Sherlock Holmes (2009): ** 1/2 (out of 4)

The trailer for Sherlock Holmes was one of the worst short pieces of video that I had ever seen. Its fundamental flaw was playing up the Victorian/Modern juxtaposition - fistfights! firearms! explosions! tasers! - without allowing enough context to actually make that interesting. Instead, the viewer got the (strong) impression that they were just throwing a bunch of stuff at the screen, and looking to see what stuck with the audience. The only hope I had for the movie was that most of those scenes would be left out by the director because... well, I'm not sure. It's not like I'm the target audience...

Anyway, none of it was left out. But in context, it worked out a whole lot better than the trailers had led me to believe. It still wasn't good, but it was worth watching, and certainly it was fun. And that's a start.

That said, what I really want to talk about is the Sherlock Holmes elements.

Many of the objections that I had to the trailer were, fundamentally, problems with the idea of mixing certain concepts into the character of Holmes. Since when is physical violence a strong element of the Master Detective's repertoire? Well, the answer is "since Guy Ritchie took over". It worked in the context of his direction style, it worked in the context of the actors chosen (who did a fine job), and it worked in the context of a need to still overshadow Watson in a newly action-y pairing. The violence became part of the point, and that turned out to be okay, if not great.

On the other hand, where did this fit into the mythos? Without getting into spoilers, this seemed to occur both early in Holmes' career (based on characters met), and after the stories (based on Watson's moving out and on with his life). While they were certainly going for a new mythos - something that they could make a franchise out of - it was still a bit confusing for this casual acquaintance of the original stories. I would have preferred one or the other.

And the story... was kindof Holmes-y. There were the right number of "supernatural" elements. The deductive work was pretty reasonable. The mysteries weren't, for the most part, cheats, which is a good sign. And while the story may have been a little bit more momentous than perhaps necessary, it was still something that could mostly have fit in. Mostly.

Anyway. I feel like I'm rambling, because that's how I felt coming out of the movie. I didn't feel ripped-off; that's good enough sometimes.

** 1/2

Fantastic Mr. Fox: **** (out of 4)

When I was growing up, my father loved to read to me and my brother. At first, this was mostly stuff like the Dr Seuss family of books, good stuff that read well and lent itself to memorization. But as we grew up, we got into more "sophisticated" fare. His absolute favorite was Roald Dahl, whose books (The Witches, The BFG, and especially The Twits) were twisted and humorous - what other authors do you know that write about a woman hiding her glass eye in her husband's beer? - but most of all, they're fun to read out loud. And as we grew older, and no longer quite so easy to read to, he's found other kids to read to - nieces and nephews, family friends, etc. But still, one of the things that comes to mind when I think of my Dad is the joy he got - still gets - from those dark, twisted, smart children's stories.

But I really wasn't expecting to be reminded so clearly of those old days when I walked into a second-run theatre on Sunday night and watched Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Part of it was the animation. I had seen the animation style in the trailers, and while I had been impressed, I didn't quite recognize at the time how close of a fit it was to Dahl's work. The stop-motion puppetry was different, immersive, effective, and ever so slightly off in a positive way. It was both jerky and graceful, and interestingly understated. The characters were visually distinctive, both in stills and in their motions. Together, it brought across Dahl's writing style in a visual manner, something that I don't think any previous adaptation has managed nearly so well.

Another part of it was Wes Anderson's direction and writing. I certainly had seen his minimalist dialogue, quirky writing, and episodic formats as conducive to a children's story - something like The Royal Tenenbaums would play spectacularly for children, IMO - but I hadn't really thought of how it would work out with animation. But Dahl's work clearly matched his style in a way that I had little reason to suspect going in. The adaptation felt like a book, and the narration gave it that feeling of a bedtime story.

But mostly, it was that story, and more accurately the characters in the story. The characters were either unremittingly evil and dark (the humans, a few animals), or noble and dark (the rest of the animals). Every character was flawed, and they wore their flaws on their sleeves. Their mistakes were made knowingly, telegraphed for the viewers in a way that didn't seem fake or unfair. And while the good guys may come out on top in the end - more-or-less - it's not without some losses that seem both real and relevant.

Together, it felt like a bedtime story that was worth listening to long after I should be done with listening to bedtime stories. And I spent the whole movie grinning.

I didn't see this movie in 2009, but it may still be my movie of the year. Or at least I think that's how it works. Certainly, I look forward to seeing it with my father when it's out on DVD. And if, for some reason, he ever works on The Twits or The BFG, I suspect I'll have to fly out to see it with my Dad on opening day.

****

(Also - we have a second-run movie theatre in the Bay now? Yay, Bluelight!)

Originally published at Rogue Tory. Please leave any comments there.

Lucy’s LJ post reminded me that I hadn’t posted this yet. I’ve been thinking about what I want to achieve in 2010 for the last few weeks, now that my general situation is stable—as opposed to previous years where I have been flipping between courses, jobs etc. So, my goals for 2010 in no particular order are:

1. Redesign and rewrite my portfolio site, it’s currently a bit drab and doesn’t promote me that well (I don’t need it really now that I have a full time job, but I like to keep things up to date).
2. Learn how to prepare and analyse accounts for small companies, especially now that I am responsible for UKUUG and MERCi and prepare the IT budget at work.
3. Sign up two more clients to my web/email hosting package (this more or less runs itself).
4. Take and pass driving test—I don’t really want to get a car, but I could do with a licence just in case.
5. Start pubs web site as Beer in the Evening was sold a while ago and now has loads of ads and pop-ups. This is definitely not a cunningly disguised method of justifying going to lots of pubs (including on Alderney).
6. Keep Data Circle up to date with regular posts—at least one a week. The same goes for Politics Watch, I enjoy writing about politics and don’t do enough of it.
7. Launch at least one of the three company ideas which I have—these are all things which require upfront development time or capital, but once up and running will not need much maintenance.
8. Contribute to an open source project of some description. I have coding skills and can proof read documentation (especially useful for projects where the main author doesn’t have English as their first language) and will probably try and improve the symfony documents first as I want to learn that particular framework anyway.

There are lots of other goals too, but the above are probably enough to be getting on with for now.

A question for work. We can ssh into our intranet via a particular host (call it foo). I'm using the Lotus Notes webmail (which is 1000% nicer than the software client, and I now use it all the time by preference) and can easily access our internal IRC, source control and intranet websites via ssh tunnelling.

The intranet website access requires foo to be running a proxy. This is of course easy in Apache 2.0:

ProxyRequests On
ProxyVia On
ProxyDomain .internal.example.com

<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 172.26 10.1 localhost
</Proxy>

172.26.*.* and 10.1.*.* are intranet IPs. (Yes, we have multiple RFC-1918 ranges.)

All well and good. However, foo can thus be used as a proxy to access outside websites, in a manner that bypasses our WebSense filter (which is running as a transparent proxy). WebSense is inherently patronising and braindead rubbish that is not fit for purpose, but we don't want to upset the IT department unduly, and outside access is not after all what the proxy is there for. Also, not all intranet sites are in .internal.example.com — I need access control based on IP range.

So — how do I tell the proxy to only allow itself to be used for access to intranet IP ranges? What manual page did I miss?

(I could carefully construct a ProxyBlock entry to block everything except our ranges, but that's more than a little laborious. I could do it server-by-server using ProxyPass, but that's way too much like work and I can't be sure my whitelist would ever be complete — I just want to allow it to proxy to intranet IP ranges but not to other IPs.)

Has anyone done this? How did you do it?

• Rowland S. Howard is dead. Dammit.

• Quite possibly the most bloody stupid email in history.

• Firefox DOMINATES the Web in Antarctica.

• Geeks! Remember the spectacular fail of Samizdat by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute? Now you can read it. Oh dear me.

• Wikimedia blog: Dear museums, help me to help you. They still haven't answered. V&A FAIL.

• Rocknerd: So how was your haul?; The occult symbolism of the Video Music Awards.

• NewsTechnica 2010! Polanski thanks supporters of drug rape as extradition wait continues; Britain: 5,394 arrested in Internet song crackdown; Twitter users urged to stay calm during Fry drought; Vendors: Netbooks "dying, honest".

Are there any Boston-based overpaid geeks who have a spare laptop or netbook for the poor? I have a friend in need who couldn't even afford $100, but rather $0. They'll use it lovingly and geekily. Please email me.

Geek question: what's a good self-hostable app for a photo/picture blog? Wordpress is not quite there IME. I want something that really does make it all but automatic.

Thank you to all those noting The Register. I suspect this pissed off Rat-Faced Freddy way more than he let on at the time.

I got a pile of nice stuff for Christmas. Survived the day. The following Monday was arkady's birthday and we went to the V&A. That week I had to work, but did the work-from-home thing on Wednesday ... at which point my poor mugged laptop's screen finally cracked under the strain of the bent case and died horribly. (The Toshiba Portégé R600 is shiny, powerful, expensive and STUPIDLY flimsy and fragile.) I had a replacement by Thursday. Must work out a good place to put the Vista sticker.

Tabs peed copiously on the couch a few days ago. What finally worked to clean the smell out: baking soda and peroxide on the couch itself (make paste, scrub in with brush, leave to dry, vacuum off) and washing the feathery cushions with a sizable whack of baking soda.

Posting NewsTechnica at a fantastic rate. Still aiming for one a day, but doing lots of extras.

Liz has decided she's quite definitely staying in Australia, which is a bit poo all round. We remain on good terms, though.

The little boxes in MS-Excel are called "cells". The product is called "exCELL".

Year born:

Gender

The first lesson is that markets are not self-correcting. Indeed, without adequate regulation, they are prone to excess. In 2009, we again saw why Adam Smith's invisible hand often appeared invisible: it is not there. The bankers' pursuit of self-interest (greed) did not lead to the well-being of society; it did not even serve their shareholders and bondholders well. It certainly did not serve homeowners who are losing their homes, workers who have lost their jobs, retirees who have seen their retirement funds vanish, or taxpayers who paid hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks.

• The healthcare bill is insurance reform, not healthcare reform
• In this country we're dealing with how we treat illness, not why people are getting sick in the first place

• No snacks. He no longer snacks all night. "Don't bring it into the house if you don't want it in your mouth" means less profits for Nabisco. If everyone did this, his home state of New Jersey would lose jobs at the local M&M factory.
• Execize for free. He refused to do exercises that have a recurring cost: no gym membership. Yes, he bought an AbRocket and a Wii Fit, but those are CapEx, not OpEx. It doesn't cost anything to go for a walk. His daily drive to the train station is now a walk: less profit for the gas station, the monthly parking company, and his auto insurance company makes less because they gave a discount for not driving to work.

• Change Congress: Change how congress is funded, so the incentive is to do what's right for the people, not companies. Citizen-funded elections will do this.
• Change Wall Street. Unblock governance reform. Do things to encourage long-term thinking, and un-do the things that encourage short-term thinking. Permit instutional investors on boards of directors (currently banned, leaving boards to be filled with short-term profit-minded folks). Forbid the same person from being both CEO and President of the board (the president sets the CEO salary).
• Change the media. Permit them to buy their way out of being publicly held. The Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as non-profits.