August is the month for the big summer blockbusters, three in total.

The A-Team is a failed attempt to revive a well-loved franchise. First, the good: both Bradley Cooper and Sharlto Copley were great as Face and Murdoch, using all the right ticks for those characters. Some of the action sequences (i.e. the numerous explosions) were decent enough. That’s about it. The rest was a mish-mash of nonsensical plot, with too many pointless threads and characters. Given the film was trying to establish four strong leads, adding a half dozen other people to the mix really left little time for much else. Liam Neeson’s Hannibal was an interesting idea, portraying him as a meticulous and obsessive planner, but we don’t get enough time with him to really see it pay off. Quinton Jackson’s take on BA was pretty poor. Rather than being the mean, near invulnerable hulk of the series, we get a generic brawler who, to add yet another sup-plot, finds religion. There were some good ideas on show, but they were drowning in franchise building, dumb plotting, and the apparent need to move to the next action set-piece. Poor. (See my A-Team Twitter review).

The Expendables, on the other hand, made to qualms about what it was. Sure, the plot was perfunctory and the characters paper-thin, but that was the point. It was all about getting the biggest action movie stars of the last three decades together to revel in their artform. It’s a big dumb action film, with all the explosions, guns, and hand-to-hand fighting you could hope for. If you want a story, don’t bother. If you want to see Stallone fight Lundgren, then this is the film for you. (See my The Expendables Twitter review).

Finally, Salt is a fairly straightforward action-thriller. It borrows heavily from the improvisational spy style of the early part of the Bourne trilogy, but without either the story or meaty contact to really see it through. While a handful of the set-pieces are genuinely well-done, they get lost in the predictable “twists” of the thriller plot. It’s the usual 24-style movie-plot threat and by the time it actually happens you really won’t care. A shame. (See my Salt Twitter review).

The winner is The Expendables, for it’s no-nonsense action sensibility. It would have lost in many other months, but up against two other action films, it’s no contest.

As is the norm, July was a reasonably full month with 4 films viewed.

Predators, while not a masterpiece by any measure, is exactly what it needed to be: an action movie with an 80’s feel, free from large CG scenes and full of physical effects, enough of a plot to put the cannon fodder where it needed to be, and some absolutely great scenes. The pre-credits opening shot is particularly grabbing, pushing the audience immediately into the action and getting things started with some panic. Adrien Brody doesn’t pull-off being an action hero in the same way that Schwarzenegger did, and the slow reveal of the predators themselves was something of a waste, given we know what they look like from the rest of the franchise, but those are small points in an otherwise solid film. (See my Predators Twitter review).

There’s a lot I would like to say about Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece, Inception, but can’t do so without leaving a large trail of spoilers. There will be many fiercely argued debates about the minutiae of it’s world and it’s take on subjective reality. That’s how you know it’s going to be a classic. Nolan has created an incredible piece of cinematic storytelling, full of visuals and world-building that wouldn’t work in any other medium. The central conceit of controllable dream worlds is revealed just as quickly as it needs to be, just like everything else in this film from Leonardo DiCaprio’s broken team lead to the depth of the maze that is being built in the incredible plot. That, as I see it, is its only major flaw: everything moves so quickly that only the central concept and DiCaprio get a chance to breath. The supporting cast (and a great cast it is) provide excellent sketches of characters and there are many questions to be asked about them, but we never get the time to see any of it. When the only real criticism you have of a movie is that you want to see a lot more, you have a classic. A fantastic, must-see film. (See my Inception Twitter review).

Pixar’s latest effort is a new look at an old franchise. Toy Story 3 revisits Woody, Buzz and friends ten years later as Andy, their owner, prepares to go to college. The central theme of transition and moving on sets a tone that is both sweet in places, and fairly sad in others. That’s not to say it’s not got the little adventure set-pieces of the previous films, it has quite a few that will make you laugh, but it is less overtly funny than its two predecessors. Revisiting a franchise this long gone is dangerous, but Pixar have done well to put a neat little ending on this story. A great film. One other note: the 3D effects are understated to the point that they actually don’t add anything to the film. If you saw this in 2d, you’d still have the same great movie. (See my Toy Story 3 Twitter review).

I had high hopes for The Karate Kid, a thematically different take on the story structure of the 80’s classic. In the opening chunk, some of my hopes were lived up to: we see the frustration and loneliness of a young boy pushed into a foreign situation. Had the film built on this theme, it could’ve been a great film but it was there just as the set-up for a much more formulaic movie. Jaden Smith managed to get the emotional points across pretty well for an actor of his age, but failed when it came to anything approaching comedy: he has the mannerisms of his father, without the brash charm to pull it off. For a film lacking in depth and out-and-out fun, it certainly ran a lot longer than it should have. The plot on offer could’ve been covered in 90-odd minutes, but we’re given nearly an hour more than that. A shame. (See my The Karate Kid Twitter review).

While I really enjoyed Toy Story 3, this month’s winner is Inception for its clever storytelling and THAT hotel corridor scene.

In the Modern Java series, I’ve looked at how Lombok removes boilerplate from bean classes, JSR-303 validation makes checking domain correctness neat and how JPA provides a convenient standardisation over the ORM space. Each of these technologies does something interesting and in an interesting way.

The point of this series, however, was not to try to provide any deep level of insight into any of those technologies; writing anything even approaching a useful tutorial about JPA alone would take up many more posts than I had ever intended on giving the subject. There is simply too much there, and too much intricacy involved to sum that up.

No, the point of this series was multi-faceted, and I’d like to take another few moments to try and explain what I was trying to achieve.

Firstly, the primary concern for designing good systems is understanding the domain of interest. If you don’t understand the domain well, you won’t be able to produce a nice user experience at the front-end. You won’t be able to write meaningful abstractions at the back-end. You won’t be able to write something that you can pick up a year or two down the line and immediately understand. Knowing and understanding the domain is a prerequisite for good design.

What does that have to do with the libraries I discussed? Each of them help you design in terms of the domain and only the domain. Lombok helps you write domain objects without all the cruft in the way. Standardised validation makes sure the correct rules are cleanly annotated and enforced on those domain objects. JPA ensures that when instances of those domain objects are persisted, they are persisted following a series of rules that make sense for the domain. Each of the libraries pushes you down a path of thinking about your domain and hiding other more mundane concerns.

Secondly, I wanted to show that clean code is infinitely preferable to cluttered code. In the examples I gave, I showed a simple bean class being built up with just a handful of annotations, each one describing it’s own purpose and providing a clean understanding of the domain. As a thought experiment, consider what that code would be like without the annotations. Imagine the number of classes and methods that even a well-designed alternative would have to orchestrate. While I’m sure it could be quite neat, I can’t imagine a solution quite as neat as the one offered by the technologies I mentioned.

That leads into my final point: modern Java features, such as annotations, and the libraries that make use of them allow for much richer, cleaner and downright better code than has been possible previously. I won’t try to argue that Java is perfect as a language as I like many of the alternatives, such as Scala, Groovy, Haskell, Ruby, Python and many others. What I am trying to say, though, is the situation with the Java language is a lot better than it was five years ago, when typical Java code was verbose, unsightly and headed away from the domain. It often obscured the domain, rather than illuminating it.

My hope is that future iterations of the language and future libraries continue to keep Java in a competitive place in the language market, by making even more problems domain-focused and removing the remaining boilerplate. With the Project Coin and Project Lambda improvements due in Java 7 later in the year, I really think this will be the case.

Three new films this month, all quite different.

Rec 2 picks up immediately after the ending of Rec, with a SWAT team about to enter the quarantined Spanish apartment building. Rather than shy away from the weak ending of the original, it embraces it and builds a fairly silly plot around it. There’s all-sorts of terrible tell-don’t-show storytelling on display here, and that undermines a good amount of the work done elsewhere. Despite a forgettable plot, the audio-visual design is fantastic: in-camera glitches, sound breaking up and distorting in just the right way to make you squirm, and THAT scene with the boy. Genuinely creepy horror in places, let down by the plot changes. (See my Rec 2 Twitter review).

The Killer Inside Me is, if nothing else, beautifully shot with art-direction in the opening credits that most films can’t muster in 90 minutes. The look throughout is striking, whether we’re observing the lead sitting in a chair or brutalising another character needlessly, and he brutalises other characters frequently. There are several fairly uncomfortable, difficult scenes here; scenes of reasonably extreme violence against women (in the context of modern cinema, at least). While they’re extremely powerful and shocking moments, they sit amongst a plot that for the most part lurches along and doesn’t really get anywhere. The film is purposefully rife with ambiguity as we, the audience, try to fill in the gaps around why the lead is such a cruel and twisted man. Sadly, it’s just not interesting or well-done enough to really bother. The idea of irredeemable characters, monsters for their own sake, has surely been done better than this many times before. (See my The Killer Inside Me Twitter review).

Finally, Shrek Forever After marks the supposed end of the series, with Dreamworks claiming they won’t make any more. I wish they’d stopped at least one film back (perhaps two). The latest film in the series is definitely not a classic, lacking the originality, creativity or joy of the original Shrek. The plot is fairly forgettable and largely unimportant, with the majority of the laughs (and there are some good laughs in there) coming from little visual cues. The source material here has been stretched a little too thin: had this been an episode in a 25 minute cartoon series, you wouldn’t have noticed the difference. Okay, but not great. (See my Shrek Forever After Twitter review).

While I didn’t think any of the films this month were particularly great, the winner is Rec 2. Despite a fairly nonsensical plot, it delivered where it mattered: providing a horror-filled, cinematic experience.

It may be a few weeks late, but the Film Fight for May is an extremely light one with only one film.

Four Lions is another interesting piece of comedy from Chris Morris. The premise is a comedy that follows a few would-be suicide bombers from their hometowns to training camps and back. Rather than being mean-spirited or relying on controversy, what we get is a great British farce as we see how absolutely incompetent most of the crew are. There are a few stark moments, but it’s almost entirely silly, poking fun at the idea of the bombers and their ridiculous scheme. (See my Four Lions Twitter review).

And the winner is… Four Lions. Obviously.