Downfall

For the first time in an age I found myself snowed in and unable to get to work. It was 50:50 but a text message from an ex-colleague who lives not far from the office persuaded me of the futility in making an attempt. So I found myself at home with no remote access to work and had to take the day as leave.

I watched Downfall; a film I’ve wanted to see for a long time yet somehow managed to miss despite the numerous repeats last year. Though it’s a tremendous film, its real achievement is in portraying the various bunker occupants as human beings rather than unique expressions of evil. As the film critic Roger Egbert wrote:

...he [Hitler] was not a great man, simply one armed by fate to unleash unimaginable evil. It is useful to reflect that racism, xenophobia, grandiosity and fear are still with us, and the defeat of one of their manifestations does not inoculate us against others.

In avoiding caricature we are prevented from writing a line under this history, in humanizing the protagonists we are reminded that such evil could happen again; and this is what makes Downfall a truly great film.

It was a wild rumpus

It was a film I admired and could easily become a film I love. Where the Wild Things Are was made by people who remembered what it’s like to be a child; everything from Max’s relationship at home to his adventure with the wild things spoke of the truth. The wanton destruction, the picking of sides and the unexpectedly violent mud-clot fight; it was wonderful.

My favourite book last year was The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I have admittedly not read much, something I hope to rectify this year, though I seem to remember saying something similar in the past. I have two borrowed so there’s somewhere to start. However as a warning familiar to many, never express an interest in anything specific. For Christmas I received three books on the Roman Empire, one on the Persian Empire and one on Ancient Civilisations. I can’t recollect the last time someone gave me non-fiction on a period subsequent to 1066AD.

For my favourite album there was slightly more to choose from. I’m not the music buyer I once was, there are no longer stacks of CDs purchased on a weekly basis, but now that DRM on online purchases is a thing of the past MP3 downloads are becoming the norm. I’ve downloaded on many occasions this year… yes, it’s a miracle. A lot of good albums but standing out was Tale to Tell by The Mummers.

It is the most uplifting magical music of an age and such a shock to read that the composer behind the group, Mark Horwood, had committed suicide.

A time of goodwill to all movies

I feel so ashamed, sitting in my ivory tower (cunningly disguised as a mess of a spare room) pronouncing on the stupidity of the general public from whom I naturally exclude myself... and then I decide to watch 2012. Disaster movies are my Achilles heel when it comes to good taste and I’m particularly vulnerable to the apocalyptic end of the world “we’re all goin’ to die” tale. An unimpressed colleague described the film as akin to being on an overlong rollercoaster. But despite the obvious plot devices, the naff dialog, the implausible escape from a seemingly certain end, the sense that one ought to be more emotionally involved when witness to the death of millions... Well put it this way; I knew it was rubbish but all I could manage was “wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee”.

It’s a film with a good cast that includes John Cusack (of the brilliant Grosse Pointe Blank), George Segal (a big name from the 70's) and Danny Glover (only two days from retirement). As mitigation I could suggest that they rose above the material but this would be to evade the truth. My work colleague described it as two and a half hours of her life wasted. I on the other hand will no doubt watch this ridiculous piece of rubbish again. Roland Emmerich flattens The White House once more and leaves my critical faculties in ruin. All I have to do now is enjoy James Cameron's Avatar and my journey to the dark side will be complete.

When I was king, I was a truly great king

From director Spike Jonze, the man responsible for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, comes his latest film, Where the Wild Things Are. Since I liked both those earlier films I have high hopes for this latest effort, indeed I’m counting on it to restore an eroded sense of wonder, if only a little.

It’s not that I haven’t seen any fulfilling films this year. I found the Danish film After the Wedding intensely moving; I saw it twice and cried both times, though that probably says as much about me as it does the film. I remember once watching The Elephant Man with my daughter and having to work hard at preventing her from seeing any tears; I’m not sure whether I was successful or whether I needed to be. Probably. I'll have to look into that.

But this film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s famous book promises something else. That sense of awe I felt as a child on returning from a voyage with Doctor Dolittle, the scene in Joe Versus the Volcano where Joe looks to the outsized moon and thanks God for his recaptured humanity, or the opening scene in Toys to lift my forgotten spirit and remind me of the glory of Christmas. Interesting that those two films are disliked intensely by a number of my friends and dismissed as mawkish sentimentality, though sometimes it seems any sentiment is regarded unfavourably.

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect so much but I stubbornly refuse to let that dent my enthusiasm; every so often we need to be reminded that the world can be beautiful. Will this new film suffice?

Not waving

Some bad habits you never grow out of. Such as wanting something, not being sure why you want it, and then not being sure what to do with it once you’ve got it. Such is the case with Google Wave. I logged in, changed my profile picture and… logged back out again. The thing is I don’t have the time to invest and I can’t really think of anything to communicate. I do at least have one contact, that’d be the wannabe writer, the one who deserted me to go and do something more worthwhile instead and who it turns out can write a good tale. Perhaps he could make it up to me by collaborating on a way to hold back time so I can become only slightly adrift.

I am so far behind schedule; the number of constantly snoozed reminders has reached double figures, I see red flags all over Outlook and I’ve been off work ill. I still feel like crap. I’ll feel worse I’m sure when I run through my e-mail. For some light entertainment I may start the day by comparing the mail requiring me to complete my compliance training (ethics and some such) with that explaining the consequences of failing to adhere to the change request process as documented on the company SharePoint. One was undoubtedly from an external service provided to the company… one managed a firm yet friendly warning of what was required… and the other threatened the recipient with termination. Well you’ve got to laugh. At least that’s the rumour…

Hope

On Tuesday evening my daughter and I walked into town to see the Christmas lights switch-on. I wouldn’t normally indulge but children change everything. As a child I remember random moments of wonder and adventure, but over time they dissipated to be replaced with that thing called life; work, earning a living, the usual suspects. And then, unexpectedly, my wife and I discovered that contrary to previous advice, having children may be possible. Even then I was somewhat ambivalent; I didn’t marry to propagate the species, though listening to some you’d think that was the only reason to marry. But my wife wanted a baby and I wanted an easy life. That’s right; I wanted an easy life so we had a baby.

Eight years later and it remains the greatest moment of my life, or to be more accurate I should say the last eight years have been peppered with great moments. There have been trials too, health worries, job worries, marriage worries; life continues to threaten with maudlin regularity. I have many bills, little money and the vast empty expanse of the New Year to contend with, but I am armed with my daughter and the Christmases yet to come, together we remain invincible, undefeated... and I have hope.

Lies, damned lies

I’m spending a little too much time ‘task switching’ as opposed to ‘task doing’, but I suppose it’s better to be too busy. I like busy. Being able to see the value in your work helps, but it's not that way for everyone.

I have a developer friend who was once tasked with consulting and updating reports for another department of his company. It was all for a good cause, to determine their internal efficiency. Unfortunately it turned out the department had been taking the term ‘internal’ all too literally and, as if unaware of the outside world, managed to cut the customer out of the equation. Imagine your job is to take data from a customer, manually process the data and then hand it back. Not surprisingly the company want to know how efficient that process is. But the department doesn’t have the tools to record the time taken for data coming in, processed and returned to the customer on the same day; it does however have a tool that records the amount of data waiting to be processed that came in on a specified day.

Oh dear. The department reasoned there was no cost to queuing data coming in and queuing data going out, no internal cost anyway. Hence there was no need to ask for any engineering resource. When the company asked how long it took to process an item they may have meant ‘how long until the customer gets their data back’, but what they got was an answer to an entirely different question. How many customers did they lose? We’ll never know; my friend doesn’t work there any more. Very few people do.