December 27, 2010

TRON: DEADLY DISCS

I was a little kid when the first Tron movie was released. I watched it at my grandparents', on their TV set with a video player. They were the times right after the military coup in Turkey, and movies weren't really coming to the theaters. I don't know, maybe it was something political or simply maybe the distributors didn't have enough money to distribute big movies. And of course, those films were not coming to video tapes in a legal format. They were shamelessly pirated and nobody gave a shit about it back then. As a matter of fact, i don't think anything changed today and people don't still give a shit about the pirated copies.

Well, i can merely remember one or two scenes from the movie. But i remember i adored it.

Then came the game: Tron Deadly Discs. I spent hours and hours playing this game. I had a 4k PC which did not have a popular brand name, and my game options were really very limited. I think i had 6 games in total and i really spent unbelievable amount of time on these 6 games. Tron was not really my favorite, but i liked it anyway and played it.

So today, i had a chance to watch the new Tron movie on big screen. Well, i had some other things to do so i didn't really watch it, but i had a chance to see the arena fight. I don't know if it resembles the old movie, i can't remember that, but it definitely resembles the arena in the game. But of course, you may need to use some wild imagination to find a connection between a 3D movie and a game which looks exactly like this:

But the reason why i wrote this post is quite different. I don't how to describe it, because it is one of those very private moments which is individual-spesific. The whole thing initiated some sort of a chemical reaction in my brain and my body. This extremely slight connection between the two images helped me to bound to my childhood. And what i felt was kind of something i wish i could feel all the time.

Now it is all gone, and all i can do is to try to write it, simply because i don't know what else to do.

December 14, 2010

THE RUNNING MAN - IN A THEATER VERY NEAR TO YOU

Anybody remembers the movie Running Man, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger?

Arnold plays a prisoner who obviously is framed for somethnig he hasn't done. And his only way to freedom is a TV show, a wild game in which death row inmates are given a chance in an arena. If they succeed, they are freed. If not, then it means they are dead.

Even though i haven't seen mentioned anywhere, i am pretty sure that the movie is based on a story by Stephen King. I am not really a King fan, but i clearly remember reading that particular story about a man in a game show with the exact same concept. The difference is, King's story pretty much focused on the show itself, while in the movie there is another challenge Arnold has to overcome.

It turns out that, in the movie, Arnold is actually a good cop who refuses to obey the direct order to shot fire at innocent civilians. So the system punsihes him. And the media shows makes him look like a pshycopath who kills civilians even though he is ordered not to. So, Arnold has to survive from the game, and then he has to find the actual footage which prooves that he is innocent.

What a wild imagination this movie has, right? Media shows a man doing something which he explicitly refuses to do? Gosh, how do they come up with these crazy ideas? Thanks God, it is just a science-fiction and the world we are living in has nothing to do with the world shown in the movie.

Well, at least we don't have arenas in which people are killed just for the sake of a little entertainment. At least, not yet.

December 07, 2010

what the hell was she doing in the football game anyway

Turkish Republic is doing a really very good job in democratising the counrty. A new level of understanding has spread all across the republic, and now we are all enjoying the privilidges of the new constitutional laws which was accepted in a nationwide referendum which was held on September 12th this year. Ironically, this is the very same date the nation has accepted the constitution constituted by the military power in 1980. Nobody had seen how anti-democratic the constitution initially was; but no worries. It is all history now and Turkey is leaping towards a more open society.

OR NOT. 

Last Sunday, December 5 that is, some university students were beaten down by the police who are supposed to maintain the peace in the community, because they were obviously ordered to stop these terrorist minded youngsters who dared to protest  PM Erdoğan who is allegedly the founder of the new democracy in Turkey.

It seems like a free university means a collection of buildings in which the headscarved girls can enter freely, and nothing more. Or at least, this is what our shallow liberals want you to believe. In any political forum, you can bet that there will always be someone who brings up this headscarf issue as if this is the only indication of a democratic Turkey.



That's very true: everybody has the right to get proper education no matter how they want to express themselves. Girls can wear headscarves and boys can wear Taliban-alike beards. I don't have to approve their way of life.

But yet, this is really not the only criteria in a democratic society, and unfortunately, these fierce headscarf supporters mostly fail to criticize when police decides to use brutal force on students.


Very interestingly, on the very same day, the very same police force failed to prevent a very harsh fight between the holigan fans of two opposite football teams.

Violence in football games is a pretty much regular scene in Turkey, and i honestly don't like football. So i didn't really pay attention to just another crap in our new democratic society who can't even  tolerate to the opposite football team...   That's only until i went to my regular barber shop this evening after the office hours. The TV was open. The news was on. And there was just this another guy, probably another regular customer and we were all hearing this news about the holigan violence.

And the news said that, a woman was severely injured because she was hit by an empty beer bottle which was blindly thrown to the crowd. She was severaly injured and it will take a hell lot of time for her to fully recover.

And what the hell was she doing in the football game anyway?


Right. This is the exact bullshit that other guy said. I tried to shut up, knowing that my response would not possibly open a new perspective in his pathetic mind. But he just kept talking the same crap, so i loudly said "Is it banned to go to watch a game? People can go anywhere they want."

He was having his hair cut on another chair, and me on another. And that's when my barber started talking to me, probably triyng to distract me from him. And guess what. He was in that game, with his wife. And he was just lucky that he was in the scene only 2 minutes after the figght was over.

And i am sure the guy has talked behind my back when i left the barber shop.

Are there any social and political conclusions which can be derived from this simple experience i had not more than 6 hours ago? You can bet on it. But unlike our shallow liberals who love to draw the most optimistic pictures based on their very limited encounters with the most elite rich conservaties, i prefer to let you draw your own conclusion. And you are free to share your thought with me.

December 02, 2010

Kaiser Soze

Even though Reservoir Dogs is still one of the best moives i've watched so far, i sort of think that Jackie Brown is the best movie came from the director Tarantino. I love Jackie Brown because it relies on real suspense rather than some exegrated viloence scenes which Tarantino apparently thinks that he is best at.  You can't believe how much i was frustrated while watching the movie Kill Bill.

So anyway, last night i was watching the movie The Usual Suspects from the director Bryan Singer with my wife at home, and in a moment of enlightment i realized that the movies The Usual Suspect and Jackie Brown use the same method with a different technique.

Twisting the story is what most movies do. Actually, twisting a a story to an unexpected direction is pretty much the biggest factor to like or dislike a movie. The best it twist, the best we tend to like it. And these two movies, twist the story by telling us what we haven't seen before.

OK so, there is a mildly spoiler in here. So if you haven't watched those two movies just don't let me spoil them. You are warned.

In the movie Jackie Brown, Tarantino shows us the very same scene but from different perspectives over and over again. So essentially you watch the very same thing, but in fact it is a different scene because you see what you haven't seen before. In the movie The Usual Suspects however, you don't repeatedly watch the same scene. But you follow the adventure through a series of flasbacks, and between those flashbacks, the characters tell you something new so you start to keep watching things with the new information at hand. (THE BIG SPOILER ALERT:) First you think there is coke in the ship, then suddenly you learn that it is not about coke or money: it is about getting rid of someone.

Yeah, when i think about it, they both are great movies.