God distracts the faithful

Whilst God distracts the faithful I see eleven films over four days, only two of which are new. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Garden of The Finzi-Continis; the latter had been sitting on my shelf since just before Christmas and as I’d seen The Conformist on Netflix only a few weeks ago, it would complete a Dominique Sanda double-bill. The Conformist is visually striking but in that category of ‘appreciate’ as opposed to ‘love’, whereas Finzi-Continis, having a gorgeous colour palette, is not only beautiful to look at but a film I’ll watch again; this despite a soundtrack that on occasion appears off, apparently the result of being post-synchronised rather than recorded live. Something I couldn’t help noticing with both Italian films is that voyeuristic regard to female nudity you find in late 60’s and early ‘70s European cinema. There are some who will call this a brave (for the time) expression of female sexuality; you believe that if you want, it looks like a wet t-shirt to me.

Giorgio Bassani's story is of a wealthy Jewish family separated from the rise of Italian fascism by the walls of their estate; odd that I too came to believe the high-walled garden would shield them from the world outside. There were many festival highlights, but the other that springs to mind is an old favourite, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. My reaction each time is the same. It starts quirky, turns rather clever and - just at the moment you feel a danger of it disappearing up its own fundament - becomes something quite wonderful. Joel shows Clementine an embarrassing moment of his past, to which the younger Clementine leads the younger Joel away through a gap in the fence. “I’m so ashamed” he says. “It’s OK”, she replies “you were a little kid.”

Phil's four-day film festival

12

Something Wild; Jonathan Demme (director), Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels, Ray Liotta.
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis; Vittorio De Sica (director), Dominique Sanda.
Wonderland; Michael Winterbottom (director), Gina McKee, Shirley Henderson, Molly Parker.
Revolutionary Road; Sam Mendes (director), Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet.
City of God; Fernando Meirelles (director), Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino.
The Machinist; Brad Anderson (director), Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh.
The Dark Knight; Christopher Nolan (director), Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart.
Moon; Duncan Jones (director), Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Tomas Alfredson (director), Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt.
The Fountain; Darren Aronofsky (director), Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Michel Gondry (director), Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet.

Not quite there

Another Netflix movie, several episodes of The Office, and I’m of an early opinion they’re not quite there when it comes to on-demand. On Saturday I watched a two-hour film, Departures, and was interrupted three times; it wasn’t enough to ruin the film but it could have been. On Sunday morning; three episodes of The Office without interruption, yet in the evening it took multiple attempts to watch one more. Of the two other films, In the Mood for Love was poor quality but played right through and The Conformist suffered several glitches. This is nowhere near the service I get from BT Vision where, for example, I played all five seasons of The Wire with a consistently better picture quality and experienced minor problems on only one episode; that’s over 60 hours of nearly uninterrupted playback. So besides acknowledging I need to get a life, what else does this tell me? There are a number of possible factors skewing my experience.

• BT Vision is wired into the router, everything else is wireless.
• To play content on the television I use my daughter’s Nintendo console, giving me scope to wonder on the reliability of both software and hardware. How good are the software updates? How good is the wireless on a Wii? When it does lag, which is to blame?
• The only fair comparison I can make is to remove hardware from the equation, and compare Netflix, Lovefilm and iPlayer from my wireless PC.

I suspect however that BT’s impressive performance is mainly due to a looser interpretation of network neutrality - where some content is more equal than others; given the aggressive pricing of Netflix and Lovefilm I’d be surprised if they’d paid for QoS.

The hills are alive with the sound of pretentiousness

It's the Japanese film that won the Oscar for best foreign language film of 2008. It shouldn’t have. Departures is a good film, I liked it, but I find it difficult to believe it best. I should watch The Baader Meinhof Complex whilst it’s still on iPlayer so I can rate one of the competition. Daigo Kobayashi is a cello player who through circumstance becomes a mortician. In a country where death is the subject of much ceremony - yet is also taboo - Departures offers another view on a culture so different to our own. I’m all for difference, and on those universal themes of sorrow and loss it was very moving, in places, but I have some reservations.

To start, it’s a film with two endings; there’s a really good end to this film - about 20 minutes before the actual end to this film. There’s the lovely conclusion (that should have been) when the cute wife, who to that point hasn’t been too supportive of his new career, looks lovingly at her husband whilst he handles another customer. And then, unfortunately, there’s the mistaken need to tidy up any loose ends - the whole back story of his father. And then there’s the cello, oh God...

Daigo is a cello player, and in common with other cello players he likes to drive into the middle of nowhere and position himself on a small grassy ridge with snow-covered mountains in the background. If you’ve seen the poster and want to know what it has to do with the film, let me answer that one for you - absolutely nothing. This isn’t a film about a cello player - that’s the ‘cultured man in culture clash’ device - it’s a film about a man who handles dead bodies; though to be fair, showing a dead body in front of a mountain backdrop might have been more difficult to sell. There’s a few of these cello-playing intervals too; some featuring the player himself, some with swans or other wildlife. Oh and while I think about it, there’s a bit about some fish who “swim upstream only to die”. As luck would have it there happens to be an old man on hand to utter some wise words underscoring the message of the film, though I’m damned if I can remember what they were.

There's always a bigger fish

A silly amount of time spent trying to size three hyperlinked images of the same dimensions into a mosaic collage that would fit the width of a blog post; that's easy for me to say, easy enough until I added in consistent spacing between the images. I cheated; I hard-coded the sizes and the two smaller images were stretched slightly, but I think with a proper use of divs acting as columns, 100% widths and the overflow property, it should be possible to write something slightly more dynamic. Only, not today; I’m chewing up too many evenings working on minor side-projects that can be filed under “how” rather than “where”; not always a bad thing, I’m sure I’ll find a suitable use for “where” at some point.

In the 1,056th redesign of this blog the search box has a (CSS3) transition in width, which looks good where supported (Chrome, Firefox etc) and jerky where not (IE). It’s a bit of a gimmick either way since it requires screen real-estate to expand into; perhaps this is the reason Twitter recently changed their search box to fixed width? On the other hand, the on-focus transition in background colour looks good and has an acceptable degradation on IE. But let’s face it, who uses the search box on a blog? I might occasionally search within a niche blog but mostly I rely on The Google; why restrict myself to one source when I can search them all? And I have no niche, no idea from one week to the next what I might write about, so it’s even more difficult to imagine a reader having read a post on minimum priced alcohol, then wondering what I have to say on that masterpiece of modern cinema, Shoot 'Em Up. I love a good film...

I love a good film... and Shoot 'Em Up isn’t one of them. Yet despite this love of film, I’ve been thinking of cancelling my Lovefilm subscription. I’ve signed up to Netflix, using the free trial to watch season five of The Office, but there’s enough to keep me interested, for a few months at least. The picture quality - through the Wii - is adequate, not as good as that provided by BT Vision; use the iPlayer on both devices and the Wii appears a little fuzzy in comparison. Netflix does however have an easy interface; I’m not keen on the large sideways scrolling tiles, but there are other views and I like features such as automatically lining up the next episode in a series. It’s the convenience of streaming versus the better picture and newer releases afforded by DVD. Only my last three rentals on Lovefilm have been a mixed bag. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was as good as I’d heard but Captain America hugely disappointing, and Bad Teacher so bad I’d almost call it evil; I got what I deserved. Not like In the Mood for Love, my first film on Netflix, moving and understated, it suffered an unscheduled pause an hour into the film and - entirely unrelated - from a cruel suspicion the subtitle font was in Comic Sans; it wasn’t, but it was close. I mean, what kind of person notices things like that?

Notes on a car

Meta full circle

Which annoys me most; the hack to get something out there or the tunnel vision developed when I return? I changed the search box on this blog a while back to use an input prompt but - wanting something that would work across the three main browsers, and aware of the need to avoid searching on the prompt text - settled for a short term fix of a background image which I could remove/add with JavaScript when the search box got/lost focus. An age later I got around to using two elements; a prompt label and a text input with transparent background, believing that a correct z-index would ensure the input overlaid the prompt and thus, when the input received/lost focus I could remove/restore the prompt showing underneath. However, whilst this worked for Chrome and Firefox it (almost predictably) didn’t for IE. Even the latest version appears to have issues with z-index, but then a Google search will tell you there’s a problem with everything so I should have known better; time spent trying to bend the stack order to my will might have been more profitably spent simply hiding the prompt when clicked upon.

Which I did; only by this time I was rather taken with CSS3 transitions and of a mind to re-vamp the search box again. And since in addition to the placeholder attribute, transitions are something else that IE still doesn’t support, this was the point at which I bit the bullet. Graceful degradation for the Microsoft browser; it doesn’t need a smooth transition in width, and I reasoned (though I’m not convinced) I could also get away without the prompt, so excised the previous work and saved it for later, when I’ll undoubtedly change my mind. If I can fix the position of the input text on earlier versions - it’s currently aligning along the top - I’ll be happy enough; I’ve learnt to live without rounded corners after all.