Films billed as epic rarely live up to the hype. It’s hardly surprising then that Troy is fairly terrible. Not absolutely dire, but there is nothing to make the viewer care. Or indeed to make this reviewer give much more than a list of what went wrong:

• The prologue. Everything important from this introductory text was in the film. Why bother?
• Battle Scenes. Lacking a certain amount of visceral imagery, a lot of the huge battles looked like swords under the arms affairs (particularly the first beach assault at Troy). It was difficult to get a real sense of scale in most battles.
• Brad Pitt. Now, many years ago, I thought the boy Pitt was just eye candy for the ladies (no, never confused), but his performances in many films since then have convinced me he is an excellent actor. Why, then, this dire souless performance? Dry, lacking personality, painful.
• Orlando Bloom. Now, in the short time since he first appeared, I’ve thought that Bloom was talentless. I still do. Who told him he was an actor anyway? He gives the same performance he did in Pirates Of The Caribbean.
• The direction. Cuts don’t go together properly, lazy use of cityscape panoramas, CG inserts. Trying to be epic for the sake of it, rather than because the material is there to warrant it (not that the Trojan War wasn’t epic, just that this interpretation is far from it).

Eric Bana, however, really showed off how skilled he is; an excellent actor with a bright future. The rest is dead weight.

Those nice people over at Ping-O-Matic have finally set up an XMLRPC interface. If you use any pinging service at all, I implore you to stop and just ping rpc.pingomatic.com. Keep it centralised and simple.

First thing I’ve added to this site in a while.

Never write a to-do list in public. Almost a year on and I’ve done way less than half of that stuff. The things I have done have largely been the easy ones (although I did sort out that comments business nicely).

Never again.

There are three main components of any car crash, although they do not seem to occur in the order one might expect. The cause (part 1) slowly burns into your conscious in the minutes and weeks following the crash.

The truth of the matter is that the real cause will never be known. It started too long ago; a chain of events, large and small, snowballing into this final collision.

Did you check the mirror? Did you see anything behind you? The blind spot is always there and becomes a matter of much self-loathing after the crash.

Maybe you did see something coming. Maybe you hoped it would be alright. Yeah, everything will be alright. Keep your eyes on the road ahead and never deviate. Focus and ignore the doubt.

Delude yourself. Do what it takes to believe that “it’ll be alright”. You are heading for a car crash.

Time for some more random links:

• Nifty Tricks For Emacs – Lots of interesting little ideas for extending your text editor.
• Verbless Book – A Frenchman has written the first book without verbs. Why? Because he could, dammit.
• PDML – A markup language and processor to turn XML into PDF. Good use of php minilanguages.
• Metroid Cubed – An isometric version of the original Metroid. Absolutely awesome.
• Man 1, Bank 0 – Very long, but highly entertaining story about a man who banked a junk mail cheque and got more than he bargained for.
• The Return Of Andy Kaufman – Can we really expect to see him soon? Maybe, just maybe.
• Why You Should Never Put Your Picture On The Internet – Dozens of spoof pictures.
• Reuters RSS – Reuters are now providing categorised RSS feeds. Nice.
• The Infinite Cat Project – Cats looking at cats looking at cats…
• Adventure Morality Fable For Boys #7 – Don’t eat rubbers.
• Is Evil – Bert is, apparently, most evil.
• Navigation Matrix – Very nice looking CSS navigation.
• Regex Tutorial – Great tutorial on regular expressions and the problems they can cause to amateurs.
• Pacmanhattan – Pacman played in the middle of a city.
• Drinking Alone – Why drinking alone is a noble art.
• PearPC – OSX on Linux.
• The Shining In 30 Seconds (with bunnies) – Flash animation that is exactly what it says it is. Excellent.

Updates will be sporadic for the next few weeks, as first exams are tomorrow.