]
PIFF 2010: What do you think about Elly?
Asghar Farhadi’s Darbareye Elly opens with a small group of friends starting on a reunion vacation along with their families and a guest Elly. Even those who are not friends are friendly. But the truth is, even the close friends are only friendly acquaintances now just the way most once-close relationships transform from friendships to [...]
Avatar is no Star Wars
I read and heard a lot of superlatives about James Cameron’s Avatar in the last two months. Some from well-known critics and mostly from the gen-pop — “awesome”. I knew very little about the story itself and that may have helped ground my expectations closer to Earth than Pandora. I waited for the opportunity, and [...]