A couple of nights ago I accidentally ended up at an event at the Royal Film Commission because my friend who was hanging out with me at the time wanted to go and the affair sounded interesting so we went together. There was a screening of three short Jordanian movies by local talents, and we watched all three standing up because there were more people present than chairs. The films were: Al Balkooneh, Hara 13, and Bitter Pineapples. Unfortunately, I don’t have the names of the directors.

The open-air event was well organized and I generally liked it, but I noticed the following things about the films themselves:

1- All three of them were set up in old Ammani neighborhoods, with a touch of romantic poverty.
2- All three of them featured lower-middle class to lower-class characters struggling either in love or family relations.
3- All three films’ scripts did not come across as convincing to me. There were Bedouin characters in one film where the setting was an Ammani neighborhood, and dialog in all three scripts was not true to life. For example, in two of the three movies there were “zo3ran” characters who really did not sound the part to me. I am guessing that because there is a significant class distance between the films’ staffs and the characters in these films that this was so. Plus, I know too much street language to be convinced with anything that distant from the real thing.
4- The stories, although set in lower-middle class neighborhoods and featuring fit characters, carried with them the controversies and concerns of their upper-middle and upper class makers. As such, there were some gaps in the stories which rendered them untrue to their settings.

Overall, however, I was impressed with the motivation these young film makers had and with the quality of their work. It’s so refreshing to feel that there is a cultural renaissance in the making here in Jordan, but for it to really be representative of us all as Jordanians and Arabs, it has to involve people from all classes and not just privileged upper class talents who can afford to realize their artistic visions.

So I took the GRE a couple of days ago, and it is safe to say that that chapter of my life is a-over. I’ve been getting used to the idea of not having to study, and the irony of the fact that I scored better in quantitative section as compared to the verbal section although I guessed aggressively in the final section of math. Go figure.

Now I move on. Finally!

A bit of the Arabic section of this blog via Wordle:

The Quran via Wordle generated single letters and not a single word resulted. Weird, right? Click on the images to see them bigger. They’re beautiful.

This will entertain…

Dramatic lemur:

Dramatic chipmunk:

Remember the camels? They are still around. Only now, they actually roam the streets surrounding where they graze and they some times defy passing cars by posing in the middle of the street. I don’t think this is legal.

I know how popular the camels are with you guys, so I took a couple of pictures with my phone for your viewing pleasure. If this sounds like I am confirming the stereotype of Arabs as camel-herding people, then let me unequivocally say that I am as amused as anyone by these REALLY big creatures being loose like this very close to where I live. It’s bizarre.

Here’s an engaging “word toy” called Wordle.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I tried to create my own word cloud but I am having a bit of a problem with my Java settings. You try it and share with me!

When I started my vacation almost three weeks ago, I bought a bunch of pirated DVDs of the latest movies and watched them in two days. For lack of a better subject today I will talk about these movies:

1- What Happens in Vegas: Crap. Cameron Diaz wears nice dresses in it though. I am envious.

2- Sex and the City: Double crap. This is the quintessential chick-flick type movie which I abhor but enjoy all the same because it really doesn’t demand any thinking on my part. It basically encourages conspicuous consumption and frames it so that it appears to be the omega of every achieved woman’s life. Let’s not forget that it also portrays marriage as the ultimate goal even for the most successful, independent women out there. Bullshit. Even the shoes in the movie are meant to slow us down. Fergie’s song is good though.

3- 27 Dresses: Triple crap. What a sucky movie. Another chick flick but one I did not enjoy at all. Stupid dresses too. Katherine Heigl is not my type.

4- The Incredible Hulk: Good movie! Yay! Cheers for the green giant! I love Edward Norton and Liv Tyler. The movie kinda lost its momentum at the end though. Oh, and it also featured the man-macho woman-fragile theme and shits like that. That was not cool.

5- You Don’t Mess With the Zohan: Hmm. I am a bit puzzled how to review this one. On the one hand, it has a good theme of coexistence between Arabs and Zionists. On the other hand, it has some images of Arabs which I did not like. For example, you have the shouting crazy fanatic armed Arab and then you have the sophisticated and disciplined Zionist who beats the Arab. Also, I think I noticed they claimed Hummus was an Israeli dish. HELL-O? Hummus is very Arab but yeah Jews in the U.S. and elsewhere normally claim Hummus and Falafel are their own. That’s basically stealing cultural heritage, made grave by the conflicts between the two cultures. Unforgivable.

Thus ends my review of these movies. Let’s hope that I will have something better to write about tomorrow.

Im tmptd to do ths agn. Also knwn as asylm hair…its the bst.

This song has been my favorite since I was in school and couldn’t quite get what the lyrics said except for “you and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals” and had no internet access to google the rest. I absolutely love this song to bits. But you, if you don’t like funny/dirty songs, don’t click play.

Awesome song, no? Bloodhound Gang’s The Bad Touch lyrics here.