The best Tom Hanks sequels never made:

1. Turner, Hooch And Moggy – Hooch gets rabies, so Turner (played by Hanks) teams up with a smart ass cat to fight crime and save Hooch before the local government put him down. Voice of Moggy provided by Steve Guttenberg.
2. The Red Mile – Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) is a moody prison guard who moves to an all woman facility in North Dakota. On his arrival, he is befriended by wrongly convicted female murder with bad sanitary towels. Dark, gripping and messy drama.
3. Bigger (And More Extreme) – When bored with his executive career, a fortune telling machine turns Josh (Hanks) into a hideously disfigured giant working in a Mongolian circus. He fights the locals and cruel circus master to regain dignity and his freedom from a life in chains. Features sky-diving and nudity.
4. Apollo 14: Search For Spock – Admiral Kirk and his bridge crew risk their careers stealing the decommissioned Enterprise to return to the restricted Genesis planet to recover Spock’s body.
5. Philadelphia Reborn: The Dead Rise Again – The story of a lawyer who returns from the dead to take his revenge upon Philadelphia, creating a zombie army as he goes. Meg Ryan leads a team of international biologists intent on finding a cure to “the disease”, falling in love with Hanks in the process.

Man, forget this computing lark, I’m going to be a big Hollywood producer. Show me the money! On that note, Tom Cruise tomorrow…

As my plan for working on both my UGC cinema listing RSS Feed and Actors RSS feed has not progressed as well as I had hoped (I haven’t really started the overhaul yet, by which I mean I haven’t looked at either in months), it’s good to see someone else doing something about it. Jonathan Paisley has created an experimental WAP interface for UgcRss. It’s running over home ADSL so may break, but it seems fairly solid to me. Thanks for that!

A good start to the month with former kings of Glasgow indie-pop, Bis, reforming under the new name of Data Panik (they are being clear that it is pronounced Dah-tah.) Eight or so songs have already been recorded, featuring all three Bis members. Live they will have a real drummer, where formerly they had a drum machine.

This month also began with a normally joyous event, the release of a new Idlewild album. Although the band have been moving slowly away from their punk-tinged debut over the years, it is still quite shocking to hear an Idlewild album that is so resolutely bland. Where previous albums had intelligent lyrics wrapped up in fervent Scottish rock or indie lullabies, Warnings/Promises has a continual acoustically focused sound; all strumming with nothing to stand out from the mire of mediocrity. The thoughtful lyrics remain with some truly outstanding and amusing lines, but without the musical hooks to back themup the album might as well be wallpaper.

The Mars Volta released the first single from their newest album, Frances The Mute. The Widow features a slightly tighter version of the album track, as well as 14 minute b-side Frances The Mute (suprisingly, not on the album of the same name.) Frances The Mute (the song) is one of The Mars Volta’s few weak moments; 4 minutes or so of excellent prog rock, wrapped in another 10 of noise.

As sophomore albums are all the rage, Hell Is For Heroes followed up the excellent debut album from the beginning of 2003 with Transmit/Disrupt. Although lacking the vibrancy of The Neon Handshake, this album still manages to deliver a sizeable slice of rock. The opening number, Kamichi, sets the pace with a fast but fairly straightforward jaunt of drum-led music, with later tracks laying down serious and extremely tight riffs.

Because the beginning of this month was handed over to finishing my final year project, cinema trips were light on the ground. However, unlike January with its one sided fight, March has two competitors.

Constantine is a big-screen bastardisation of Hellblazer. Gone is the mysterious Liverpudlian private investigator, replace by a much more americanised version played by Keanu Reeves. I’m fairly sure every other review of this film by someone who knows anything about the character has pointed out the flaws in the conversion: John Constantine now being an american with black hair (the original character famously looks like Sting), the presence of real action sequences (he’s more of a thinker than a fighter), the lack of character (both Reeves and Rachel Weisz are atrociously bad in this film), and other less important factors.

Strangely, the film is reasonable up until a point, if ignoring the acting. It’s watchable if mindless entertainment. Once the cross shaped shotgun appears the film dives into cringeworthy territory. Thankfully, this happens late in the day. Not bad, but not great either.

The Life Aquatic, With Steve Zissou is quite a different beast. An oceanographer (played by Bill Murray) goes on a mission to find the mysterious and possibly fictional Jaguar Shark. In the mean time, he has to deal with his waivering marriage, his newfound 30-year old son (Owen Wilson), financing troubles, a reporter intent on exposing his idiocy, pirates and more.

The comedy found in this film is as deadpan as it comes. Dry, but never without character, the jokes (if you can call them that) expose a lateral wit that lets us explore the quirky cast throughout; as funny as it is charming.

The characters themselves are well-thought out and the acting is phenomenal. Murray shines as Zissou, Wilson manages to get passed his usual smug and awkward characterisation to play a Kentucky gentleman with aplomb, William Dafoe is hilarious as the jealous German left hand man, and the others are equally good.

A clear win for The Life Aquatic, an interestingly offbeat film that deserves more acclaim that it seems to be getting.

At Solitude, we like our open source software. There are all kinds of interesting ideas out there that people are giving away for free. The problem is the websites are almost always shit. Now, I’m not knocking the visual look; it probably doesn’t matter that the website for most programs isn’t attractive.

The main issue, illustrated by almost every open source project I’ve ever seen, is that they assume the user knows what the project is about. Wrong. I usually find out about these things through a vague link. Putting the news section immediately on the front page is a bad thing. The first thing I want to know is exactly what the project is about, not that version 0.65c has just been released with new enhancement X.

Three guidelines:

1. Have a section on your website explaining in plain English, no marketing jargon and as little technical gibberish as is necessary (which should itself be explained), exactly what the project is for, what it does and why anyone should care.
2. Begin the front page with a careful, one-line abstract of the explanation page followed by a “read more” link. If you can’t construct such an abstract, you’ve already got a problem with the structure of the project.
3. Clear, single-click downloads. Note that Sourceforge pages put most people off.

These guidelines will improve your site greatly and are not hard. We’d name names of projects who don’t live up to expectations, but I’m sure that it would take far too long.