amateur review space

Sometimes a film or a TV show doesn’t jump straight out at ya. Instead, you feel obliged to just plunge in on blind faith because of the creator, director or an actor on the show. I wasn’t initially taken by the blurb on the Netflix original series: The OA. But I placed my blind faith in Brit Marling whose work I’ve seen in Another Earth and Sound of My Voice . I knew that she does amazing, philosophical, sci-fi stories and she is also a phenomenal actress. The OA is a myriad of questions and unpredictability. I’ve watched 3 episodes so far (all in one sitting!) and I can say that I’m absolutely hooked. It’s a story of an amazing Russian woman who has survived what you wouldn’t think was humanly possible ; she is one troubled individual with suicidal tendencies and, is also some kind of an enlightened being. I don’t know whether I’m thinking the last part because she has been through such extraordinary events. I get superstitious with people that have been through super events. ...

In Orhan Pamuk’s book Istanbul , he talks about the Turkish concept of huzun : a sense of yearning, emptiness, or loss. He ponders whether this comes from the growing diluting of the traditional culture that is looked down upon by a modern, more European culture. He says this is why t here is this cloud of nostalgia that befalls on Istanbul. Not only is the city a shadow of its former glory, the culture and spirit of its people is huzun . Uzak, in a lot of ways is a cinematic portrayal of Pamuk's Istanbul. The central character Mahmut is a photographer who has a seemingly glamorous job but is actually quite boring: he takes photos of tiles for a large tile company. He has been doing that for 10 years. He lives in a nice apartment in Istanbul, and has a group of intellectual photography friends that lament the death of their art. Yusuf comes from "the village": the place Mahmut left long ago to transform into an Instalbulite. Yusuf talks of the closing down of t...