Twilight: Eclipse

Eclipse followed by True Blood. It was a day of werewolves, vampires, and the (slightly irritating) women who love them.

I never got into Twilight, as I previously explained. Eclipse is slightly better in the sense that at a few (very few) points in the film, it becomes self-reflexive and makes a few jokes. The whole thing seems so silly to me that without any jokes, it becomes unbearable. And the chasteness of all involved has become truly annoying.

True Blood, on the other hand, is anything but chaste. The homoerotic scene between Billy and Sam in S03E01 reminded me of the wonderful phrase "the subtext is quickly becoming the text" from my all-time favorite vampire story. Wouldn't mind seeing something like that in the next installment of Twilight!

The entire building for rent

Ayse told me to document these old buildings, and so I do.

Another demolition on my street

Emek protestolari sürüyor

Beyoğlu Belediyesi önünde eylem. Cuma aksam 7 biraz gec bir saat gerci.

Hands up!

Sex and the City? 2

SATC2 has already received its fair share of negative reviews, so I'll keep this brief. It's not just that the film is too long, incredibly insensitive, and that the characters are so annoying we don't care whatever happens to them. My main problem here is that in Sex and the City, there's hardly any sex, and barely a glimpse of (New York) City.

A few notes: Trying to be educative about the Middle East and Arabic language doesn't work if you end it all with "F... the New Middle East." Also, SATC was a lot more feminist when it wasn't trying to be preachy about feminism, and have the girls sing "I'm a Woman." And the funniest thing in the movie has become their clothes, not their lines. Sad.

Arvo Part in Istanbul

Sitting in the middle. Premiere of Adam's Lament starting soon.

Antichrist

In the prologue of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, a married couple is having sex in their bathroom while their little child walks over the edge of an open window to his death. It all goes downhill from there.

The prologue is shot beautifully in black/white, in slow motion, and set to Haendel's 'Lascia Ch'io Pianga'. For the 45 minutes after that, I could hardly stay awake. And for the next 45 minutes, I wished I were still asleep. The film is divided into four chapters (in addition to the prologue and the epilogue). After the child's death, she (the mother, a fantastic Charlotte Gainsbourg) slides into a depression, and he (the father, a much too old Willem Dafoe, who seems to have been selected mainly because he has played Christ before) tries to get her out of it. He is a very successful therapist apparently, and while he knows all the rules (never treat your family, never have sex with your client), he can't quite abide by them. Long story short, he tries to cure her, she pays back by lengthily torturing him. That's women for ya!

Walking into a von Trier film, I expect misogyny (much as he denies it), but I also expect to be cinematically shaken up. None such after the prologue. It is excellently directed, I just am not impressed by the direction it takes.

My office view

This is probably one of the things that gets me out of bed and out the door in the morning.