In a story about infamous London gangster, Charlie Richardson, you might expect to hear about his rise to power, the struggles he had with rivals, set-ups for his ultimate fall when finally sent to jail; the film Charlie is not like this at all.

Lacking real focus, the film instead looks at anecdotes relating to the testimony given against him and, more often, other short tales of his criminal endeavours that are largely unrelated.

Although the film is clearly biased towards his version of events, we never really see a hero (or anti-hero) emerge, leaving the film sadly lacking in terms of character and plot. Certainly, we learn something of the man, but never enough to really make us care either way, no struggle, no interest.

While Luke Goss puts in a strong visual performance as the title role, his faux-cockney accent grates and ultimately taints the whole film.

Sub-par ganster action, but not entirely without merit.

The random links have been piling up for the last two weeks, so time to get on with it:

• Hostile Copy Protection – This is surely taking copy protection too far.
• Citizen Kubrick – Absolutely fascinating look at the archives of Stanley Kubrick. An amazing read.
• Hard Disk Risk – You really have to do some serious disk formatting to get rid of data.
• Album Covers From Memory, in Paint – Exactly what it claims to be. Some interesting renditions of familiar album covers.
• Unicode Sampler – Samples of different Unicode characters.
• PHP Iconv Handler – Why was I not informed that converting to UTF-8 would be this easy? I’ll be doing this soon.
• 39 Steps For Story Writing – Sound advice on writing more good.
• Switching from PHP to Zope/Python – Not entirely convincing, but worth a read.
• The Importance Of Fudgeability – Rigid systems die. Extensibility and the human factor must be considered.
• The Nightmare Of Localisation – There are more problems than you have considered.
• How To Be A Programmer – Practical advice for all would be professional programmers.
• Jailbird Man – A flash game based on the fantastic Harvey Birdman. Try and break out some characters you failed to defend.
• IECapture – See what your site looks like in a range of windows browsers. Useful resource for designers.
• RSS Shell Scripting – A shell script for parsing RSS feeds. Insane.
• 100 Movies That Deserve More Love – A list of classic films that do, indeed, deserve more love. Watch at least 5.
• GBA Crash Course – Learn to program a simple GBA pong game.
• Guide To Indie Rock Hair – Everything you need to know to have indie rock hair, for boys and girls.

And that’ll do.

For no real reason I was looking at the ZSh man page and found this gem of paragraph:

A userguide is currently in preparation. It is intended to complement the manual, with explanations and hints on issues where the manual can be cabbalistic, hierographic and, or downright mystifying (for example, the word ‘heirographic’ does not exist).

Something about self-referencing humour that makes the English geek in me smile.

After some recent downtime, ActoRss is now fully functioning. For anyone who is unaware, it is a system to get an RSS feed for the latest films an actor has appeared in (or will appear in).

I took the opportunity to rework the original code, with the following improvements:

1. Faster – Although still a little on the slow side (due to the proxy nature of screen scraping), this version is much faster than the previous.
2. Error Correction – If you mispell an actor’s name, it will try to find the nearest, most relevant match.
3. Atom Enabled – You can now get your feed in the Atom format. Although I’m unhappy with some of the constraints Atom places on such a simple feed (modified and issued dates are unknown and irrelevant), I’d rather leave it up to the users to pick their format.
4. Directors – You can now also get feeds for directors, sound engineers, visual effects supervisors… If they’ve warranted a page on imdb, you can get a feed for them.

Now, I know that those last two improvements make a mockery of the name (since it’s now no longer solely about actors and RSS), it just seemed like the obvious extension to the existing version. Hope people enjoy it.

Trying to remake the best zombie film of all time is not an enviable task, bringing the inevitable fan backlash and accusations. Thankfully, then, Dawn Of The Dead is a more than capable film in its own right.

Although largely stripped of the consumerist overtones of the original, the film still makes sense as a survivalist film, conveying in subtle ways the behaviours that would build up in such a situation.

The whole film is suitably paced: from the swift pursuit of safety in the opening scenes, to the survivors starting to settle into a normal life, to the chaos in the closing scenes. The direction and writing of it all does Romero the justice his contribution to zombie films deserves.

An excellent remake of a classic film.