Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
I love my films me, I have like a passion for really good special effects – thought that Avatar film was amazing. It has to be Blu-Ray all the way! My bro got a Blu-Ray player and after you’ve watched films at his house, your own TV just looks rubbish in comparison. People keep asking is Blu-Ray gonna take over normal DVD, what a stupid question. Of course they will. That’s like when no one had heard of just your average bloke being kitted out with a mobile phone and now all these little kids have em, it’s the same with Blu-Ray. And the capacity is just so much more on a Blu-Ray so it’s no wonder it’s going to take over DVDs. But my girlfriend always says that there’s always the next biggest thing, after Blu-Ray there’ll be something else. Yeah, that’s technology tho innit?
My Life in Ruins, starring Nia Vardalos, looked same the perfect choice for an expat movie review: American-Greek classical person takes a job at Athens University, gets downsized, does a stint as a tour guide. Perfect!
Well, not so much. Great idea, good cast which includes Richard Dreyfuss, one of my all-time favorite actors, but not so well executed. The writing is schmaltzy and heavy handed, the plot is predictable, and outside of a few gorgeous shots of Hellenic ruins, the movie pretty such falls flat.
But seeing Vardalos, who is a reasonably good actress, of course got me intellection about My Big Fat Hellenic Wedding, which she wrote and starred in. Originally I hadn’t planned on reviewing it since the admirer is not technically an expat, but seeing My Life in Ruins got me intellection about it in a whole new way.
In My Big Fat Hellenic Wedding, Vardalos plays Toula, the younger daughter of Hellenic immigrants in Chicago. Her parents, the expats, live in their own Hellenic bubble of kinsfolk and culture. They run a restaurant – Greek, of course, called Dancing Zorba’s – and extended kinsfolk is part of their everyday lives in ways that seem quite, well, foreign. As Toula explains:
I’m Greek, right? So, what happens is,.. see, you have two cousins. I have 27 first cousins. Just 27 first cousins alone. And my whole kinsfolk is big and blasting and everybody’s in each other’s lives and business all the time. Like you never meet have a time alone meet to think ’cause we’re always unitedly meet eating, eating, eating. The exclusive other grouping we know are Greeks, drive Greeks marry Greeks to breed more Greeks to be loud, breeding Hellenic eaters. No one in my kinsfolk has ever gone discover with a non-Greek before. No one.
Toula’s father insists:
There’s two kinds of people. Greeks, and everybody else who wish they was Greek.
Toula was brought up inside the Hellenic bubble her parents created. She had tried to break discover of it as a youngster, but dark-haired Toula and her moussaka for meal were unloved and teased by her blond-haired, Wonder-bread sandwich-eating schoolmates.
When we first meet her, Toula tells us:
I wish I had a different life. I wish I was braver or prettier, or meet happy.
But she’s not. Working in the kinsfolk restaurant, rebelling against but unable to pull absent from the Hellenic community, Toula is miserable. She explains:
Nice Hellenic girls are supposed to do threesome things in life. Marry a Hellenic boy, attain Hellenic babies, and feed everyone. Until the day we die.
She wants more discover of life. She convinces her father to let her (at the geezerhood of 30 she needs his permission!) take a machine class at the community college so she crapper meliorate listing curb at Dancing Zorba’s. Her first real foray into US culture happens at the college when she joins a table full of blond-haired, white-bread-sandwich-eating young women in the cafeteria.
There are others, however, who prefer to design their own daytime gowns. With a vision and a describe book, these mavens draw all original daytime dresses, with just a touch or an manifest inspiration of Hollywood. So here are some tips on how to design you own daytime dresses, tone style.
1. Watch tone Entertainment News
Watching tone lifestyle channels or entertainment news exposes you to a variety of tone daytime dresses. You can check out some lifestyle channel’s prizewinning and worst dressed. These are legit – they are sorted out by legitimate fashion critics, after all. These prizewinning clad and worst clad lists will give you a very useful cue on what coiffe designs to go for and what to stay absent from.
2. Leaf through Fashion Magazines
Fashion magazines feature the latest daytime dresses attrited by these tone stars. Fashion magazines are actually way better than watching television. Instead of encrypting the coiffe designs in your head, fashion magazines give you the luxury of but showing it to your coiffe designer or coiffe maker and highlighting areas which you want altered.
3. One and One Makes One
Take an daytime coiffe design attrited by one tone actress, and another attrited by another tone icon and mold them together to form a uniquely gorgeous daytime dress. Other than existence a half-original, you will have the privilege of choosing which designs to pick out and which to yield out.
4. Elegance Minus the Frills
A lot of the most gorgeous daytime dresses actually have one or more of the following: frills, laces, feathers, sequins, crystals, diamonds, trains, corsets and double sided tapes. These are indeed lovely addition to their daytime dresses. However, it does not necessarily mean it could work well for a mere mortal such as you. Have the coiffe prefabricated in a way that does not alter its elegance, yet takes absent the frills, laces, feathers, sequins, crystals, diamonds, trains or the corsets – as well as the need for double sided tapes. Note: trains and frills are for ceremony dresses. Laces and corsets are more fitting for a bridesmaid dress.
Recently, while hosting the screen awards function in Mumbai Shahid Kapur said to Shahrukh Khan that the title of his movie should have been ‘My surname is Khan’ and not ‘My Name Is Khan’ (pun intended). However, this just goes on to show the tremendous hype and expectations from the movie which is scheduled to hit the cinemas worldwide on 12th February 2010. This Bollywood extravaganza directed by Karan Johar witnesses the reuniting of some of the big names like Shahrukh Khan and Kajol after a space of 8 long years. Even Karan Johar is directing a film after Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna which was released way back in 2006. Between this hibernation as a director he went on producing movies, some good and some dubious. So the team has united and their creation will be out on Valentine Week this year.
Karan Johar who is well versed in making love stories (an ardent follower of Yash Chopra) is certainly releasing his film on Valentine week but is also experimenting for the first time with some global and serious issues of terrorism and its aftermath on innocent civilians. To advocate his genuine intentions he has made his favorite actor Shahrukh Khan as his mouthpiece in the name of Rizwan Khan as the protagonist of the movie. Even his selection of a Muslim hero as the central character is a well thought out move as it is the Muslims who have suffered the most since the twin towers collapsed.
The film is a love story at the heart as said by its director with the undercurrent of terrorism and its aftermath, the director and actor were quoted as saying it in the media. The film features Shahrukh as Rizwan who moves to San Francisco with his mother and finds love in Mandira (Kajol). The things change after terror strikes the country and the couple separates. Rizwan thus embarks on a notable journey across the US, inspiring people and initiating a revolution to bring back Mandira. Rizwan also suffers from Asperger syndrome making matters even worse for him. So, people find it quite difficult to understand him.