Shockingly early for a film fight, here it is for December.

We begin with an unusual piece starring Will Ferrell, Stranger Than Fiction. Toning down Ferrell’s normally over-the-top comedy stylings, this instead has him running through a fairly surreal scenario (that of his life being narrated accurately and presciently, with his death impending). We get a delightful love interest in the form of Maggie Gyllenhall, a slightly over-done neurotic in the form of Emma Thompson, and an out of place but interesting English professor (Dustin Hoffman). Quietly funny, well-written, but spoiled by a slightly weak ending, the film is breezily watchable without being trashy.

On the other hand, Big Nothing is about an accurate a title as you get. Simon Pegg doesn’t get the room he needs to prop up David Schwimmer in this dark, farcical comedy. This film bulges with half-finished ideas, shoved together like pieces from different jigsaw puzzles, barely seeing the picture in any of them. Mistimed and lacking many redeeming moments, an entirely forgettable film.

Guillermo Del Toro goes in some interesting directions with Spanish film, Pan’s Labyrinth. It is a modern day retelling of fairytales of old, where beautiful fantasy set pieces and morality plays are contrasted starkly by brutal moments of horror (i.e. before Disney stripped them for consumer production). In this case we see a little girl challenged to retake her place in the underworld while her cruel step-father tries to savagely quell a rebellion. The entangling of these two threads, and the world illuminated so brightly and darkly, culminates in an excellent work.

Finally, Deja Vu is an action/sci-fi piece about changing the events of a terrorist attack in New Orleans. While Denzel Washington handles the role as confidently as he can, the film makers cannot say the same. Plastered with some cack-handed but very Hollywood pseudo-science, the film suffers from a lack of conviction. Instead of following through with the rigid world that is set-up and you can see tragically but grippingly playing out, there is a distinct taste of a last minute happy ending rewrite; the film suffers greatly for it. Could have been better.

The final finalist for the film fight is, obviously, Pan’s Labyrinth. The finale has already been written, meaning of course that I have selected my film of the year. Expect it soon.

Another massively late film fight, yes, but a good one.

November kicked off with the controversial Borat (yes, I can’t be arsed looking up the full and correct name). Enough has been said about this film: Sasha Baron Cohen travels around America as one of his alter-egos baiting people into saying some pretty awful things. It’s an amusing and tragic look at both the attitudes in some parts of our society and the way we choose to deal with them. I would say this is worth seeing regardless of whether or not you find the man’s work particularly amusing, as his subject’s are suitably horrifying.

Christopher Nolan keeps up his near unsullied record with The Prestige. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale play magicians locked in a vicious feud, pressing forth the boundaries of magic, showmanship and dedication to their cause with the most poisonous venom. With the director’s usual sleight of hand present, excellent performances all round (including a cameo by David Bowie), and some fairly interesting set pieces, this is a masterful work, beautifully presented. A definite must-see.

After years of Bond heading towards mindless Hollywood action, full of cheap special effects and ludicrous adversaries, it is a pleasure to watch such a solid piece of cinema in the form of Casino Royale. With Brosnan ousted, Daniel Craig plays Bond like never before: as the determined government killer, torn by morality, that Ian Fleming always intended in his earliest works. Gone are the outlandish gadgets (for the most part), in are some fast cars and some of the best action sequences the series has yet to produce. Though the free-running inspired building site hunt is in stark contrast with the plodding pace throughout much of the casino material, the latter is bolstered by a few interesting twists. It’s not much of a compliment to say this is the best Bond movie since GoldenEye (which shared the same director) since the rest of the films were garbage, but perhaps it is worth saying it is likely to be in my top 5 bond films.

Finally, Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny has much of what you expect from a Jack Black comedy: a silly premise, executed warmly but lacking the really big laughs of his peers (such as Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller). The early scenes present few laughs, mostly rehashing material the band has previously used, but starts getting funnier towards the end. This is not much more than an extended music video for the band, so if you like them, go get the album and you’ll have a large chunk of the strongest material here.

In other months, Casino Royale would have won, but The Prestige is just such a great film that it was never going to get beaten, hard as Bond is.

Raymond Chen has reasonably pointed out that most low-end users don’t like using the search boxes that modern browsers provide in addition to address bars. I couldn’t agree more.

The first thing I do with any new FireFox install, before loading up bookmarks or any of my favourite extensions, is to remove the search bar. Why?

1. Ease of use. I don’t want to have to think about which box I’m going to use for a particular action, especially when the most common action is using Google: which works equally well in both boxes.
2. Address bar is faster. Any time you move your hands from the keyboard to the mouse, you lose a significant portion of time. I don’t know if the search bar has a keyboard shortcut, but I know that the address bar does (Alt+d). Even if it does, how do I then quickly select a different search engine than the default?
3. The address bar is multi-functional. I can use it for URLs and google, but if I add some keyword searches to my bookmarks (replace the query string %s and add a keyword), then I can have any search engine I want at my finger tips.

This makes the search box dead space in a prime location. It’s one (recent) saving is the addition of Google-style autocomplete. With a little more work this could, and should, be integrated into the address bar. At the very least, the option should be available.

So, what other things do I use the address bar quick search for?

• Javadoc – Look up any standard class with a quick “jdoc Class”.
• Man pages – As with terminals, “man [program]” works just fine for looking up UNIX stuff.
• Acronyms – Need to know what something means ASAP? “acronym ASAP” would do.

I use it for dictionaries (“dic”), the thesaurus (“thes), torrents (“torr”), and just about any other common search because it is better. Give it a try.

A reminder for myself for the future (and any other people doing Java development): using the like operator in iBatis. The meta character escaping you need in your XML is column like '%'||#property#||'%', where property property is a bean property in your parameter class.

Also, if you’re doing everything in your where clause dynamically, I would recommend looking at dynamic and isNotNull tags.

Due to a silly number of other events in October, like a stupid number of birthdays (including, of course, my own birthday), I only saw three films in the cinema (though I did watch a decent number from my DVD backlog).

Will Ferrell hits the race track for his latest character film, Tallageda Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. This is exactly what you expect from a recent Ferrell film: a tale of a man who is top of his field hitting hard times and unexpected competition, having to re-learn and evaluate himself, and coming back stronger than ever, with a number of bizarre characters and memorable lines. While it fails to match previous efforts, like the excellent Anchorman, it’s still a worthwhile comedy if you like the lead’s goofy schtick.

Former Ferrell collaborator, Steve Carrell, plays it straight for once in delightful indie flick, Little Miss Sunshine. The story of a suburban family whose ties are wearing thing, the film follows them on a road trip across state to a (fairly nauseating) children’s beauty pageant. As with most good tales, the focus is on the journey, not the destination. The trials and breakdowns as they make their trip are tragic, hilarious and occassionally shocking. While a certain gloom hangs over areas of the film, it never lasts for long; the film serving as an affirmation of the tribulations of family life.

A couple of years back, the great Hong Kong crime trilogy, Infernal Affairs, kicked off. That is long since finished, but a heavyweight Hollywood version has appeared in the form of The Departed. The tale of a cop going undercover in a crime syndicate, and the same crime syndicating planting a mole in the cops, this version builds the same tension through paranoia and near-misses, with some excellent performances from Jack Nicholson and Leonardo Dicaprio. Although the dialogue is better (post-translation), it does go wayward in a few places (like the love story). Still a very worthy film.

It’s a tricky month, but I would say Little Miss Sunshine edges it.