Review | Girls (Season 1)

To: Lena Dunham
CC: 2012, everybody who watches the show Girls
SUBJECT: My thoughts on your show

Dear Lena,

I wouldn't go as far as addressing you as madam, because apparently it's not the norm anymore to address you as Monsieur or Dame when you write a letter. Also it would be a bad idea if I actually address you as Ms Dunham. Anyway, how are you? I am fine thanks, but let's talk about your show titled Girls.


With that show, you have already became a household name in a year which everything is more likely to go viral on the web in milliseconds. With the likes of PSY, Rebecca Black or god forbid Lauren Faust, you have become the voice of thousands of women girls living in urban sprawls while climbing their way through uni. And I say this as a man who just finished high school, almost missed the cut off of my preferred courses in every university I observed,but ultimately got an alternate pathway through one of them*. Seems to be the worst scenario to establish your post high-school life.

Review | Django Unchained

Can slavery ever be a fantasy?

3 companion pieces with Zero Dark Thirty

I've haven't been doing a lot of reviews since I graduated from high school and so far I have written two reviews for two movies. So with this in mind, let's talk about Kathryn Bigelow's anticipated awards contender Zero Dark Thirty depicting the CIA's decade long manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. So here are my quick thoughts:

The 20 Best Movies I Haven't Seen in 2012

While every cinephile and moviegoer are busy having to spend money on all the films they watched in theatres last year, I was very busy. It was my final year in high school and while everybody regarded it as the most important year of your life, I might agree. Psychologically, it was devastating for me and the rest of the year to leave out everything and study for your final exams in which we call the HSC. Then it was calculated into a huge anomaly called an ATAR (the Australian Tertiary Admission rank) to which I will never understand how it would calculated and despite that, I still got into a university and the preferred course I wanted to do (suck on that!). Though what I'm against is the amount of ecstasy coming off from finishing your formal education is the amount of freedom which turns out pretty empty when you're trying to plan for the future.

That is why I didn't get a lot of time to see the movies I wanted to see and those films are based on a little thing called word of mouth.

So here are my list of the best movies in alphabetical order I haven't got around watching but will try and catch up. I haven't included Django Unchained and Silver Linings Playbook because they will be out by the end of the month. Some of these movies may make it into my "Best of" list which you may not see until midway through the year.

Review | Life of Pi (2012)

A feel good story with a meandering first and final act

I don't really know how a film like Life of Pi can be considered "unfilmable". Is it because the source material contains content that most filmmakers would be too afraid to tackle or is tthat they don't think it's possible to frame the film properly? Since having seen Life of Pi, I think any book or material from any other medium can be filmed, but it must have the right director, the right actor and the right crew who should carry the film and bring the appeal of the book it's based on to a certain audience. Best case scenario would be The Lord of the Rings. Directed by Peter Jackson, who at the time had directed some B movie schlock had directed such an incredibly big and dense story of all three books under a large budget and all he did was to frame everything grand making audiences feel like they're in the LOTR atmosphere.

Life of Pi has the right director from Ang Lee who directed films such as Brokeback Mountain, Lust Caution and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the right actor and the right team in special effects to actually deliver a story based on Yann martel's best selling adaptation that is emotionally contained as it establishes itself as a heavy handed, then becomes so visually engaging that it goes off the rails with a contradictory and saggy ending.