Rocket Surgery

Wow.

I don’t like comic books.  I don’t usually like comic book movies.  I liked the original Superman: The Movie from the seventies, and I thought the recent Spiderman movie was just obnoxious.

But The Dark Knight was great.  Heath Ledger had been making great buzz as The Joker, and all the talk about Oscar-worthiness got me interested in seeing it, and I was not disappointed.  At all.  In fact, I was pretty damn impressed.

I like dark movies, and this one was pretty dark - particularly for a comic book movie.  This is NOT the Adam West/Cesar Romero Batman and Joker from the TV series, or even the Michael Keaton/Jack Nicholson Batman and Joker from Tim Burton’s go at it.  This one doesn’t attempt to be fun, it goes for serious - and paradoxically, therein lies the fun.  The Joker doesn’t make over the top corny, campy jokes - any humor that comes from the Joker comes from his being sarcastic.  He’s more disturbing (and disturbed) than funny.  He’s a genuinely threatening villain.

And our hero is forced to examine his own ethics when confronted by the Joker’s complete lack of them.  How far can you go and what means can you use to defeat evil without becoming evil yourself?  Pertinent question for our times (viz., waterboarding).

The rest of the cast is great too.  Aaron Eckhart’s character did not develop as I expected at all - I love being surprised by movies - and I even liked Maggie Gyllenhaal who I normally don’t really care for.  Each actor was fully vested in their characters, and this was a true ensemble piece.

Four stars.

What a dumb movie. Not that dumb is always bad, of course.

But in an action movie, you want to have suspense…you need to perceive that the protagonist is somehow threatened during the action sequences.  When a 67 year old man is blown up by a nuclear weapon and is thrown for (presumably) miles on the inside of a lead-lined refrigerator, then gets out and walks away without a single broken bone or even a bloody nose or lip, he’s basically invincible at that point and some chick with a sword is no threat.  When it happens at the beginning of the movie, how can you possibly care what happens to this guy?

And then when Mutt goes swinging through the vines like Tarzan…my eyes were rolling.

It was amazing to me that Spielberg was involved.  They definitely jumped the shark with this one. 1 and a half stars.

I’ve done something simple, yet cool and useful in our Ant builds to make them work a little nicer with Hudson.  I’ve modified things so our Jars/Wars get stamped with version control information from Hudson.  To do this, I take advantage of the fact that when Hudson starts an Ant build, it puts certain key values in the environment variables, so I grab them and stuff them into the manifests for the jars.

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Well, this may turn a number of you off and make you think I’m some sort of Luddite or something, but I have come to a considered opinion:  I don’t really like Hibernate.

Before you consider me an ignorant fool, here are some of my reasons for you to consider (and I may add to this list over time): Read the rest of this entry »

I was thinking of trying out another MMORPG, so when a friend told me she played Vanguard Saga of Heroes, I decided to try it out.

Don’t.

It’s terrible.  It’s buggy–seriously buggy.  Weird graphical artifacts all over the screen buggy.  Sound stuck in loops like a broken record buggy.  Miserable frame rate, and the graphics aren’t that great — heck, the new graphics in Runescape are nearly as good.

I never should have played World of Warcraft.  Once you get tired of that, there’s nowhere to go!!!

I watched Paths of Glory last night — another Stanley Kubrick movie. This one is an anti-war movie set in World War I in France.  Kirk Douglas plays an idealistic colonel whose troops are ordered on an impossible suicide mission by a general seeking recognition and a promotion.  When the troops fall back without achieving their objective, the General orders a court-martial for three randomly selected soldiers to have them executed as an example to the rest of the soldiers.  Col. Dax acts as their defense.

Most of the time, I don’t like older movies.  Styles have evolved over time, and the acting in older movies from the 50’s and earlier often seems pompous and overdone.  This is probably because many actors were trained for the stage and still brought much of that acting style to the cinema, and they didn’t really take advantage of the medium which supports much more subtle performances.

This one didn’t suffer from this “problem” too much (perhaps because it was a war film and everything is amped up to 11 in war), so I found it pretty enjoyable.  I think this actually may have been the first time I’ve seen Kirk Douglas act at all, and he was indeed impressive.  I liked that there were no simple answers and no sunset ending–which made it that much more to think about.

Not the best Kubrick film, but it was solid.  Three stars.

I am becoming quite a fan of Stanley Kubrick.  I have always liked A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, and Dr. Strangelove, so I’ve been viewing some of the other things he’s done.  The Shining was good, 2001: A Space Odyssey was good, and Eyes Wide Shut was meh.

So for Father’s Day I got Barry Lyndon, which stars Ryan O’Neal as the title character.  I knew going into it from reading reviews that this movie was slow-paced, so being forwarned was helpful.  Being mentally ready for the slower pace, I spent the movie doing what Kubrick (presumably) wanted me to do as the viewer: taking it all in.  It was like the Rhine River ride at Busch Gardens–a nice way to slow down and enjoy the view.

Not that the movie was all eye candy.  The acting was quite good (I had never seen Ryan O’Neal do anything worth watching before), the character development was subtle, and the storyline, while meandering, also was not entirely predictable (always a plus).  The biggest problem I had with the movie was the music — that infernal Handel theme over and over and over.

But the movie (like the Handel theme) is stuck in my head days after watching it.  Three stars.

Missed it by that much.

I went and saw Get Smart over the weekend.  It was pretty disappointing.  The casting was the best and most inspired part, but it was too much about action and whizbang and less about funny.   This was not a Get Smart movie - it was a typical action movie inspired by Get Smart.

Should have waited for it to come out on DVD.  One and a half stars.

Just finished watching No Country for Old Men.  I haven’t seen enough of the Coen brothers’ work to judge whether this was as much of a departure as it seemed — I’ve seen Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and Fargo.  Of the three, it reminded me most of Fargo, being as dark as it was; but the Southwestern scenery and people reminded me of Raising Arizona.

One thing I like about the Coen brothers is the quirky characters.  They have something odd about them all; some subtly, some not so much.  Javier Bardem’s character Anton Chigurh was chilling.  It’s like he didn’t feel anything.  There were several times when he did things I didn’t expect — at least at that exact moment — which I love (predictable movies are boring movies).

Tommy Lee Jones was understated, which was a blessing.  Woody Harrelson is annoying in everything he does, and I mean everything.  Josh Brolin was very believable, and I did not expect how things turned out for any of the three main male leads.  Another pleasant surprise, to not be surprised.

And WOW, I could not believe that Carla Jean was Kelly Macdonald - Diane from Trainspotting - with that West Texas accent!  There was not a trace of the Glaswegian accent.  I was thinking that it looked a lot like her, but that couldn’t be her, but boy was I wrong.  Yet another unexpected nugget.

I was definitely engrossed.  I was not sure I’d like it, but I did.  Three stars.

I was looking at some of the core language enhancements being considered for JDK 7.  Some of them look pretty good, others, meh.  Here are a few of the ones I’m looking forward to:

Constructor Inference for Generics

Using generics, your currently have to type both sides of an assignment when doing a constructor:

Map<String, List<String>> anagrams = new HashMap<String, List<String>>();

Being considered is the ability to omit the types and infer them, such as:

Map<String, List<String>> anagrams = new HashMap<>();

which would be equivalent to the first line.  I like this - improves readability, loses nothing but typing.

Relational operators for Enums

Currently, the only relational operators that you can use for constants in an Enum are == and !=.  Since all enums implicitly implement Comparable, theres no good reason why you should not be able to use <, >, <= and >= on enums.  As it stands now, you need to explicitly invoke compareTo().

Switches on Strings

Sure would be nice if instead of if-else if-else constructs to branch on string values, you could do

switch(someString) {
   case CONST_1:
      return true;
   case CONST_2:
      return false;
   default:
      throw new IllegalArgumentException("Bad value: " + s);
}