Lavonardo

Rounding out the triplet of movies watched over the christmas break is 4 Weeks, 3 Months and 2 Days, the Romanian movie that took the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2007.

Sadly, the sad tale of an abortion in the late eighties Bucharest remains as gray as the dilapidated city.

The story is simple, and marred by the implausible density of the lead character. A lot of the complications in the tale hinges on her inability to deal with reality and that saps the story’s believability. The attention to detail is meticulous, the environment feels constricting as everything is either mired in bureaucracy or available only through the black market.

Indeed, one of the main aspects of the story is the run-down city. The ugliness of the environment never lets down, be it from dysfunctional municipal traffic, uniformly box-shaped cars or unlit hallways where there paint peels away. The cinematography is merciless, and revels in exploiting the scenery. Especially the long nightly journey through the suburb falling asleep towards the very end is convincingly shot.

Definitely not a happy movie, but worthwhile watching nonetheless. And probably a good candidate for the oscar for best foreign film.

As the first western movie in fifteen years, watched 3:10 To Yuma. At least I figure I haven’t paid to see any since Clint Eastwood’s almighty Unforgiven. With two more westerns featured in the trailers (the improbably named Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the newest Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle, There will be Blood).

The story hits all the right spots, even bordering on the over-crowded on the count of plot devices. All the bases are covered, from evil businessmen to totemic guns via rebellious offspring.

The scenery is nothing short of great either, the screen is filled with both boldly red canyonlands as well as blue-tinted nocturnal images of the same.

The film has been advertised with the interplay between the two leads. And Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, as the downtrodden rancher and unaplogetic outlaw, respectively, do excel in their roles. And the supporting cast is not a bunch of slouches either. Ben Foster casts a nicely psychotic second in command of Russell Crowe’s gang.

Apart from the Black Hawk Down-esque ending, the movie is indeed a genuinely good western of the old school, and gets a definite recommendation to veteran fans of the genre and laypeople alike.

This time there’s no floppy ears to account for the stars, but the quality of the supporting actors like Peter Fonda, Luke Wilson (in an oddly cruel role) and Alan Tudyk are worth an extra nod.

As the traditional day-before-christmas-eve-movie (going strong after eighteen years), watched Chris Weitz’s Golden Compass, the first film based on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. I quite liked the books back in the day, and the zeppelin-equipped trailer piqued my interest even further. How did things play out in the long form?

Quite well. Even though the plot sees dilution through rampant exposition (pages of careful explanation are compressed to mere lines of dialogue) and the Magisterium remains an oddly distant threat. The scenery is pretty, but unfortunately the arctic vistas do get a bit boring when compared to the interestring steampunk imagery shown in the earlier scenes. Sadly, the avalanche of expositionary vomit begins immediately, and exposes the watchers to far more details than he’s aware in the books, cutting down the mystery significantly. Despite the anti-religious themes being watered down, several institutions have called a boycott on it.

Nicole Kidman aces her performance as the icily mysterious ms. Coulter, but is often left with very little to play with in the heavyhanded dialogue, and is left with hysteria. Daniel Craig is sadly restricted to mere minutes of screen-time, but the character of Lord Asriel didn’t merit much more in the book either. The Panzerbjörn Iorek Byrnison is voiced by Ian McKellen, and it’s indeed odd to hear him extolling a pint-sized friend to hurry across a dangerous bridge. Christopher Lee, another Lord of the Rings veteran, is featured for perhaps half a minute, but manages to exude a lot of menace in the little time he is given.

Sadly, the movie didn’t exactly excel, neither in the US box office nor in reviews, so sequels based on the two subsequent books of the trilogy are far from certain.

The extra half-star comes from the commanding presence of Lee Scoresby’s bunny-daemon. Yeah, I’m a sucker for floppy ears.

To quote Leo Johnson from Twin Peaks. Without spitting on the floor, obviously.

Gave up on trying to patch up the old theme, and picked up this nicely inconspicuous one. At least the handling of lists is much saner, and the layout doesn’t go berserk on account of a multi-line entry title.

Last week’s not been that good in the non-hassleness of computers.

Exhibit A: The wordpress configuration issue (inability to grant privileges) that consumed a significant chunk of last friday evening turned out to be a feature offered by the service provider. Circumvented, by taking a slight shortcut in the installation.

Exhibit B: The new version of the Nokia Multimedia Transfer tool gets into an infinite loop upon startup and is, obviously, unable to gather any photographs from the mobile phone. Using the USB-cable and the phone in data transfer mode enables image retrieval, and is not too much of an extra effort to perform.

Exhibit B.1: The n95’s bluetooth is somehow utterly unable to play nice with Lynch, and sending of any files directly from the phone fails immediately. Might be fixed with a new firmware, might not.

Exhibit C: Freemind’s latest official build seems to be totally incompatible with Leopard, but a beta build of the 0.9-series comes to the rescue.

Exhibit D: The chosen Wordpress theme seems to break at the seams when not really extraordinary cases are reached. Eg. having a post title longer than a single line ends up in a horrible overlap-o-rama.

Another annual tradition, listing the things that percolated to the very top last year:

Album

Nothing really rose head and shoulders above anything else. Some of the best albums were Megadeth’s United Abominations, Epica’s Divine Conspiracy and Neil Young’s Chrome Dreams II. Radiohead’s new album is still waiting in the wings.

Song

Dropkick Murphys’ (F)lannigan’s Ball.

Concert

Megadeth in Sauna. Rush was good, but not nearly as good, whereas Metallica was almost impersonal and repetitive.

Book (fiction)

No questions asked, it was Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora.

Book (non-fiction)

Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams’ Wikinomics. And a honorable mention to Markku Varjo’s long-delayed Akvaariokalat.

Movie

Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men. Yeah. It was released back in 2006, but saw it after the new year, so it counts here.

Television show

The Wire continues strong, and the dvd release of the fourth season can’t arrive soon enough. Honorable mention to Doctor Who/Torchwood.

Game

Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy. Bioware’s Mass Effect is plenty good too. As are the various XBLA boardgame interpretations.

Dinner (domestic)

Antilope cubed (at the wednesday emperors’ christmas ball).

Dinner (foreign)

Gloriously good steak at Villette in Brussels (and McCormick & Schmick’s in Boston, obviously).

New magazine

Death Ray (with Monocle just inches behind).

Comic

Fingerpori.

Graphic novel

Fell.

New restaurant in Helsinki

Dong Bei Hu.

Sports moment

There’s two sharing the pole position: Teemu Selänne winning the Stanley Cup and Derek Fisher’s game-breaking late entry into the Jazz playoffs game against the Warriors.

Previous years’ analyses are also available:
2006 and 2005.

As usual, the new year’s day is the traditional day for a retrospective over the year that just passed.

Quite a few things, and very much on the positive side:

• Started in Hesari as a game critic (and got two reviews published).
• Endured variable finnish/german territorial pissings at work.
• Gave an hour-long presentation in the annual Red Hat Summit in San Diego.
• Guns n’ Roses Chinese Democracy wasn’t released.
• Was assimilated into facebook, like so many others
• Wrote 720 entries into this very blog (and failed to resurrect fishblog, once again).
• Got a new mac, and have been happy with it.
• Didn’t write a single line of production code, and very little therapy code.
• Visited two new countries: Belgium and Mexico.
• Took far too few photographs, but managed to enter photo thursday almost every week the challenge was run.
• Sports-wise the biggest news was Teemu Selänne finally getting the cup in the summer (and then going AWOL from Ducks).
• Visited the annual Utah European Alumni Meeting in ’s-Hertogenbosch
• Moleskine use decreased considerably, though at work the black notebooks get a lot more mileage.
• Got inspired by the arrival of many new interesting software platforms, but apart from a tiny widget, didn’t really get to work on any of them.
• Endured the loss of three regularly read newspapers/magazines: Presso, Business2.0 and Taloussanomat.
• Read a lot of books, some of them for many months. Parallelism is the key.
• Saw Rush for the first time.
• Attended Tuska for the first time. Skipped the bargain-priced Black Crusade on account of a busy week.
• Got really lazy geo-caching. Only two finds in Netherlands, zero in Belgium and Mexico. Still a few unclaimed ones.
• Failed to see Bengtskär for the nth year in a row, but got closer than ever before.
• Found no slovenian euro coins.
• Was quite impressed by the size and speed of hummingbirds.
• Started using librarything.

Not linked, the archives are functional, and locating the corresponding entries is left as an exercise to the reader.

Previous years’ analyses are also available:
2006, 2005 and 2004.

Release early, release often.

Or at least early in this case.

Theme renovation goes on still, the archives are dysfunctional, so caveat browser. For a while at least.