A review on Asghar Farhadi’s “A Hero” (2021) By Masood Sabet (Contains spoilers!) Rahim is in prison, having failed to repay his paltry debt to his former brother in law. He gets out on a two-day leave, on a quest to appease his estranged creditor, so Rahim could be released permanently. There is hope in the beginning, as he seems to have acquired a few gold coins, which are potentially enough to repay half of his debt. As the plot unfolds, we realize the coins to have been found on the street by Rahim’s girlfriend, Farkhondeh. Rahim cannot bring himself to sell the coins and instead, tries t ..read more

A note on Big Fish By: Masood Sabet Since time immemorial all the way to glamourous cinematic productions of our time, storytellers have long been grappling with the notion of love. Love has manifested itself in myriad forms and interpretations. Sometimes it was construed as mere naivete, and sometimes it elevated simple deeds into acts of selflessness and sacrifice. Mortal earthlings and divine entities have both been subjects of love stories. The transcending touch of love has proved to grant immortality even to the paltriest beings. Tim Burton’s contemplations about love have borne a long ..read more

A Note on The Man in the High Castle, Season 01 By: Masood Sabet “The trouble with Eichmann was that so many were like him, and they were neither perverted nor sadistic. [The trouble was] that they were terribly and terrifyingly normal.”[1] I remember a video game I used to play years ago, called Brothers in Arms. It was set during WWII, but this one came with a twist; after you’d finished the campaign, you’d be allowed to play it another round, but this time as a Nazi soldier. For many players, it’s a thrill to play as the villain. However, the further you go, the more you realize that a sol ..read more

A Note on “Arrival”, 2016, directed by Denis Villeneuve By: Masood Sabet “The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Albert Einstein It was some 200,000 years ago, when we first managed to use our vocal cords as humans to produce meaningful words. Man started putting a name to whatever his five senses could perceive. Now a walk from the cave to the river to catch some fish was much easier to plan and organize. But it took us 50 more millennia to go beyond the realm of senses, to the emergence of Subjective Reality and the advent of Fictive ..read more

A note on “Marriage Story”, written and directed by Noah Baumbach By: Masood Sabet Annie Hall is the epitome of Woody Allen’s wry comedy, aimed at the intrinsic irony of relationships; “a guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, hey doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken. Then the doc says, why don’t you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. I guess that’s how I feel about relationships. They’re totally crazy, irrational, and absurd, but we keep going through it because we need the eggs.” When Alvy gets wind of Annie’s taking an interest in living on ..read more

A note on “Quichotte”, a novel by Salman Rushdie by: Masood Sabet “Let go of this ruse, O lover! Go mad, go mad! Come forth into the flame, become a moth, become a moth! Make yourself a stranger and destroy your own home then come dwell with the lovers! Come dwell with the lovers!” Rumi Man has come a long way in pursuit of a shred of certainty. Alas, the further we endeavoured, the less we’ve found. What we have become to call virtue has proven so transient over the ages, that our “moral compass” has been rendered useless in this chaotic magnetic field of ideologies and creeds. Whichever way ..read more

A review on Joker, 2019 By: Masood Sabet “An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.” (Samuel Butler, 19th century British novelist) It seems that we have entered a new dimension, in which the conventional common ground is too shaky to accommodate our co-existence any longer. A new reality where our artificial and fragile social cohesion is wearing off and the civilization as we knew it is falling apart. We didn’t even realize when we made the transition and jumped through the wormhole. We were probably too busy cont ..read more

A review on Roma, a film by Alfonso Cuaron By: Masood Sabet “…The whole world had one language… they said to each other, ‘come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly… come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens.’ …the Lord said: ‘If as one people, speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language, so they will not understand each other.” Genesis 11 Since time immemorial, or more accurately, the Cognitive Revolution, the man has been perpetuati ..read more

A review on Fellini’s “8 ½” and “Juliet of The Spirits” By: Masood Sabet Milan Kundera in his most celebrated book, Immortality, writes: “There are certain paths in life which from the very beginning place a person face to face with great immortality […] Uncertain. It is true, even improbable, yet undeniably possible: They are the paths of artists and statesmen.” [i] Statesmanship and fame have a natural bond analogous to that of a system of cause and effect. No statesman will deny that what drives them through their daunting endeavors is what they articulate as “legacy”, what they leave behi ..read more

A review on “The Haunting of Hill House” By: Masood Sabet A prehistoric hunter has followed the trail of the wounded prey for hours, and the night is falling upon him. Now he is at the heart of a dense jungle and knows that returning to the colony without game is not an option. He is well aware of the real threats in the dark befalling him. He is terrified. He has seen numerous men fallen by venomous snakes, devoured by fierce tigers, or beaten to death by an agitated gorilla. He has heard the stories and learnt some lessons; which ones to avoid, which ones to fight, and which ones to run fro ..read more