I COME BACK :D

Hello readers, been months - almost a year- I didn’t write any entries. You know, I was busy like hell: finishing my undergraduate study – graduated – working (finally!)

I’ve been a bachelor of English education since 3 months ago. On April 20, 2011, the convocation was held. Wow, that would be an unforgettable moment and a momentous event ever.

 

With mom. It was taken before the convocation.

 With dad. After the convocation party over. Standing in front of Faculty of Language and Arts Education.

With friends. From left to right: Boyu, Bung Es, Icih, Nda, me, Sinta. Thank you gals for coming :)

And as time goes by, I’ve been working as an English teacher at Yudha Utama Vocational High School. I'll tell bout that later on.
Well, I'll keep updating my blog from now.

 Cheerio!

TOTAL BRAIN MALFUNCTION

It’s 3 in the afternoon, I’m revising my skripsweet behind the wooden desk. It should be my time to take a nap, anyway. Hhhmm, forget about that.

You know, this activity makes my head and my back get so stiff. Afterwards, my brain starts to blow very soon I guess. Even worse, this is so soul-consuming.

And before I get a total brain malfunction I suppose to escape to my blog to get some new fresh air and to cool down my brain.

By the way, laziness always haunts me when I intended to tidy up my final project: the holy skripsweet. Eyes got harder to open, mind didn’t want to cooperate, hands are getting weak. Oh c’mon, SLOTH (re: the god of laziness), depart from me please! Let me be in serenity with my skripsweet! I tempted to graduate as soon as possible from college.

And one more thing: Hey you, INSPIRATION, SPIRIT, DESIRE, occupy me when I need you most.

A’rite, I think I should get back to revise my skripsweet. See you later.

Nowhere Boy

John Lennon's childhood. Liverpool 1955: a smart and troubled 15-year-old is hungry for experience. In a family full of secrets, two incredible women clash over John: Mimi, the buttoned-up aunt who raised him, and Julia, the prodigal mother. Yearning for a normal family, John escapes into the new and exciting world of rock 'n' roll where his fledgling genius finds a kindred spirit in the teenage Paul McCartney. Just as John begins his new life, tragedy strikes. But, a resilient young man finds his voice -- and an icon explodes into the world.

 

Genre: Drama

Starring:

Kristin Scott Thomas, Aaron Johnson, Thomas Sangster, Anne-Marie Duff, David Threlfall, Ophelia Lovibond, Sam Bell, Jack McElhone, Ellie Jeffreys, Calum O'Toole

Director: Sam Taylor Wood

Running Time:1:37

Release Date: Opened Oct 15, 2010

 

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/nowhere-boy,1162197.html

The Social Network

"The Social Network" is the kind of movie that by all rights shouldn't work. A verbose compendium of scenes of people talking to one another largely in college dorms, a Palo Alto ranch house or a law office conference room, "The Social Network" has another thing not going for it: It's centered on computers, the kiss of death of modern cinema that fatally smothers visual dynamism with dull close-ups of laptop screens and mouse clicks.

But when a talky movie's talk has been written by Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing"), and those words have been animated by the visual brio of director David Fincher, what looks on paper like a static series of dead-end conversations comes to life as a vital, engaging, even urgent parable for our age. As the dramatized story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who invented the site in 2004 while a Harvard sophomore, "The Social Network" can't be taken as the literal record of events -- which ultimately involved Zuckerberg being sued by his partners and competitors. Clearly Sorkin and Fincher had higher aspirations for their film. With surgical precision, exhilarating insight and considerable storytelling flair, they make Zuckerberg both a metaphor and a lens through which to understand contemporary culture.

The rhythms and rhymes of "The Social Network" establish themselves in the film's small masterpiece of an opening scene, when Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara, the new Lisbeth Salander for all you "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" fans), trade barbs over beers in a Cambridge pub. Prickly, defensive, always five steps ahead, Zuckerberg is clearly peeved that his date pines for guys who row crew. He's brilliant but clueless, putting Erica down because she goes to Boston University but painfully aware that he can't get into Harvard's elite final clubs. He may be a programming genius, but he's an emotional idiot. When the conversation goes fatally south and the girl breaks up with him, he responds with what has become the mantra of his generation: "Is this real?"

What ensues is a narrative that hews closely to classic American tales of ambition, ingenuity, competition and betrayal; "The Social Network" has understandably been compared to "Citizen Kane" in its depiction of a man who changes society through bending an emergent technology to his will. But with its leitmotif of striving, resentment and cherchez la femme, the story also evokes Fitzgerald at his most longing and elegiac. A modern-day Jay Gatsby, the "refresh" button on his keyboard standing in for Daisy Buchanan's flashing green dock light, Zuckerberg -- or at least Sorkin's version of him -- embodies all those timeless contradictions and of-the-moment tics (the hoodie, those flip-flops) that make for a classic literary anti-hero.

Eisenberg delivers a deceivingly accomplished performance in the tricky role of Zuckerberg, whose recessive, withholding persona is completely at odds with the larger-than-life charisma such characters usually demand. Within an ensemble that includes Andrew Garfield as Zuckerberg's erstwhile partner Eduardo Saverin, Josh Pence and Armie Hammer as the brothers who claim Zuckerberg stole their idea (and who, ahem, row crew) and Justin Timberlake as the Mephistophelian Sean Parker, Eisenberg manages to make his nerdy protagonist the most interesting guy in the room, even at his most awkward and antisocial.

And that, finally, is the most powerful paradox that propels "The Social Network," whose title is clearly intended for maximum irony. As Sorkin and Fincher masterfully bring viewers along on an infectiously giddy journey of discovery and invention, they also manage to infuse Zuckerberg's story with meaning beyond his own achievements, struggles and flaws.

Mark Zuckerberg may not be larger than life, but thanks to this swift, smart, beautifully crafted film, his on-screen avatar gets to impart truths that always will be.

Source: washingtonpost.com

Top 7 Most Beautiful Cities in the World

Check this out and release some stress.

1.Hong Kong, China

Hong Kong is number one on my list for many reasons: Hong Kong has whopping 39 buildings over 200 meters tall. It also boasts four of the 15 tallest buildings in the world... that's all in one city! Hong Kong's skyline shows a large selection of distinct sky-reaching towers, with beautiful night lighting and reflection. This city exemplifies the post-modern skyscraper and skyline. Finally, the mountain backdrop makes this skyline (as you can clearly see) the greatest on the planet!


2. Chicago, USA

Chicago is the birthplace of the modern skyscraper. When Chicago built its first steel high-rise in 1885, it was not the tallest structure in the world but the first example of a new form of engineering that would change nearly every city on earth. Chicago has 17 buildings over 200 meters tall (three of which are among the top 20 tallest buildings in the world, including the tallest in North America). Chicago has some of the finest mid-century architecture and examples of modern skyscrapers.


3. Shanghai, China

Not to be mistaken for a space station, Shanghai is a real city! China's biggest and most advanced city, Shanghai was said to be the most cosmopolitan city in the beginning of the 20th century, but lost its glory during the "Mao era". It is now quickly regaining its position as one of the biggest economic powerhouses in the world as well as a showcase of modern architecture. In Shanghai you'll find 18 structures that are over 200 meters tall, one of which is the insanely tall, the 468m downtown Oriental Pearl TV Tower.



4. New York City, USA


New York City has one of the densest and most diverse skylines, with a huge collection of buildings and building styles. Thanks to Hollywood's obsession with the city, it is also the most easily recognizable skyline in the world. New York City has an amazing 44 buildings over 200 meters - the most in the world! Home of the famous, now destroyed World Trade Center Towers, the Empire State building, the Statue of Liberty and the United Nations, New York City is the financial capital of the western world. Upon the completion of the new "Freedom Tower" (built on the old site of the World Trade Centers), it may rank higher in this list (depending on how good it looks of course).



5. Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo is the world's most populated city. Its skyline has a number of unique characteristics that set it apart from other big city skylines, among them 15 structures at over 200 meters tall (including the Tokyo Tower which changes colors every night). But because of the density and vast size of the city, every corner appears to have its own skyline. With the height restrictions and the required red lights that flash atop all mid to tall-sized buildings make the city look spectacular at night. Tokyo is filled with neon lighting and unique, contemporary architecture, and like New York City is also often portrayed in movies for its aesthetic and eye-catching cityscapes. Interesting fact: Tokyo houses the world's largest fleet of helicopters to get around town if traffic gets too crazy.



6. Singapore

One of the best (urban) planned and cleanliest metropolitan cities in the world, Singapore looks like an architectural model city come to life. The buildings cannot be higher than 280 meters due to air traffic control restrictions, but that has added a tall (but not too tall) and consistent building height and space pattern that makes this skyline unique: Three buildings are exactly 280 meters tall and 5 others (8 total) stand at just over 200 metres. The buildings are mostly light-coloured and there is a large expanse of greenery dotted around the city core. This South-Eastern city is definitely in a league of its own.



7. Toronto, Canada

Toronto is a meeting place, a crossroads of many cultures and ethnicities. Toronto is downtown Canada, the biggest city in the country with a skyline to match. Toronto has 7 structures in its skyline that stand at over 200 metres, including the astonishingly tall 553 metres, CN Tower, which is often referred to as the tallest freestanding structure in the world. While mostly untrue (because there are taller TV masts in the world), the CN Tower possesses the world's highest observation deck, making this city's skyline one of the most immediately identifiable.

Source: attractivereviews.com

Eat, Pray, Love

Anyone bringing Elizabeth Gilbert's blockbuster memoir of self-discovery, "Eat Pray Love," to the screen has a huge challenge before him: How to overcome the book's episodic, anecdotal structure and penchant for aphorism, to create a dynamic narrative? Even more daunting, how does one dramatize what is essentially an interior journey?

The answer, at least according to director Ryan Murphy ("Glee"), is to photograph Julia Roberts looking by turns beatific, pained and just slightly self-pitying against as many fabulous backdrops as possible. That strategy pays off with uneven success in "Eat Pray Love," in which Roberts portrays the author as she recovers from a disastrous divorce, painful rebound relationship and general spiritual ennui on a year-long trip through Italy, India and Bali.

The film's most crucial constituency -- the book's rabid fans -- are likely to feel well served by Murphy's adaptation, which hews pretty faithfully to Gilbert's story. (He veers off the path most wildly in India, where he was stuck filming Roberts meditating, or trying to meditate, for hours on end, full stop.) And even newcomers, men included, can enjoy being swept up in the film's lavish third chapter, where Gilbert meets a seductive Brazilian named Felipe (Javier Bardem) and embarks on a luscious love affair amid the verdant terraces and soft beaches of Bali.

All that eye candy aside, though, "Eat Pray Love" can't be described as a home run. At least during the movie's first third, Murphy doesn't stop moving his camera, compulsively swooping it around and perching it above the action as if it were a neurotic bird of prey. The perspective is at its most jangled in Italy, where Gilbert is supposed to discover the joys of Italy's language, food and "joy in doing nothing." But Murphy, American that he is, doesn't slow down long enough to convey the country's sensuous pleasures or to flesh out the personalities of the friends Gilbert meets while pursuing them.

Her supporting characters get a little more time in India, where Gilbert meets the expansive "Richard from Texas," played here by Richard Jenkins in a scene-stealing turn as a broken man healing his scars through bravado and spiritual seeking. It's in India, too, that "Eat Pray Love's" most affecting sequence transpires, as Gilbert makes peace with her ex-husband, played by Billy Crudup in a thankless but accomplished performance. (For the record, James Franco plays the post-divorce boyfriend, bringing every ounce of irresistible boyish charisma to the task.)

Roberts, who cannily chose to produce "Eat Pray Love" as the perfect vehicle for her alternately dazzling and relatable talents, manages to tamp down the book's most grating self-congratulatory tone. But in the movie, as in the book, all talk of God, the universe and love and light aside, there's no doubt who the real star is. As a middle-aged Dorothy at large in a New Age Oz, her Liz Gilbert mostly wanders around smiling, sometimes crying, but always somehow looking like a goddess herself, recently arrived to show others the way -- whether she's urging a Swedish student in Rome to eat more pizza or telling a teenage Indian girl reluctantly succumbing to an arranged marriage that she's visualizing a happy life for her. (Uhm, thanks?)

By the time Gilbert arrives in Bali, the extravagant beauty of that island -- made all the more eye-popping by the presence of Bardem -- is likely to inspire filmgoers simply to sigh, sit back and enjoy the view. What, exactly, does Gilbert learn at the feet of the jolly elderly medicine man she feels destined to befriend -- aside from how to smile with her liver? It's never clear, and it doesn't much matter. "Eat Pray Love" finally settles into its own cinematic destiny as an attractive escapist love story, in which the romance is more with the I than with the guy.

Source: washingtonpost.com

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Michael Douglas makes a triumphant return to form as one of American cinema's great villains in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," the 23-years-later sequel to the movie that captured the go-go '80s.

In its own giddy, glib way, "Money Never Sleeps" evinces just as strong a hold on its times, when terms like "subprime" and "credit default swaps" -- which would have been virtually meaningless two decades ago -- are the lingua franca of the financial realm. The crimes that Gekko went to jail for in Oliver Stone's original film now seem like child's play compared with the shady deals his spiritual heirs have been confecting during his years in prison. Now that he has been released, during a very funny scene in which he reclaims a mobile phone the size of a shoebox, Gekko has renounced his past life of avarice and (what else?) published a book. It's called "Is Greed Good?," a clever turnabout on his most famous line from the first "Wall Street."

That's just one of many in-jokes that Stone lands throughout his sequel, which often exceeds its predecessor in sheer verve and visual style. Using an ingeniously layered visual design, split screens and sinuous mobile cameras that move through scenes like the human sharks who inhabit them, Stone here proves that he's still a director of bold muscularity. If some of his references hit too squarely on the nose -- the shot of a child's soap bubble standing in for the metaphoric financial version, for example, or the vaguely fascist corporate insignia of a malign CEO played by Josh Brolin -- Stone has a knack for pacing, detail and atmosphere that manages to feel authentic and fancifully allegorical at the same time.

In large part, much of that entertainment value derives from Douglas, who tucks into Gekko with gleeful relish, his physical gusto made all the more gratifying given the unwelcome recent news that the actor is fighting throat cancer. His famous hair now gray and less slick, his suits dressed down but still bespoke, Gekko presents the perfect antihero, a deliciously amoral bad guy on a quest for redemption (or maybe just a piece of the new action). The ally he has chosen for the journey is a young entrepreneur named Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), who just happens to be engaged to Gekko's estranged daughter, Winnie (Carey Mulligan). Disgusted with her father, Winnie writes for an investigative blog, while Jake invests in alternative energy technology and speaks fluent Mandarin.

In other words, Jake and Winnie personify the future that Gekko, who speaks witheringly of those crazy kids with their derivatives, either can't or won't grasp -- or maybe he's just too busy seeing around corners to beat them at their own game. The wily suspense of "Money Never Sleeps" lies in how deep Gekko's reptilian instincts go, a question plumbed in the course of a peripatetic tour through New York's most decadently gilded precincts, with a stop along the way at the Federal Reserve.

"Money Never Sleeps" may belong to Douglas's Gekko, but Mulligan and LaBeouf provide attractive, believable foils to his slippery sleights of hand; veterans Frank Langella and Eli Wallach, in roles reminiscent of Hal Holbrook's in the original, offer words of bygone wisdom echoed by the image of a buffalo seen in one aging character's office.

Set to music by David Byrne, Brian Eno and Craig Armstrong, "Money Never Sleeps" possesses the lift, acceleration and speed of the very bubble it seeks to puncture. Stone has managed to wring unlikely entertainment value from what we now know was the longest recession since World War II. With style, wry humor and a healthy dose of cautionary polemic, he's made some of our most troubling recent history great fun to watch.

Source: washingtonpost.com