Category: Movies

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Lebanon Movies

Immortals Censored in Lebanon

immortals movie censored in lebanonYesterday night I went to the movies to watch Immortals with a couple of friends. The movie is good and I guess you’ll like it if you’re into this kind of movies. Here’s the description of the movie from IMDB.

Theseus is a mortal man chosen by Zeus to lead the fight against the ruthless King Hyperion, who is on a rampage across Greece to obtain a weapon that can destroy humanity.

In the middle of the movie, my friend noticed that there was a cut in a scene. The music suddenly stopped and a new scene started. A sentence said by a character in the next scene confirmed our suspicion that something was missing and in the end of the movie it became clear that the movie was censored so I decided to download the movie and check if it was true. It is, 2 minutes of the movie is missing in Lebanese cinemas!

Note that there will be spoilers in the rest of the article so keep reading only if you watched the movie or do not wish to watch it.

Unfortunately the censored scene is a key part of the movie. When the virgin oracle helps Theseus recover after he had buried his mother and fought for the bow, and while she is leaning at him the scene is cut in the Lebanese version. In the normal version, they kiss, she then stands up, removes her dress, and join him into bed. At this point her “behind” shows on camera. She then tells Theseus that her visions are a curse and she wants to see the world through her own eyes, her own flesh. We can then see there shadows making love and the scene fades out.

What’s weird about the censorship in this movie is that what is censored normally appears in other movies shown in Lebanese Theaters, so I am not sure why exactly this one was censored. My friends and I suggested 3 theories:

  1. That’s just Lebanon, consistency in censorship is not required.
  2. The Oracle should remain a “Virgin” so maybe they somehow linked it to Christianity.
  3. They just censored it so the movie could be rated PG (Lebanese standards). If that’s true it means the Lebanese censorship bureau (or whatever it’s called) doesn’t have any problem with violence and people killing each others, the important thing is that they should never kiss!

People in surrounding countries used to enjoy watching movies here because they are not censored! Now are movies are started to be censored! I hope whoever censors stuff around here realizes soon that we should be having less censorship (Ideally no censorship, just ratings) as the world evolves not more!

Categories
Computers Movies Music

Organizing my Media Files

For the past two weeks I’ve been organizing my media files (audio and video) at home. My files are spread between my Laptop (~100GB) and an external HDD (~80GB). To organize all this I decided to add a 250GB HDD to one of the PCs at home and dump all those files to it. The advantage of having the files on the PC is that I can access them whenever I want from my network. Moving the files from the external HDD to the PC was easy and fast via USB, but moving them from my laptop to the PC is taking a lot of time currently since I am doing it over my wireless connection and getting maximum speeds of 2MB/s. Tomorow am gonna try to see how faster the transfer will be if I plug my Laptop to the router, I just have to find the LAN cable I am sure I have somewhere :P so I can start to move the files faster!

Categories
Movies

The Kingdom

The Kingdom Movie Poster

Last night I went to the movies with a friend to watch The Kingdom. We went to Cinema City in City Mall and all the theaters were full so getting our tickets one hour before the movie started was a good thing to do, I just wish we chose some other seats because we were surrounded by two very annoying people. The guy on my right came in with a large popcorn in his hand and before sitting he started unloading his 4 pockets from chocolate bars he brought in with him, so he spent the whole movie eating and moving in his chair. The girl behind me was so excited about the movie that she felt she had to comment on every action scene in it, sometimes giving advices to the actors and shearing them up and some other times commenting on how stupid they were in her opinion.

The movie is banned in many Arab countries so I was afraid they removed some scenes in it here but I think the movie was left intact since all the scenes didn’t have any strange cuts in them. The movie starts with a small documentary about Saudia Arabia followed by a Terrorist attack on a foreigners compound in the country. After the attacks happens an FBI team goes to the Kingdom to try to catch the group behind the act but is slowed down by the lack of cooperation given by the Saudis who feel that the terrorist act is an internal problem. The team finally finds a Saudi Colonel who is ready to help them in the mission to find the Terrorists.

The movie manages to show the real division in the Arab and Muslim street with some supporting terrorism and some fighting it. You can also clearly see the clash of cultures between the West and the East and how each camp sees that his cause is the just one. During the movie you also discover that the only thing both sides have in common is the desire to kill more enemies from the other side forgetting that the enemy is another human with a life and a family of his own.

Every person living in this region of the world should watch this movie, if it’s banned in your country get it on DVD or download it from the net, it is a great movie showing us a lot of stuff we live everyday so make sure you watch it soon.

Categories
Internet Movies Music

Search Files (mp3s, movies…) using Google

MUSIC: intitle:index.of +”last modified” +”parent directory” +(mp3|wma|ogg) +”song name” -htm -html -php -asp

MOVIE: intitle:index.of +”last modified” +”parent directory” +(avi|rar|mov) +”movie name” -htm -html -php -asp

Those are just a few examples on how to find files using google, this is not new but I am sure some people don’t know it, so just copy the sentence and change the file name with the one you want.

Here’s what every word in the search works so modify the search sentence according to your needs

-intitle:index.of > The page title contains index of (so you get an index of files)
-”last modified” +”parent directory” > index pages contain these words so we need them
-+(avi|rar|mov) > the file types normaly used by the medias we want
–htm -html -php -asp > we don’t need any of those page types

Categories
Lebanon Movies

Caramel Trailer

In case you haven’t watched it yet here’s the Trailer of the first film of Nadine Labaki called Caramel, Everyone is saying the movie is great so I am planning to watch it next week.

Here’s the plot summary:

A romantic comedy centered on the daily lives of five Lebanese women going in Beirut.

Layal (Nadine Labaki) works in a beauty salon in Beirut along with 3 other women. Each one has a problem: Layal has a relationship with a married man, Nisrine will marry to a muslim, Rima is lesbian and Jamal is worried about getting old.

and here’s the trailer from YouTube.