New Film Books

Arriving back in the UK yesterday (huzzah!) I finally got a chance to pop into town to spend some book vouchers I'd been given as a leaving present from the folks at Intelligent Environments when I finished my contract work with them back in May.

For once computer books were NOT on the agenda :)

This is, of course, the time of year when books with titles like '<insert name of vaguely related magazine here > Film Review 2008' appear on the shelves. This consistent naming style of such annuals has always struck me as somewhat ridiculous, given that most of these books will have had to go to print less than half way through the year preceding the one advertised in the book's title.

I resisted the temptation to update one of my annual review guides - all becoming increasingly redundant in these days of internet access to sites like imdb and Rotten Tomatoes. My preference in these 'all movies you might see' review volumes is for the series from The Radio Times, although I haven't updated my copy since 2004. Apparently the newest volume, as one would expect, features more films. But it also features less pages which, given the miniscule, barely readable, print of my 2004 volume means that either they've made the reviews even shorter than the one or two sentence critiques they've used in the past, or that you're going to spend more than the cost of the book on a magnifying glass to be able to read anything. I think I'll pass on that one then!

One annual review I do look for every year - not least because, thanks to the joys of Ebay, I have every edition published since 1942 - is the Film Review annual which restricts itself to mini-reviews of the year it represents. Alas there are a few weeks to go before that one is published.

In the end my money went on the latest (and seemingly final) Movies of the...' series produced by the wonderful Taschen Books, and edited by Jurgen Muller. These lavishly produced books comprise the editor's choice of the 'seminal' 5-7 films of each year in the decade each volume covers. The series started with 'Movies of the 90s' and with each successive volume has moved backwards, a decade at a time. The 2007-published volume breaks the rules of previous titles in the series by covering films released between 1895 and 1920 in a section that would normally cover just a single year - but of course this makes sense given the paucity of quality and promotional material for that period.

This latest book is as luxurious as previous versions have been - consisting primarily of lots of black and white stills from movies with the accompanying short synopses and essays of appreciation almost passing as mere side notes. The 'white text on thick glossy black paper' approach is distinctive but does make keeping them in tip-top condition pretty much impossible as every finger print and smudge seems to get highlighted in a way that wouldn't be possible if a more traditional approach to printing had been taken.

But that's a minor criticism for what is arguably my favourite series of film criticisms ever. I don't always agree with the authors' selections for the given year (in fact often, I disagree - sometimes violently!), but for someone whose film knowledge prior to the mid 1970's is seriously lacking, the volumes are a God-send when it comes to hunting out essential gems from the past.

Shiny Disc reviews (or at least links) will start reappearing on this blog over the next few weeks, as background fller to the ongoing work on preparing for launch of the ShinyDiscs.com web site which will require a not insignificant amount of programming. As one of my ongoing mini film projects, now that the final (or, more accurately, chronologically the first) volume in the series has been printed, I'm going to start a separate series of reviews based on films highlighted in these volumes that are available on shiny disc format, in an attempt to catch up on the history of modern movies.

First up will be The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) - expect reviews to appear here when sendit.com get around to delivering the copies I ordered yesterday.

Both films were, of course, directed by legendary film-maker D.W. Griffiths and it will be interesting to find out if watching them feels more like work than pleasure given how far we've come in the more than 90 years since these classics were made.

And it's back to Limerick I go....

... got the call I kind of knew I'd get at 6 o'clock this evening (sometimes being a "glass half empty" person means you're better prepared for when these things happen). At least I've got enough euro's left over for taxi fares at the other end!

So it's a morning flight back to Limerick tomorrow. Not sure if I'll be back home (for good this time - please God!) very late Friday night or whether it will be one of those 'last flight on Sunday' jobs (my flight to Limerick at the moment is booked one way).

Wish I'd not got up at 7am this morning having gone to bed at 4am because patching a server took far longer than it should have done. Sigh!

Back Home (For Good?)

Well Friday was officially the last day at work in Ireland. The last few days were so manic that a tooting taxi to take me to the airport on Friday afternoon arrived long before I was ready for it. I didn't really get a chance to say goodbye to the few people still left, struggling to meet a deadline that expires a week tomorrow (albeit two weeks later than the internally set one we were aiming for), and have spent most of the weekend since in a 'too tired to sleep' zombified state where the happy realisation that the 'Irish experiment' MAY really, finally be over, just hasn't really sunk in yet.

This is probably just as well because I have a horrid feeling I'm going to get a call for help tomorrow or Tuesday asking me to fly out and help avert a possible looming crisis before next Monday's deadline arrives. Hopefully not and I'm just being too 'glass half empty' about the whole thing.

Former colleagues on the project and friends seem surprised that I don't regret the whole difficult experience, but the truth is I needed a break from London and despite all the hassle and stress the contract achieved for me what I'd wanted from it. I met and worked with some really good people too, which is always a bonus. All that being said, it's good to be home!

Today I've started what I meant to do back in February when my new Vista laptop and two new widescreen monitors arrived: start the 'Spring cleaning' job I've been putting off for the best part of the last six years. Before going to Ireland I only ever got time to install one of the afore-mentioned monitors because of the ridiculously over-crowded office I have at home. The other monitor, complete with stand and docking station, has been blocking my hallway in sealed boxes for months and there comes a point where constantly moving piles of paperwork from one place to another in a vain attempt to try and acccommodate them really doesn't achieve anything. So more than 10 years of assorted paper, CDs, DVDs and electrical debris need to be correctly filed, abandoned or otherwise deployed so that I can start work on prepping for new Microsoft certification exams, getting to grips with the £300 worth of 'new client-side technology' books that were waiting for me when I got home (Thanks Brian and David for taking delivery and then bringing them round so they were waiting!) and, at some point, kick-starting development of the temporarily abandoned shinydiscs.com site and its associated blog reviews.

So it's good to be home, but I'll feel a lot more confident about that if I'm still here on Wednesday! In the meantime I don't think I've cleared as much dust, sorted out so many tangled wires, or repeatedly wiped down so many surfaces as I have in the last 24 hours. And that's just in one corner of one room! What I'm trying to say is... I may be back but it may still be some time before I'm back to the 'daily blog update' that was always the intention when I started this thing over a year ago.

Last Sunday in Limerick (DVD Catchup)

Well today is my last Sunday in Limerick. I'm back in old blighty next weekend for my regular fortnightly trip back to check the mail and bills (with a dental appointment on Monday meaning I don't fly back to Ireland until Tuesday) and then it's a short three and a half day week before offical contract end on 12th October.

Rent on the company flat (which I'm sharing with a recent new hire from Slovenia) is paid up only until October 12th which means there will be a somewhat premature departure of the two remaining developers (a Slovenian and a Russian - what an international group we are!) to Scotland where the project is now looking likely to run until some time around May next year under the 'control' of a new software development company whose chairman is on the board of the company that currently employs my services. At this stage of the game I'm under considerable pressure to go to Scotland, if only for a couple of weeks to help with handover, but the writing has been on the wall for a while now and I've finally come to the same conclusion that most of my former colleagues came to: that for my own health and sanity, if nothing else, it's time to move on. It feels like a personal failure in many ways, but not one I can rescue or have any real control over so despite the temptation of guaranteed employment for several months with a boss I'm really appreciative of, it's become a case of 'I tried my best. Time to move on rather than waste any more time'. So I'm looking forward to a return home and some time off to get to grips with some of the new technologies, hopefully getting the long-promised Shiny Discs web site off the ground before looking for another contract after Christmas.

With crazy work hours pretty much on hold for the last couple of weeks I've been able to use evenings and weekends in Ireland to catch up on the backlog of DVDs that have accumulated, thanks to the trusty laptop and WinDVD software....

Heroes, currently airing on the Beeb and about half way through the first season, has had its entire first season released on a lavish HD-DVD boxed set in the States, and is every bit as good as people have been saying it is. Think 'Harry Potter page turner' and you've pretty much got the gist of the TV series with its cliff-hanger endings and plot twists. Think X-Files or Lost before they got too formulaic. The thing about the twists in this show is it's clear they've been planned right from the beginning, unlike the last-minute 'what could we do to shock the audience and turn the world upside down?' nonsense that shows like Lost have resorted to as the pressure for more episodes has grown. Admittedly the final 10 minutes of last episode ARE a bit flat, but when a show's this consistently good through a 23 episode run, how could a 'finale' NOT be slightly disappointing?!! The HD-DVD package is excellent and (quelle suprise!) significantly cheaper than buying the scummy standard DVD 'half box' sets that are going to be released in the UK (the first one apparently hits UK stores tomorrow) so it's disappointing to read that it's pretty much disappeared from the 'high definition' Top 10 in the US just a couple of weeks after release. At the asking price of just under £50 on import, including delivery and customs charges, it's a complete steal and is a great showcase for the advantages of high definition viewing over standard DVD or terrestial TV viewing if you have a high definition TV. Heroes, despite its comic book-based premise, counts as some of the best character-based drama I've seen all year.

Not that I'm an expert when it comes to critical reviewing of course. I'm beginning to seriously question my faculties for accurate observation when so many of the professional critics seem to have opinions so much at variance with my own. What many of them are in total agreement about as being brilliant (Knocked Up, already out on HD-DVD, is OK but nowhere near as good as people keep saying it is just because Judd 'Superbad' Atapow is current flavour of the month) I find extremely mediocre, and what most of them regard as a missed opportunity I've regarded as excellent.

Highlights on British DVD (aside from the excellent third season of Battlestar Galactaca which I'm about half way through now) have been largely unexpected, given luke-warm critical reviews or just apathy from the cinema-going public. This week's highlights have included Chumscrubber which is a quirky gem of a movie. My friend Brian Sibley did such a good job on reviewing this when it got a limited theatrical release just 3 months ago that it seems pointless me trying to repeat what he's already done so eloquently (you can read Brian's blog review here). Chumscrubber is definitely worth a rental or purchase, even if the subject matter does at first glance seem a little 'off' and the title so damned lame.

Jindabyne, a story about the impact the discovery of a dead aboriginal girl on a men's fishing trip comes to have on their community is one of those 'worthy-and-quite-interesting-but-frankly-a-little-dull' art house movies that the critics go ga-ga over, but which left me a little cold, despite the presence of the ever-wonderful Laura Linney, and an excellent performance from Gabriel Byrne. It's a slow-paced 'back to Nature' story that's given plenty of time to breathe, but the planted little obscure seeds of character back-story just seemed too contrived and too vague. There were too many characters with problems that never really resolved themselves I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed. This one is worth a rental definitely, but given all the critical raves I'd expected something a little more original with a bit more depth to it. It felt like a variation on a theme that I've seen far too many times before.

Factory Girl was the real surprise of this week's watch list - a purchase I'd nearly avoided because of lack of interest in the subject matter, Andy Warhol who I've always felt had far too much of the Emporer's new clothes about his so-called 'talent'. Guy Pearce is an actor always worth following and was ultimately the reason why I gave this one a go - he has a nack for avoiding the mainstream and choosing obscure little gems of films, and so it's proved with this one too. The film received luke-warm response, although most critics praised Pearce's performance, so the real surprise was not only Sienna Miller incredible performance in the title role, with what must surely be a career-best performance, but how much I enjoyed the film itself. Others seem to find the film too much of a mess, trying to cover too many areas unconvincingly, but I found it engrossing, original and highly moving. Given the current obsession with 'cult of celebrity' figures like Paris Hilton (yawnerama!) and Pete D'oherty it seems particularly relevant today. This one is, in my opinion, well worth a rental despite the lousy 20% review on Rotten Tomatoes and lowly 6.1 score on imdb, and although others found the visual style as 'pretentious' or 'distracting' as I find Mr Warhol himself, I thought it really helped to make the film something unique. Definitely one of the more enjoyable films I've seen in the last few months.

Like I said, I'm clearly out of touch!

Dublin

Advance Warning: There are no film or DVD reviews at all in this blog post!

Last weekend I took a trip to Dublin with a couple of my co-workers, Richard and Vitaly. I've been sharing the company flat with Richard for a few weeks but his contract ended on Friday and he decided not to renew (with the lousy weather, long hours and weekend working, and this being his first contract nobody could blame him). Vitaly is a Russian contractor who has worked for the last couple of years on the software that we are producing a new version of. His wife Nadia came along too.

Saturday was great, even though we were all exhausted after another difficult week at work. A quick early evening nap meant Saturday evening went really well and Dublin was what friends had told me it was - a fun, friendly city with lots of drunks (including us), but all of the friendly, smiley kind. A stag party from Manchester helped make the evening and I posted photo's from the weekend on an internal company 'social' web site which I've also posted here (beware three 'pages' of slow download and company 'in jokes'). What the photo's don't really convey is a sense of what a nightmare Sunday became when Richard's car broke down late Sunday morning in the middle of Dublin on a busy match day.

Using the internet to try and find a breakdown service on a day when an important national match is being played is not a wise idea. Two idiots wasted several hours we didn't have before towing us (in a battered old Ford Fiesta) to their 'premises' behind three off-road rubbish tips complete with roaming packs of rabid dogs, mad barking locked-up Alsations and the supposed office being a trailer home. It felt like we were about to become the participants in a bad Hollywood 'horror' flick, and far scarier at the time than any photo's I managed to grab (the mere act of which caused another altercation). A 170 Euro bribe had not been in my budget but was needed to get the car towed to the more public location of Dublin airport, where the RAC were joined and called out, with me thankfully managing to get a hire car for a week despite only having my photo passport without the accompanying paper license. The moral of the story is: if you're going to take your car abroad make sure you have recovery there!

Sunday was an expensive and wasteful (not to say stressful) end to what should have been an excellent weekend, and for Richard it was pretty much the last straw in what he has come to see as the 'nightmare' of his first contract in Ireland. Thankfully we have the pictures to remind us that we'd loved Dublin itself before the nightmare started!