Category Archives: Entertainment

Safe & Sound (From “The Hunger Games” Soundtrack) [feat. The Civil Wars] (Single Review) – Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s Christmas present for her fans arrived in the form of a song titled “Safe & Sound,” which is serving as the lead single for one of 2012’s most anticipated movies: The Hunger Games.

The song opens with a guitar playing to which Swift sings eerie breathiness: “I remember tears streaming down your face when I said, I’ll never let you go, when all those shadows almost killed your light. I remember you said don’t leave me here alone. But all that’s dead and gone and passed tonight.”

The moment Swift utters the first note, you know this isn’t like any song she has written before and it’s a very welcome departure from her previous works to a more mature, mellow musical sound.

“Just close your eyes, the sun is going down. You’ll be alright, no one can hurt you now. Come morning light, you and I will be safe and sound” Swift sings on the chorus, with the hums of The Civil Wars, who are featured with her on the song, in the background only serving to increase the overall tense atmosphere of the song and make it more fitting of the movie it will be part of.

For those who don’t know, The Hunger Games is based on a book of the same title and is set in a post apocalyptic world where there is very little hope, very little potential for a better life and where the young people of that world have to kill each other for the entertainment of their ruthless governing Capitol as part of the Hunger Games. Once you have that in your mind, it’s very easy to see how this song fits perfectly that atmosphere. You can easily imagine the characters of the book sitting around a campfire and singing this to maybe bring nonexistent strength to their spirit.

“Don’t you dare look out your window, darling everything’s on fire. The war outside our door keeps raging on. Hold onto this lullaby even when the music’s gone,” Swift sings on the second verse with slightly more strength to echo a buildup in the song teller’s morale. The vocals are layered and icy while trying to echo the building fire inside. It simply works.

The Civil Wars are more pronounced on the second verse onwards as their provide beautiful harmonies to Taylor’s singing, providing an eerie echo that resonates with the overall ethereal atmosphere painted in the song, adding to the folky sound the song has.

Safe & Sound is dark. Safe & Sound is anything but safe and sound for a singer who has become more known for her tween hits than her better songs that never see the light of day on radio. Safe & Sound is here to show that Taylor Swift is truly one of this generation’s best songwriters – one who is able to craft an idea into a song that can fascinate you. She uses beautiful imagery and manages to create musical hooks out of the gloomiest of songs. Safe & Sound is no exception to that rule. Safe & Sound is the most grown-up Taylor Swift has ever been on song. This is one of the few songs she has where she doesn’t talk about boys, love, fairytales and broken romances. This is a song about life, about hardships – and she pulls it off brilliantly.

8/10 

Hugo – Movie Review

Based on the book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick, Hugo is Martin Scorsese’s new feature film.

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is a young boy whose father (Jude Law) died in a fire at a museum, leaving him to the care of his uncle Claude. The only possession left with Hugo is a machine called an automaton which he intends to fix. And so, Hugo is taken to work at tending to the clocks at a train station in 1930’s Paris. It is there that he has to rely on theft to survive and work on fixing the automaton, hoping it would give him some closure or information as to the death of his father. At that train station, he stumbles on a man named George (Ben Kingsley) who owns a toy shop. Hugo soon becomes friends with George’s niece, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), who strangely holds a key to fixing the automaton and open an adventure for the two of them – all as the station’s Inspector Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen) goes after Hugo, in attempts to take him to the orphanage.

Hugo is a stunning movie. It is beautiful, gorgeous, mesmerizing. The cinematography, the visual effects, the direction, the music – all of these combine together to give you a very pretty movie to watch. It takes you in. It fascinates you at many points. It captivates you. It transcends out of the movie theatre, taking you to Paris, the city in which it was supposedly set.

But all of the above combined also need a good plot or story to help the fabric be tightly knit together into delivering a full-package movie. So the central question regarding Hugo arises: is the plot engaging enough?

The answer is a succinct miserable no.

Not only is the story so bland that it makes the movie altogether boring, it really puts a damper into all that the movie had going for it. The cinematography, though as I said is beautiful, becomes emotionally ineffective. The movie starts to go all over the place, not knowing really the point behind making it – is it a tribute to old cinema or is it an entertaining children’s movie? Is it a fantasy or it is pseudo-reality?

Hugo, being a movie revolved around machinery and clocks, has very machine-like acting as well. The actors – all of them – deliver strained performances that never really hit home, even when there’s enough emotional material for them to deliver. The comic timing in the movie is off that you find yourself rarely laughing even at its heartfelt moments. The action buildup is theoretically there but in reality never happens. You can tell what’s going to happen from a mile away and eventually, it happens. There are no surprises, no twists, nothing to mentally captivate you.

Hugo is more a vehicle for its director, Martin Scorsese, to share his passion for movies – especially historic movies – than to actually deliver a movie that is truly great in its own merits. If you compare Hugo with Scorsese’s previous works, Shutter Island for instance as to not stray far, you’d find the latter way out of Hugo‘s league in terms of overall effect on the viewer even though there’s obviously more work done in Hugo than Shutter Island.

The main difference between the two, apart from the fact that Hugo is mostly a Christmasy children’s movie and Shutter Island a dark adult thriller, is that the former has a very weak story while the latter has a stunningly intelligent plot – although it’s not as captivating visually. For a viewer with a taste like mine, Hugo feels very empty overall but a movie like Shutter Island would be very satisfying.

Being voted movie of the year by the National Board of Review and being nominated for almost every award imaginable, my expectations for Hugo were rather high. And frankly, it has all the ingredients to truly take your breath away: good actors, Paris, breathtaking visuals, a great director…. Sadly though, despite all of its potential, Hugo fails miserably. It remains flat, convoluted, very useless and emotionally flat. It may be breathtaking visually but on the overall, it’s a clockwork lemon.

Perhaps instead of having “one of the most legendary directors of our time takes you on an extraordinary adventure” on Hugo‘s poster, the sentence should have really said: “One of the most legendary directors of our time takes you on a uselessly stupid adventure” – for a movie concerned with storytelling, Hugo sure fails at telling a very simple story.

Don’t waste your money on this if you want a decent movie for your children this Christmas. Just buy the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 DVD. At least you’d want to watch that movie again. And at least that movie is truly stunningly, gorgeously, marvelously epic all around.

5/10

Lebanon’s Fransabank: The Brilliant TV Ad

I’m speechless.

One of the best TV Ads I have ever seen in Lebanon. Absolutely epic.

My 2011 Christmas Playlist

If you’re like me and just started to get into the Christmas musically (shopping and other stuff should have started already. If not, well don’t worry you still have time), this post is for you – or at least for your consideration.

While driving to my university today, a friend who carpools with me suggested that for the rest of the week I put Christmas music in the car. So I started thinking… what’s a decent length playlist full of Christmas music that I can listen to over and over again, at least till a bit after December 25th. So here it goes.

1 – All I Want For Christmas – Michael Bublé

This beats the original by a long mile. And it’s an awesome opener for the playlist.

2 – Hark! The Herald Angels Sing – Carrie Underwood

An uptempo with a great vocal to back it up. You cannot but feel Christmasy happy listening to this.

3 – Silent Night – Josh Groban

A classic by one of this generation’s best male vocalists.

4 – Joy To The World – David Archuleta

A nice rendition of this song by a young singer.

5 – Baby, It’s Cold Outside – Lady Antebellum

This classic song isn’t about Christmas per se but you can’t but listen to it during the season.

6 – What Child Is This – Carrie Underwood

This is chilling and haunting.

7 – Peppermint Winter – Owl City

“What’s December without Christmas Eve?” – so true.

8 – Blue Christmas – Andrea Bocelli &  Reba McEntire

A great version of this timeless Christmas classic.

9 – Adeste Fideles (O Come All Ye Faithful) – Celine Dion

Like her or not, she can sing – especially when it comes to songs like this. Make sure you check out her version.

10 – O Holy Night – Carrie Underwood

My favorite version of this song. Ever.

11 – God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen – Glee 

I’m not the biggest fan of Glee. In fact, I think the show royally sucks. But every now and then, they release their versions of songs and it just works. This is one of them.

12 – Bilayli Berdani – Majida El Roumi

One of the few Lebanese chants that reminds me of my childhood – of my mother singing it to me during Christmas. I couldn’t even find a YouTube version for it.

13 – The First Noel – Carrie Underwood

Because there’s no better way to end this playlist than with her impeccable falsetto singing “born is the King of Israel.”

 

Bonus Track – because it’s Christmas and just one more track isn’t a bad thing:

Jesus, Take The Wheel – Carrie Underwood

 

Merry Christmas From Apple – The iPhone 4S Siri Santa Claus Ad

Apple has launched another ad for the iPhone 4S’ Siri – and this time, it’s all about Christmas and Santa.

Having used Siri for the past month, I can attest to its functionality – everything mentioned in the video (apart from the location part since that’s only functional in the United States at this point) fully works and more often than not without a hitch.

So if you’re not into the holiday spirit yet, check out Santa and his 3.7 billion appointments for New Year’s Eve. Perhaps that should take some load off your shoulders.