As always my caveat from previous years still apply: Film Fight is a knock-out tournament and, as such, will only select my favourite film. It makes no guarantees about any other place.

First, the non-finalists that deserve a nod:

• Slumdog Millionaire
• Milk
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Anvil: The Story of Anvil
• Monsters Vs. Aliens
• Star Trek
• Antichrist
• Mesrine: Killer Instinct
• Zombieland
• Up
• Where The Wild Things Are

And then the monthly finalists:

• January: The Wrestler
• February: Revolutionary Road
• March: Bronson
• April: In The Loop
• May: Synecdoche, New York
• June: The Hangover
• July: Moon
• August: Inglourious Basterds
• September: District 9
• October: Fantastic Mr. Fox
• November: A Serious Man
• December: Nowhere Boy

Last year, it was very easy to give the title to There Will Be Blood (despite a good effort from No Country For Old Men), but this year the finalists are almost all fantastic films; The Hangover being the only one that slid through in a weak month.

I don’t know if I could pick a bronze medallist this year, the pack is so tight, but the silver (almost gold) goes to Darren Aronofsky’s fantastic movie, The Wrestler. It’s dark, and gritty, and will leave you a little sadder, but only because it’s such an excellent movie. An absolute must-see.

The winner, however, is Synecdoche, New York. Charlie Kaufmann’s film is so rich with imagery, imagination and an incredible spectrum of emotions that it can’t help but be an amazing film, in the truest sense of that word. It’s an instant classic, in my book.

The last month of the year, and the final five films…

First up, The Men Who Stare At Goats tries to be an oddball tale about the forming of an army unit who are training in psychic warfare. Despite a fairly big name cast (George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, and Ewan Macgregor), it never really manages to capitalise on what it has. It’s funny in places, but largely inconsistent. It’s merely an okay film. (See my Men Who Stare At Goats Twitter review).

Spike Jonze is well-known for his vivid imagination, so there’s probably no-one better placed to turn Where The Wild Things Are into a movie. Rather than do a direct adaptation, which would be incredibly short, Jonze has focussed on telling a story about the problems people often face in childhood. It’s very cute and sweet in many places, with a tiny hint of menace streaked through a large portion. He expertly moves the protagonist, Max, through his journey, showing us a wide-range of beautiful moments and difficult challenges. The lead, Max Records, does an excellent job. Good entertainment.  (See my Where The Wild Things Are Twitter review).

Doing a biopic of John Lennon’s life you might focus on his success and admiration as a fascinating musician. Nowhere Boy instead focusses on his formative teenage years to great effect. Seeing the legendary figure as a troubled teen was a good choice for a screen play, and it’s handled very well. Given his abandonment as a child, and his subsequent reconnection with his mother a decade or so later, we get to see a fairly turbulent time in his life that seems to have shaped him. The film has several very powerful scenes, and manages to draw a fairly detailed picture of Lennon’s early years. Very good.   (See my Nowhere Boy Twitter review).

Avatar is the film that has been in the making for a dozen years according to director, James Cameron. Sadly, very few of those years have been spent on the story, which is somewhat flimsy and you have seen before. The character development is relatively meek, and most of the film lacks any real depth. It does have a message which, while delivered a little heavy-handedly, is worthwhile: both that we should be conserving the world’s culture and the environment in which we live. Avatar is, however, a good, mindless, action film. The effects (in 3D) are well-done, and some of the battle sequences are suitably epic and fun. If you want something fun that you don’t have to think about, this is your movie. It’s entertaining, but ultimately nothing special. (See my Avatar Twitter review).

Finally, Humpday is about two friends, an artist and an apparently average Joe, who decide to make an art film of themselves having sex, for various reasons. It’s shot in a natural, almost documentary style; managing to be simultaneously amusing and uncomfortable as they get closer to the filming. The tension throughout is well-pitched, particularly between the “average” guy and his wife. Some great performances make this film, even if the ending is a little abrupt. (See my Humpday Twitter review).

The winner this month is Nowhere Boy for an emotional and affecting biopic that perfectly captures an important time in a young man’s life.

Frequent readers will have noticed a fairly large upturn in the number of posts I’ve been making recently. For the last year or so, I’ve averaged around 1-2 posts a month, which is a fairly low amount.

Separately, for a few years now, I’ve wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo, where, in the month of November, you’re expected to write an entire novel. Now, I’m realistic enough to know that I wouldn’t make enough time to do that this year. So I wanted to do something else instead, much smaller scale.

I opted to try and write a post each day for the month of November. Obviously, that’s a lot less than writing a novel, but I felt that it was do-able.

As I’m writing this, the last post for November, I have no idea whether or not I managed it (this is being written at least a week early, and then scheduled to publish last thing on the 30th). Whether I did or not, I’ve enjoyed it so far. There have been a number of items sitting waiting to get written for a while, without any pressure to actually do so.

While I am absolutely not aiming to keep this rate up, I do have something of a plan to publish a number of other items over the coming weeks. Hopefully, that’ll pan out okay and we won’t get back to that abysmal rate before this month.

Anyway, apologies for some of the lower quality items you’ve seen (I should not write early in the morning), I’ll be aiming to make everything from here a lot higher quality.

UPDATE: Turns out I did manage it. Nice.

The flip-side to my post about Dopplr being a stand-alone network, and how that is probably a bad thing is exactly where are all the serious or worthwhile Facebook applications? I can’t recall ever having seen anything with that isn’t a novelty of some sort.

Sure, games, quizzes, toys etc can be fun and people are most definitely using them, but are there any applications out there outside of the entertainment/trivia category that are good enough for consumption? I’m fairly interested by this and what, if anything, it says about preferred usage patterns on social networks.

Is the lack of visibility on non-entertainment apps because they don’t exist or because people simply don’t use them? If the former, then is that because the serious app developers don’t want to cropshare or because they see it as futile? If the latter, is it something inherent in being in front of your friends that causes the lack of interest?

I honestly have no answers here, but I’m hoping I’ll see some suggestions made here about what’s happening, or even showing some good “serious” apps.

There is a fairly tangible link between the language used to describe a software system and how easy it is to understand, maintain, and expand that system, for both technical and non-technical people. To be clear, when I say language I don’t mean the programming language of choice (Java, C, Python etc): I mean the terms used to describe it.

If all participants in the design process (again, technical and non-technical) can agree on a set of terms for each component and always talk about those components and their interactions in the same way, it can greatly ease understanding. There’s a lot more to it than that, but this is basically Domain-Driven Design.

I’d been thinking about the general principles of this a number of years ago, when I read a great article about the Guardian redesign. It took me a while to dig out the link but it’s worth a read: Domain-Driven Design in an Evolving Architecture. It’s definitely worth reading to get a feel for the issues around and power of the DDD.

It occurred to me recently that the reason that many vendor tools take a significant amount of effort before either making sense or before you realise that they’re awful is that they’re written in someone else’s domain, one in which you were not privy to the design of and which is usually only documented in terms of the things that it has already been used to do. That’s a mistake.

The empowering part of good documentation for a system is in first describing exactly what it is and how it is structured, before describing what it can do; by focusing on the domain, rather than the outcome.

With this information in hand, it should become clearer much sooner whether the domain of the tool is compatible with the domain of your problem-space. This is probably why Spring has been such a successful framework in the Java world: it goes to great lengths to explain exactly what each part is, and helping you understand how it fits under your own domain.