Salocin

A weblog that I found quite by accident posted a two-line comment referring to a cartoon on Salon and ended up in pole position in a Google search for Why do you hate America so much?. Scary people then surfaced and commented!

The weblog in question is called Snappy the Clam, and all that was posted was a link to a funny Salon cartoon that makes a point about people's reactions to the debate on attacking Iraq.

Of course it's a cartoon, and so it's a caricature of reality, but the point being made is that whenever the current policy being followed in the US is questioned, the response is "Why do you hate America so much?". The implication is clearly that people who question the rigor, logic and/or wisdom of the administration's current actions get labelled as unpatriotic, and the cartoon indicates that it thinks this is not a good thing. The last slide of the cartoon is Benjamin Franklin and his famous comment that, "They that can give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety", a point quite a few groups in the US are arguing at the moment.

But that's all irrelevant, because the comments on the board are all about whether France or the US is the more hateful nation. The comments are written in the most amazingly aggressive tone, and are all more or less off-topic given the nature of the original posting on the weblog. Reading through those posts, regardless of which side of the argument they are on, is quite an unsettling experience, since there's the most incredible lack of balance in what almost everyone on there is saying! Extremists have found a temporary home on the internet!

Known in English as He loves me... he loves me not. Audrey Tautou goes from charming to creepy in this story of emotional obsession.

Angelique (played by Audrey Tautou) is a successful art student, who has just received a coveted scholarship and has a nicely-established life with good friends and a job waiting tables in a local bar. The only slight blemish on this idyllic picture is that the man she loves, Loic (played by Samuel le Bihan), a successful cardiologist, is married to someone else.

As the story progresses, we see her behaviour turn slightly obsessive, then get radically worse near the end, but enough gaps are left in the story for us to wonder if everything we suspect happened actually did happen. Then we return to the beginning of the story (in a rewinding scene a little reminiscent of Sliding Doors) and see the whole story from Loic's point of view. It is at this point that what seemed perhaps a little strange the first time around turns somewhat sinister.

The second time around, the story continues past the end of the first telling, to reach a reasonably predictable conclusion.

The easiest criticism of "A la folie... pas du tout", is that it fails to handle the suspense in a way that makes it sufficiently ominous to impress. My immediate reaction to that is to point to the fact that this is a French film, and thus one should not enter the movie expecting a Hollywood script. The telling centres more around the degradation in Angelique's sanity as she gets caught between reality and her perception of reality.

The French title works much better than the English one, given the rhyme it is borrowed from, and I can imagine the frustration of filmgoers who are used to the script exploiting opportunities for suspense or surprise to the maximum of their potential, as the understated nature of the storytelling consistently (and deliberately) underplays these chances, leaving more to nuance and feeling than one expects in a modern film.

I left the movie feeling that I had watched a film that was no great event, but which had nevertheless managed to balance a story that contained suspense and thriller-like anticipation with a dose of subtlety. Audrey Tatuou's face remains as caricatured as in Amelie, with her huge smile and expressive features, and I personally am quite impressed that the same French actress has been in two films that not only were big in France, but made it far enough over the borders that I was able to see them here in the US.

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Links

Internet Movie Database Page for A la folie... pas du tout

Rotten Tomatoes review summaries for the film

Official Website : in French | in English

The trailer from 1001ba.com (also on the official sites)

I tried to resist commenting on the Google/Blogger/Pyra thing because everyone seemed to be doing it, and it's (in my opinion) a storm in a teacup, but when I saw this article at the BBC News Website, I couldn't hold myself back any longer!

It's not that I want to deride weblogs in any way (let's face it, the heading of this category on my website is "weblog"!), but I think the media is getting a little out of hand about the whole weblog "phenomenon".

Even the use of the word "Phenomenon" seems a little over the top to me - it's not that wondrous that it needs a word last used as a title to a film where John Travolta is capable of moving objects with his mind. Weblogs are the marriage of peoples public journals with the ability to make them widely available for free. Reading some of the recent press, you'd think they were about to change the underlying fabric of worldwide social order.

Take a look at how the BBC describe weblogs : There are millions of blogs on the web and they are often interlinked, creating an eco-system of ever-changing ideas on the net.

Ecosystem? I read blogs a lot of the time, and I have found precious few links that allow a browser to read numerous opinions on an aspect of current events. The strongest links I have found are the authors who, struggling for content, go to sites that provide questions that stimulate pseudo-deep thought users can then put on their weblog. Sometimes the questions are quite interesting, but this hardly creates an "ecosystem" of ideas, whatever that is.

Google buying Pyra is nothing more than diversification for growth, as Weblogs have a fair bit in common with the way Google likes to see itself - a little less corporate than the MSNs and AOLs of this world. I'm sure some corporate wonk in some back room is waxing lyrical on the subject of "tapping into the flow of uninhibited journalistic reflection" or something similarly trite, but at the end of the day, it's growth, pure and simple.

So I was simmering quietly in the corner waiting for it all to blow over, when this article comes up, and I find out that an Irish company is creating a service where its users can update their weblogs with text messages and photos taken by their telephone, by calling a special number. In order to keep my gripes about this article in some sort of order, I'll try to respond to specific quotes...

The latest trend is moblogging - updating your blog with a mobile phone.

So it's a trend, is it?. A Google search for "moblogging" provides little insight into this "trend". A couple of sites (this one or this one) know what it's all about, but I get no sense that this is the next craze to take over the world...

There are an estimated 500,000 people who run blogs and analysts say a quarter of them may eventually update their sites on the go.

Are these the same analysts that told us that almost everyone would be online by 2004, that the bookstore was dead and that the underlying fundamentals of the economy had permanently shifted? I remember them desperately trying to dislodge their foot from their mouth when the e-economy failed to materialize, and it turned out the only people who had made a cent from the entire horrible mess were the investment banks, their privileged customers (who were in on stage one of each IPO) and the companies writing the dodgy forecasts? This prediction sounds just like the ones we heard before, no doubt based on solid assumptions which, when looked at collectively, wouldn't fool a 5-year-old. Can you imagine typing in an entry on a 10-digit keypad? Even with text prediction? Perhaps with a palmpilot, but even then I doubt very much that people are going to be doing this in the near future, perhaps in 10 years or more, if a whole lot of other technologies (such as voice recognition) don't get there first!

Mr Holahan predicts it will transform our relationship with the internet and put billions of bloggers online.

Mr. Holahan is, by the way, the CEO of NewBay Software, the company implementing the new mobile blogging functionality in Ireland. Does the ability to update a website over a mobile phone really sound like paradigm-shifting technology? It is as profound as, say, the advent of broadband, or the creation of the first browser and website at CERN? I think that what will transform our relationship with the internet next will be the ability to search for content in a manner that bypasses all the rubbish sites that use keywords they shouldn't to grab the attention of unsuspecting digital passers-by. I doubt very much whether the ability to publish easily will transform the internet. People mostly browse the internet, rather than publish to it, and its so easy to publish already that I don't believe making it any easier is going to result in a transformation of much at all.

"In two year's time every phone user will have a website and be using blogs as their version of the world," he said.

The Oracle at Delphi no doubt made more sense. To the extent that weblogs reflect the news at all, they contain uncorroborated reports written by people who are mostly inexperienced and/or untrained in journalism (I certainly have no qualifications in that area). They're the ultimate free-market in platforms for speech - they benefit from being extremely easy to set up and update, but have the associated feature of being extremely numerous, resulting in a signal-to-noise ratio so high, it's likely only the most radical opinions will make themselves felt. If weblogs take off in this direction, its more likely they will end up commenting on an authoritative source, just as I have cited the BBC (which I usually think is great) in this article.

"Google's buy is a recognition that the news in future will be reported by ordinary people with their own particular bias on stories," said Mr Holahan.

That remains to be seen. I think that Google's buy reflects the fact that some businessmen believe there's money to be made in the Weblog space, or in its combination with something else. It's also a reflection of the fact that effective though it may be, Google doesn't have a business model that scales up much further than it already has. If they want to carry on growing, they have to grow into a new space, hence their move into images and the old usenet newsgroups. I don't believe Google is buying Pyra because it believes weblogging is the future of newscasting, although it will certainly do their share price no harm if that opinion is widely reported.

I installed TrackBack functionality today - maybe I'm overly optimistic if I think it's actually going to get linked to, but it's a cool idea.

TrackBack allows other weblogs to write about something that I wrote about and link their comment to mine by "pinging" the relevant article. Then, by clicking on the "trackback" link just under the article introduction, you can see everyone who pinged this article, and all the people I pinged when I wrote it.

For example - this article should be linked to the TrackBack discussion on the MovableType webpage.

Of course I could have just removed this page and replaced all my code with the (undoubtedly superior) code from MovableType, but enough work went into this that I'm unwilling to let it go (sunk costs, I know, but I'm only human) and I like the fact that I understand exactly how everything here works, so I'm going to hang on to it for now.

MovableType's webpage is here

When writing a website, the hardest part is getting any kind of traffic. What's to be done?

I look at this website, which was originally written as a personal attempt to get my head around PHP and MySQL, and I reckon it's pretty good - as far as weblogs go. The functionality and back-end systems create a really robust website, and a bunch of the functionality is hidden from most users - private groups, private messaging, advertising management software... In many ways I'm quite proud of it.

But here's the rub... My traffic stays low, and I oscillate between 0 and 1 google pagerank. It's not that I really want to be a popular page (I probably can't afford the bandwidth anyway), but the amount of effort that goes into creating a truly unique (Ok - influenced by Slashdot, but relatively unique nonetheless) look and feel are wasted if the number of people who visit stays low.

So what's to be done. Well here are a few options I considered...

Reciprocal Linking

I spent much of today looking around the internet for sites I would feel comfortable linking to, and asking for a link from. But two things get in the way of this, and Groucho Marx would have loved me for this... I don't want any of the sites that would be likely to take me up on the offer to link to me in the first place, and the sites that I would like to have link to me, would probably not bother because they don't need a link in return, at least not from me.

Link Farms

Horrible, horrible things that pull search results out of the realm of the useful, and reduce the value of search engines dramatically. May they all rot in hell.

Paid Advertising

I make a net loss on this site, despite the fact that its hosted with one of the (in my opinion) most cost effective hosting companies in the UK (this is them) so I'm not likely to spend additional cash on it unless I find a way to make money from it - which isn't really the point of the site in the first place...

Spamming

The most loathsome behaviour on the internet, enough said.

Use of fake keywords

Not very honest, and likely to get me delisted from the most valuable search engines.

Niche presence

This actually works - take the movie reviews for example - the review of Leo is one of the most popular links on the site. Why? Because it's an unreleased film that very few people have seen, and since I have a review on my site thanks to Incandenza (who saw the movie in London upon its initial screening), the 2/3000 people who actually want to read about it actually do come via my site, because it's quite exclusive (if obscure) content. I'd like to do more of this, but the problem is the population of a niche is small, and 2/3000 hits is not a big number, none of these people register, and few if any come back, mainly because they didn't even notice the URL, they were just here for the review.

So What's Left?

Too many companies out there offer services to fix this problem, and too many people out there are trying to solve this problem through gaming the system. I'd rather be known for the content and regular updates my site actually can claim to have than some neat trick that lures unwilling browsers to my site.

But there's a catch...

It's a critical mass game. Once you've got enough interested parties (especially spontaneous links), you get enough hits that the googlebar and the general awareness of the existence of your website rises above the low-water mark. From there, its a few short steps to a small regular readership and you can start to feel like you're building something. Getting there legitimately is a long. hard. slog. I'm trying to do this right, but hell it ain't easy, this doesn't pay the bills.

So my conclusion is this: It stinks, but I'm not going to compromise on the legitimacy of this site's actual hit-rate by playing silly games with the search engines - I want my rating on Google to tell me something (and not how well I gamed the system). Google will let me know when I've successfully broken through, whereas other webmasters sometimes seem to think that Google is the tool that will enable them to break through. I have to hope that their program is good enough, and my content is good enough, that I will eventually get somewhere closer to the top of the listings than page 7 of the search results.

In the meantime, I keep writing, giving away free advertising (that amazingly no-one takes me up on - I do get a few hundred hits a day you know!) and hoping that someone gets to liking my writing. Perhaps there are more optimal ways of getting to the top of the various listings, but I like what I'm doing here. Although I'd also like to be higher in the search rankings, I have to make a choice.

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The east coast of the US got hit by huge snowfalls this weekend, and between 20 and 25 inches of snow fell in 24 hours.

The entire city was abruptly and completely under the snow. I went to a friend's house at 10pm on Sunday for a "snowed-in party", and trudged several blocks through the snow to get there. Seeing as cars are much more important than people here, the snow from the roads had been shovelled onto the pavements, where it was up to a metre deep in places, and so pedestrians were walking on the streets.

The next morning, I got up and took these photos around the Rittenhouse Square area (in the centre of Centre City). Everyone was outdoors, playing in the snow. by the time I took these pictures, a lot of the snow had already been taken away. They're now putting it in trucks and dumping it in the river.

Cars were snowed in, and sometimes completely hidden by the snow.

Philadelphia was up and running again quite fast, thanks to a the sudden appearance of many of these!

The beauty of the surroundings was not lost on the locals, who were all taking pictures.

Cycling was not really an option anyway.

The smaller roads were not cleared for ages, and some cars were obviously going nowhere, not that they'd have wanted to, given the conditions of the roads!

In Rittenhouse square, pedestrians quickly recreated the usual paths.

Some people were better equipped than others, and they had the roads almost to themselves

Others cleared the pavement outside their houses as best they could, before the stuff at the bottom turned to ice.

Taking a walk in the park is easier if you own a pair of skis

Even large streets (this is the view north from 19th & Delancey), where cars passed frequently, kept a covering of snow for more than a day

The statues in the park were almost completely hidden by the snow

But everyone enjoyed walking around in the snow.

Posted by nlvp at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)

This is a terrible film. Those 106 minutes could be spent doing something productive like talking to a loved one, starting your first novel or staring at slowly drying paint.

First let me say that I thought both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable were excellent films, intelligently written and sensitively directed.

Signs isn't. It has almost no story, no meaningful character, mundane direction and underwhelming performances.

I don't want to give anything away for those of you foolish enough, as I was, to invest the time and money in this film so I won't go into huge detail. Suffice to say that there is no pay off for the story. Underlying it is a central tragedy with such genuine potential emotional depth that it's use as superficial character bio is demeaning. On top of that, there is an overwhelming sense that more interesting things are happening elsewhere in the world.

Mel Gibson tones his performance down as Bruce Willis did in the two previous films but to much less effect. Joaquim Phoenix is undoubtedly a fine actor but he is totally wasted here. The two children give fine naturalistic performances though and this does seem to be a talent of Shyamalan's. If only someone would tell him that Hitchcockian cameo's are fine but that he is no actor. He gives himself a part of undue significance which fatally undermines critical scenes.

Then again, that may explain why his mind wasn't on the directing. The film is an incoherent mess of other people's visual cliches with nothing thematic to tie it together.

Much of the writing is painfully on the nose, with characters blurting out each others pasts with regularity. It would have been slightly more subtle to simply hold up a big red card saying 'Exposition - Please pay attention'.

A quick summary then ... this movie is one of the biggest disappointments I can remember and poses serious questions about F Night Shyamalan's long-term future as a filmmaker, so devoid is it of ideas. Avoid at all costs, but if you should watch it, remember, You Were Warned!

I wasn't sure how to start this review, and so I went and read a few others to see what language was being used to describe it elsewhere, and was a little surprised to find that the movie had been met in the critical press by a mixture of loathing and contempt. I thought I'd add my dissenting voice to the noise.

Rotten Tomatoes has a freshness rating of 37% on this movie. This is awful, and would normally indicate that it didn’t deserve to be made at all. I find this hard to understand, because while it certainly doesn’t deserve much in the way of accolades, there is little to actively dislike about the movie, it is not overly simple, it is not riddled with clichéd one-liners, it is not badly filmed and it doesn’t bore the audience. Why all the horrible dislike? I’ll get to my thoughts on that later – but first the film.

James Clayton (Colin Farrell)is an exceptionally bright MIT graduate, tormented by the disappearance of his father in a plane crash years before, who is recruited by Walter Burke (Al Pacino) to work as a CIA operative. After a brief courtship, James finds himself in "The Farm", the CIA training grounds, where he meets Layla (Bridget Moynahan). Both during and after his training, James learns that in the world of spooks, nothing is as it seems. Surprisingly, no matter how many times he learns this, he always seems to have to learn it again.

I can’t say much more without giving away key plot points. The script seeks to create a level of complexity that gets dramatically unwound at the end, and only partially succeeds, because the dénouement is a little forced, and the set-up gives too much away, such that it is possible to put the pieces together long before the dramatic ending does so for you.

As I said above, I am a little confused as to why so many critics heaped scorn upon this movie. It is entertaining and watchable, and while certainly no masterpiece, it has none of the awful dialogue of Attack of the Clones (63% on RottenTomatoes) or the blatant free-riding on past successes of the latest instalment of Bond (57% on RottenTomatoes). When comparing this movie to others that have recently been released, I was relieved to find at least some original work not collapsing under the weight of a hundred clichés. It is true that it does not have the flair of Spy Game and that it is much weaker in terms of grittiness than Training Day, but to say it was a weak parody of both, as Sean Burns does in the Philadelphia Weekly, is to be a little too harsh.

Perhaps the fairest criticism of this movie is that it is carried by the performance of its two main actors rather than the strength of the script or the talent of the director and crew. Reading the reviews, my favourite criticism disguised as a compliment comes from the Amazing Colossal Website, where the review states that the pace of the film prevents the idiocies of the plot from sinking in before the credits have rolled.

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The Recruit page at the Internet Movie Database

Touchstone Pictures’ official "The Recruit" website

Trailers from Apple.com

Neuroses and insecurities abound in this highly self-referential script from Charlie Kaufman and (fictitious) brother Donald.

Some spoilers below

Starring Nicolas Cage (twice), Tilda Swinton, Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper, this intelligent and self-referential film casts a cold and clear light on the insecurities of a neurotic writer who is consumed by his sense of self-loathing, and who is seeking – through his writing – for a path that will lead him clear of his self-imposed unhappiness.

As Charlie struggles to make headway on a screenplay he has been asked to adapt from a novel, his personal insecurities are brought into sharp focus by his inability to progress in this endeavour, by his interactions with his would-be girlfriend Valerie (played by Tilda Swinton) and in his difficult relationship with his brother.

As Charlie tries flawed solution after flawed solution to climb out of his state of depression, his environment predictably prevents him from picking himself up, until he is finally forced into reluctant action in an attempt to salvage his script, his job, his relationship with his brother, and ultimately, his relationship with himself. Since the screenwriter is also called Charlie Kaufman, and there is no screenwriter called Donald Kaufman, insiders might want to read Charlie's observations of Donald as schitzophrenic form of self-analysis.

While slow-moving and uncomfortable in parts, Kaufman’s script tackles this patchwork of interconnected neuroses with intelligence and tact. By using the twins as caricatures of the neurotic and blissfully self-confident and placing them in a crucible, he manages to draw out sometimes painful insights, although the extreme caricature of the main protagonist sometimes leaves us wondering if we are supposed to laugh or cringe with embarrassment.

If you thought enlightenment was better than blissful ignorance, this film may change your mind, given how blissful the ignorance seems in comparison to the hateful self-examination Charlie inflicts upon himself.

Another strong theme in the film is the approach to screenwriting, and Robert McKee’s lectures and book are drawn upon to great effect to illustrate the difference between the brothers, one of whom, as the trailer puts it, “Writes like he lives: with great difficulty”, whereas the other "lives like he writes... with foolish abandon".

This film takes a while to get going, and reaches ambitiously for higher intellectual ground, and although it may have sacrificed the “edge of your seat” trick in favour of a less typical and more researched effect on the audience, it is safe to say that it succeeds in its ambitions and will stay with you for a while after you leave the theatre. We all will see a part of ourselves reflected in some aspect of Charlie’s neuroses, and in the end, the early signs of his release from his demons should leave the entire audience with a palpable – if perhaps bittersweet – sense of relief.

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Adaptation - Internet Movie Database

Trailers from Apple.com

The Orchid Thief from Amazon.com, written by Susan Orlean (Amazon.co.uk)

Adaptation DVD - Amazon record

Official Site