The grandure of its title, led me to expect this to be a somewhat more intimate film than it turned out to be. In fact, given the lack of details on the story in the various reviews, the title was about all there was to go on when deciding whether to spend time to watch it. After watching the film, however, I can now understand the difficulties reviewers must have had when trying to write something about it, for this is a film that works best when you know little to nothing about its story. There is a strong focus on style and camerawork, and indeed at first this appears to be all there is to it, there being very little story at all, but over the duration, little sequences here & there let slip & hint at details of the lead character’s background & life. Eventually details in the present & past tie up showing you the full picture of his life, at which point the film moves into its final sequence and a rather unexpected and shocking climax. You might be left wondering in the end, what the title was all about, but give it a little while to sink in and it’ll all become clear. So was it any good ? I wouldn’t say it was perfect by a long shot, and I’m not sure it would bear repeated viewings (since as I said earlier, it works best when you’ve no knowledge of whats to come), but if you like more experimental / unorthadox films then its certainly an interesting watch, and give you a little to think about after the fact.
Before I go, just mention, that while browsing around I came across the White Stripes’ cover of Jolene – fantastic.
No not litterally ‘Scary Movie’ – I mean something really scary. Something’s up with the programming on TV tonight, I’ve just watched both The Ring and Kubrick’s classic The Shining. Nobuko may be right that the Japense original is far more disturbing than the modern re-make, but The Ring was no picnic – I’ve never jumped as much as when I saw the last sequence for the first time. Damn, I can tell I’m not gonna sleep well tonight.
While out having dinner with Ron, Claire, Hugh, Kim, and the Newsomes, Ron pointed out to me that my own photos from the BVI come out second on a Google search for Indigo Point, while their own website doesn’t get a mention. So as the first step to redress the balance, here’s a link to their real Indigo Point website. Oh, we were having dinner at the bar, come bistro, The Bleeding Heart Tavern
Just got back home from a quick sojournment in Munich, where Hugh & I stayed in the fantastic Hotel Aram. Of course we had to visit the Englischergarten to have a drink with 3000 or so other folks, followed later by a night in a beer tent where there was plenty more drinking and dancing on tables. On Sunday we managed to overcome our hangovers and, along with Aram’s wife & daughter, headed into the Alps to ascend Wendelstein. The more adventurous visitors hiked the 1000 or so metres up the mountain, but we took the cable car to the top. At 1800m high, the view from the summit is mighty impressive. Finally we had to pay a visit to see fellow Red Hat’ers in the our Munich office, where I was amuzed to find one of Phil G‘s pictures still hanging in the kitchen!
A little while ago I finally decided it was time to find a good program for managing my historic E-Mail archives more effectively than grep. I didn’t, however, want to stop using Mutt as my primary mail client, and while many programs such as Evolution provided much more advanced email archival capabilities than Mutt, they didn’t not scale up to gigabytes of E-Mail archives. And so Mail Archive was born. At its core is a PostgreSQL database string MIME messages in fully normalized structure, with TSearch v2 full text indexes applied to body text and header values. A single afternoon of coding provided a script to import mailboxes into the DB (the Perl Mail::Box module handled the really hard work of parsing mailboxes and MIME messages). A few more days work and a web GUI was born enabling searching, reporting and organizing. One final evenings work and user accounts & personalization were operational. With this all complete I decided its time to welcome the world, so I’ve registered a new project on GNA!, uploaded the source and put up a simple homepage