Razan Moghrabi… Sex Talk?

A friend linked me today to a YouTube video that hasn’t gone viral in the Middle East yet, featuring Lebanese TV presenter Razan Moghrabi in an intimate session with friends, discussing sex.

I normally wouldn’t care about such a thing. Sex is a natural thing that we discuss. However, Razan takes this “discussion” to a whole new level with lewd behavior that includes putting her hand up the guy’s shorts.

Lebanese people in general, and women in particular, are already being stereotyped as being overly promiscuous, which, in a region as conservative as the one we live in, isn’t a positive association. We try to tell everyone how this is not true and that those spreading such lies are Saudi men whose only purpose of coming to Lebanon in summer is to get laid.

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Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Sex Scene Pictures & Video Leaked

The newly “released” set of pictures, featured in People Magazine, can be found here.

The newly leaked video from the sex scene can be found here.

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For the twihards who are interested in this, two pictures have surfaced of the sex scene (yes, they actually do it) in Breaking Dawn.

This is probably the most exciting part of the whole movie as the book royally sucked and I’m glad they actually decided to show the characters doing something, unlike Stephenie Meyer’s near Victorian-esque approach to the issue: yeah, they did it, you’re just not allowed to know how it happened.

This leak follows yet another picture leak, posted earlier, of the same scene.

[EDIT]: I have been asked to take down the pictures. If you still want to see them, let me know in a comment.



Bullying in Lebanon

I was sitting in a class yesterday when an openly gay guy sat next to me. I’m not very good friends with him (I barely know him) but he seems like a cool guy. I know of at least one incidence after an exam where he was more caring about how my friend and I had performed than many people we know.

So the desk he sat at had the following scribbles: [His name] is gay.

The guy took it with humor. He doesn’t care and the people that care about him don’t care either. He took his pen and scribbled down: And proud. He then signed.

I, however, felt bad for him. I have no idea why but I got the feeling that he put on this facade of the non-caring person who ridicules these kinds of insults, but on the inside he was hurt.

A similar thing happened with another person I know, who was forced to come out because of bullying. Everyone started to make fun of him (and imagine your whole age group making fun of you). But he still held his head high and went through it. While I have some reservations on many things this person did, I have to admit that he was being, in a way, bullied.

Bullying in Lebanon – and other countries for that matter – has always been against those perceived as weaker than us, be it racially, sexually, religion-wise, etc….

So just let me say this. Bullying does not make you a better person – on the contrary, it makes you ridiculous. Whether you enjoy the little surge in power that you get when you make someone lesser than you feel bad, just know that this lesser person is the better person and better people are the people who ultimately get the good jobs, the nice girlfriends (or boyfriends) and lead the better life.

So if you’re a bully, take a minute to ponder how horrible you’d feel if the same things you’re doing to those you are bullying are being done to you.

And as final food for thought: aren’t we all bullies? haven’t we all made fun – at certain points – of people that we see as “lesser” than us?

Easy A – Movie Review

Easy A. The best comedy of the year, aka the best teen comedy in a long, long time.

The movie tells the story of Olive Penderghast, a high school girl who’s as off the radar as you can go. A rumor starts that she lost her virginity and soon enough, she becomes the most popular girl in school. Inspired by the novel “The Scarlet Letter” from where the letter “A” in the title comes from, it shows how the precocious teenager in Olive got turned due to word-of-mouth alone into something as close to a harlot as you can get – without the sex.

Her fictional one-night with her fictional college boyfriend soon becomes the introduction of many guys asking her to fake sleep with them to improve their reputation. A gay classmate comes up to her and in one hilarious scene, they fake sleeping with each other so well that your ribs would almost crack from laughing. But as with all comedies, soon enough Olive’s world will come crashing down as it all becomes unbearable and things she hasn’t even pretended to do are affixed to her…

Olive’s parents, played by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, are hilarious. They excel at being the hippies, carefree parents. You can’t help but laugh everytime one of them tries to console or give guidance to Olive. They are so out of place that I thought Olive was adopted at first. They are still so taken by their long-ago sexual and chemical experimentation that they don’t even care about all the turmoil in their daughter’s life. Their advice: Oh but it’s fun! You can’t help but laugh.

You might think the plot is cliched and whatnot – after all, most high school comedies are. But what elevates this movie is the outstanding performance by Emma Stone, who, in my opinion, should have won her category at the Golden Globes. There is no other one who deserved the best actress in a comedy as she did. She spun this movie out of her likeability alone and made it into what it is. Like or hate the movie, you can’t but like her character. She shows such promising talent that how she was a relative unknown before this is mind-boggling.

The movie also stars Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley as Olive’s love interest. Amanda Bynes returns into the movie business as the overzealous Christian who wants to stop all the “sinning” going on in her school. She is really good as well, especially when she’s in one of her prayer sessions.

Easy A may not be groundbreaking. But for once in a long while, Hollywood gives you a comedy that is refreshing, breezy and likeable without going into the comedy of shock-value. And for that, I love it.

 

 

 

Love And Other Drugs – Review

Love And Other Drugs, aka one of the most hated movies of the year. But unlike the overall opinion regarding this movie, I actually loved it!

Love And Other Drugs stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Jamie, an ADD son of a doctor, who doesn’t want to follow in his dad’s footsteps, so he gets a job as a pharmaceutical sales rep for Pfizer, the company that later on brought the world Viagra. While trying to sell his company’s drug, he meets Maggie, the character portrayed by Anne Hathaway. Maggie has an early onset of Parkinson’s and this where the story starts.

The movie is very life-like. It’s about commerce (trying to sell drug to doctors who can be bought by gifts and schmoozing), ambition and ultimately love. Aren’t those things what life is all about? You have ambition to basically set a name for yourself. This ambition will lead you to make good money, fall in love and raise a family. This is where the life-like approach comes from.

Each one of the main characters of this movie has their own journey. Jamie’s path is to grow out of the careless womanizer that he is into a man. And Maggie’s growth revolves around trust in people, to let go of her own secure but fragile little world and let go.  Jake Gyllenhaal is heartfelt, engaging in his portrayal of Jamie. He draws you in and makes the character very likable. But the true star here is Anne Hathaway.

Anne Hathaway has very much grown since her The Princess Diaries days. And if the first hour of movie, which is basically sex, is not convincing enough, she blows you away (no pun intended) with the emotions she gets across in the second half. It’s not hard (again no pun intended) to like her in any movie that she does, be it the drug addict in Rachel Getting Married or as the sick woman in this one. Her embodiment of a Parkinson’s patient is very good. The tremors she makes, the way she lives the disease… it is all done with the right touch of credibility. And this is coming from a person who has lived firsthand with someone with Parkinson’s. The struggle to get the drugs, the disappointment when she discovers she forgot to refill her prescription… you live the movie and the character through Maggie’s eyes, predicting what she’ll do next: will she open up to Jamie or will she remain secluded? Will she let herself truly live or will she just keep in going by? It’s a multi-layered character, delivered brilliantly. And I’m not ashamed to say I prefer this performance over Annette Bening’s performance in The Kids Are All Right.

There’s one particular scene involving a vodka bottle that is very haunting. You can’t but feel sorry for her character at that point.

Some say that the nudity is unnecessary, especially with the amount it is in this movie. I disagree. The sex scenes in this movie are the vehicle by which these two characters communicate and get to know each other. Relationships usually start the other way around. This is not the case here. Instead of having their minds do the talking, their bodies do.

Moreover, you feel at times that the plot can be taken to an extra level. Sometimes, it feels as if the script could have used an extra draft to make this movie into one that could have actually been a very strong contender at this year’s award season. Some scenes are dispensable and very Hollywood-like cliche, in a movie that is not very cliche. An extra revision would have probably tied those scenes up and delivered a truly great movie.

To finish this up, I prefer Love And Other Drugs over all the other  movies in the Motion Picture – Comedy nomination at the Golden Globes. It’s not for all tastes. But I loved it.