October was a big month for viewing, as we approach the pre-Christmas clearance.

Death Proof is Tarantino’s segment of the Grindhouse double feature. While, sadly, it was split for the European release (look out for the Planet Terror review in November’s Film Fight), this part of Grindhouse still delivers the goods. Kurt Russell plays Stuntman Mike, a thrill-seeker who loves hurting and scaring young women. Without elaborating much more on the plot, it meets expectations of how ridiculous a b-movie should be. The characters are over the top, the dialogue is a little over-boiled (but not hard-boiled), and everything comes together nicely. Where it falls down is the length. This release is around 30 minutes longer than the original cut, and it shows. I enjoy Tarantino’s dialogue, he’s a master it believably, but it does go on a little long in places. So, a good film, but not great.

Having enjoyed prequel Night Watch, it was with some disappointment that I realised Day Watch‘s makers had gotten it so spectacularly wrong. The original had an odd epic battle going on between the two sides of Day and Night, with each character having their own power, the set-up being quite dark, and the mysterious Gloom unsettling. This time round everything is pulled out of the writer’s ass. Characters develop new powers and find artifacts to help them when it’s plot convenient, the story is all over the place (dozens of nonsensical slivers), the upped budget has produced some pretty brash effects (a bad thing), an abysmal ending, and the whole thing smacks of not knowing what to do. It lacks cohesion, intelligence and style: the very things that the original had going for it. A real shame.

Recent Farrelly brother films and Ben Stiller films have been pretty poor. That’s why it’s such a surprise to find that the pairing has produced a pretty decent movie, The Heartbreak Kid. The plot is thin, but the farce that develops around it is quite amusing. It features a good performance by Michelle Monaghan, some great back and forths between Stiller and Monaghan’s family, and a strong supporting cast. The layer upon layer of ending is, as always, a pain point, but the rest of the film is strong enough to survive it. Good, light entertainment.

It’s sad to see a good premise go wrong. Sadly, that’s what happens with the remake of The Invasion. As body snatchers take over, the film really let’s you see that the tricks used to fool it are noticed by other people much earlier than the main character, bringing with it a sense of realism. Throughout, there are moments of well-taut pressure followed by bursts of panic, but the whole facade falls down because the plot takes too long and makes the main character’s son plot critical. Sure, seeing the big victory is nice, but having viewed it through minor eyes for much of the film, it smacks of laziness to pull this particular ending.

The Counterfeiters tells the terrible (and true) story of Jewish bankers, artists and counterfeiters treated like kings in their own private camp, while being forced to manufacture fake notes. It’s an affecting drama, showing the struggle between survival and fighting injustice, as demonstrated by the film’s two main protagonists. It pulls you in every direction, perfectly executing each scene through the dramatic conclusion. Pitch perfect, and a contender for film of the year.

As most people know, making charming little animated films is what Pixar does best. Their latest, Ratatouille, doesn’t disappoint. While the main human character is a rare mistake for the company, the eponymous rat and the rest of the cast never fail to delight. The sense of adventure, light-handed morality, and carefully handled plotting that Pixar are known for shine through once again.

Finally, Mr Brooks looked like being a good Kevin Costner film, but failed to deliver the goods. The premise is that of a meticulous serial killer, with an invisible friend (his murderous side) advising him when things start to go wrong. It’s really just an excuse for some incredibly lazy acting and storytelling. Rather than Costner showing us what he’s feeling, he’ll get started and his invisible friend will then explain it to us through pretty painful dialogue. The other characters are numerous but largely superflous, given far too much screen time for what amount to plot strands that mean nothing to the film (Demi Moore’s character could have been in another film entirely). Mr Brooks gives up on it’s own internal logic, and gives up the ghost on what could’ve been an interesting film. Shame.

The obvious winner this month is the fantastic war time movie, The Counterfeiters.

Once again, the film fights are behind. Time to catch up:

Knocked Up is a surprisingly grown-up comedy. Expecting a bit of a gross-out, it was a pleasure to see a well-developed movie; with a decent enough plot, and even some (shock) character development. While it still has enough set-pieces to entertain (the trip to Vegas being particularly notable), it’s good to see that they’re part of the story, rather than the story being an excuse for them. It’s not a masterpiece, by any stretch, but it is worth seeing. One of the best comedies of the year.

Let’s get straight to it for the next one: 1408 is about as lazy a Stephen King adaptation as you can make (without producing utter excrement like Dreamcatcher). That’s a real shame as it has a handful of genuinely jumpy moments, before it descends into horror movie cliché, dream endings, and King’s own silly trappings: haunted inanimate objects. Cusack does the best he can with the material, while Samuel L Jackson phones in his five minute performance. Pretty dreadful, despite a decent opening.

As I’m sure many have realised by now, Run, Fatboy, Run is not a Simon Pegg film. Sure, he stars in it, but I’d be willing to bet that his 3rd-tier writing credit is due to the handful of jokes he wrote for it (and I’d bet on which ones they are). David Schwimmer, as director, proves himself woefully incompetent. He manages to create a fairly one-dimensional world, with painfully unrounded characters and poor motivations. It being a comedy is no excuse, as Pegg himself has proven time and again, for simply holding up a flimsy premise as completed material and running some fart jokes through it. Apart from the outstandingly funny Dylan Moran, this film is without merit.

Finally, Michael Clayton has George Clooney as a kind of fixer lawyer, dropped in to solve problems. Although he’s supposed to be great at it, the character isn’t doing so well. His best friend has gone nuts and is going against a multi-million dollar client. The main problem with this film is direction: it meanders in the set-up, and fails to really get going at any decent pace. The performances are strong, and the story is interesting enough, it’s just not going to really grab anyone.

It’s a tough choice, and Clooney nearly had it, but I think the winner from these four has to be Knocked Up.

Last year I was a young pup at 23. As of today, I’m an old and enlightened 24 year old *COUGH*.

Being 24 is a lot like the TV show of the same name: you’re an untouchable badass willing to do anything to protect your ideals, and there any number of terrorists willing to launch an attack on you within a few seconds of the hour mark (pro tip: if it’s a couple of seconds to the hour, maybe cover your head to be safe). Also, your daughter is probably fairly crap at not being kidnapped.

Anyway, the changes this year have been, in many ways, subtle. I’m still working for the same BigCo (in a different job), most of my circumstances are pretty much the same (aside from a few personal items), and that’s just fine with me; everything is going pretty great.

Here’s to another year of this.

I’ll start by saying that if you’re not a programmer, you’re not going to be interested in this post. You might want to run along and read something better. You probably also want to be a Java programmer.

JDOM is a great Java library for dealing with XML in a reasonably sane way. You turn your XML into an org.jdom.Document object (using a handy utility like SAXBuilder), and then you can use various query and manipulation tools on it. It does, however, have some fairly silly exceptions.

Recently, I was doing some XPath queries as part of a web-app. Like a good developer, I wrote some unit tests so I knew that the XPaths were correct, the XML conversion was correct, etc. I wrote the actual code to implement the test cases and everything worked fine. Great.

Upon deploying the web-app to the container and running it properly, JDOM throws a ClassCastException and says the Document is the cause. Bizarre. After a few checks and no luck , we (I say “we” because there are now a few interested parties) break out the debugger for a look at the running web-app. [Let me stop for a second to say that debugging running web-apps is a triumph of tooling; very useful stuff.] The created Document looks fine, the code steps through ok until… bang. The debugger stops working. Ah.

After a lot of head scratching and googling, we finally figure out the problem: JDOM depends on the Jaxen API for XPath. While our unit test container (actually an IDE) has a reference to a copy of Jaxen for an unrelated reason, the deployment doesn’t. So the problem is one of dependencies.

However, the thing that made this tricky to debug was JDOM throwing an unrelated Exception. A ClassCastException seems completely inappropriate here and helped masked the real cause. A ClassNotFoundException pointing to the Jaxen library would have a) made sense, and b) pointed us at the real cause.

Lessons:

1. Libraries are only as sane as the most insane thing they do.
2. Unit tests start falling apart if the environment in which they are run does not match the final environment. This can be a very subtle problem.
3. Throwing exceptions is only as useful as the quality of the feedback the exception provides.
4. Debug, debug, debug. If the debugger fails, don’t panic.

Here’s hoping the JDOM guys get rid of that erroneous ClassCastException and switch to something a little more helpful.

I recently decided it was time to upgrade my phone, since my previous phone was starting to fail me in several ways (i.e. the battery was fecked). So I opted for the Nokia N95. (Note: if you’ve ever had my mobile number, it’s still the same. I haven’t changed it since my first phone.)

I had a couple of good reasons for making this choice. First, after my last phone, I’m a big fan of Nokia phones and the Symbian OS. Everything nice I said about my previous phone still applies, but I can now appreciate features like the active desktop style interface a bit more. It had always annoyed me that the screen you get upon unlocking a mobile is near enough useless; basically, a glorified splash screen. Nokia S60 phones are different: switch on active standby and you get 5 icons on your desktop which are shortcuts into your favourite programs (customisable). As well as that, you get the next few events from your calendar displayed clearly and prominently, plus the next items on your to-do list. That’s exactly how it should be, the most important info clearly displayed.

Another major selling point of the N95 is the camera. The previous camera I had was only 1.2 megapixels and performed poorly in all but the best light conditions. My new phone has a 5 megapixel chip, a much better lens, and a two stage auto-focus, which helps the camera pick out the best lighting conditions.

There are plenty of other nice little features (wifi, visual radio, enough oomph for 3D games) but what does it get wrong?

1. It breaks the Nokia charger standard. Every Nokia phone I’ve ever seen used a standard charger, making it easy to find a spare if you’re away from home. The N95 uses a much slimmer charger. Not good.
2. The battery life. With great new features, comes great power consumption. If you don’t use the bigger features you get a fairly standard charge for a modern phone (2 days+). If you hammer the features, you could easily wipe it in half a day.
3. It came with Moby as the standard track. It’s not 1999, and I’m not doing a car advert, thanks.

Other than that, I’m very happy with it. Highly recommended.