Avisynth Resize and not Blur

I wanted an effect similar to news videos which have blurred bands on both sides of the frame. First, I tried Avisynth Blur filter, but even with a 3x chained filter with the max settings, the blurring was not sufficient. Then I tried Avisynth Resize, something like 

BilinearResize(1920, 1080, src_left=10, src_top=10, src_width=200, src_height=300)

That did the trick. Not perfect, since only a part of the source video is being sampled, but sufficient for my purpose.