Categories
Random observations

Me and You and Everyone We Know

We didn’t know what to expect from Me and You and Everyone We Know. Thankfully it turned out to be one of the finest low budget films I’ve seen. Since watching this film, I’ve found out that it won the 2005 Caméra d’Or at Cannes and the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at Sundance among numerous others. Roger Ebert also awarded it four out of four stars in a recent review. All this from a first time director, Miranda July, who also co-starred in this wonderful film.

We know, almost as soon as we set eyes on him, that there’s something a little odd about Richard, played brilliantly by John Hawkes. This is confirmed moments later when, in an effort to impress his two children in the midst of separating from his African American wife (Jonell Kennedy), he pours lighter fluid over his hand and sets it alight! We find out a few scenes later that he confused lighter fluid with rubbing alcohol (which apparently won’t burn you when set alight).

Christine (July), is a budding modern artist who composes strange little cinema pieces from photographs stuck to her wall. To pay the bills, she drives the elderly around town in her car. On one such trip, she takes her client and friend, Michael (Hector Elias), to a shoe store. Here she meets Richard, who’s a salesman in the shoe store. From this point on, Christine more or less stalks Richard – in the nicest of ways. These two, both quirky in their own ways, are obviously meant to be together. Christine sees this from the start, while Richard, having just separated from his wife and with two young children to look after, is still less sure of this.

Further entertainment is provided by the young characters: Richards children, Peter (Miles Thompson) and Robby (Brandon Ratcliff), Sylvie homemaker (Carlie Westerman) who is the young girl next door, and Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend) who play a couple of late teens curious about sex. The funniest moments in this film occur during an Internet chat that Peter and Robby are having with an unknown person who becomes highly aroused at Robby’s strange, but ultimately innocent (Robby is seven years old), ideas of sex.

A terrific movie. If you like slightly offbeat and innovative films, this one’s a must see.

Categories
Random observations

Land of Plenty

When there are so many movies showing at a film festival, it’s hard to decide which ones to see. However, Land of Plenty was an obvious choice from the outset, since it stars Karen’s favourite actress, Michelle Williams. Be warned, some spoilers follow.

After returning to America after years spent in Africa and the Middle East with her (deceased) missionary parents, Lana (Williams) sets out to find her uncle in order to pass on a letter from her mother. Lana finds work and accommodation at an LA mission operated by a friend of the family. Her uncle, Paul (John Diehl) turns out to be a paranoid Vietnam War veteran, who spends most of his time driving around in a surveillance vehicle staking out those he suspects to be terrorists. Hassan (Shaun Toub), a homeless Pakistani man whom Paul had been following, is killed in a drive-by shooting. Lana and Paul decide to track down Hassan’s family; she because she feels it isn’t right for Hassan to end up in an anonymous grave on the outskirts of LA (the fate of many a homeless John/Jane Doe) and he because he smells a terrorist plot. The ensuing journey is what makes this film worth seeing. In some ways Wim Wenders was brave to make this film because of the post-9/11 theme, which, although apparent throughout the entire film, is brought into sharp focus in its closing scenes. There are also some very funny moments in this movie, mostly featuring Paul and his military gadgets. One thing that could have made the film better in my opinion, is if the first half of the movie could have been shortened and the latter half expanded.

No doubt this film will be added to our DVD collection at some point, not just because of its Dawson’s Creek connection but because it’s a genuinely good movie.

Categories
Random observations

Brisbane International Film Festival

Karen and I were lucky enough to score five passes each to the Brisbane International Film Festival courtesy of Clinton. (Thanks heaps!) We’ve seen three films so far: Land of Plenty, Me and You and Everyone We Know and Puppy. A brief review of each will appear here shortly.

Categories
Random observations

The Thin Line gets real hosting

RickyRobinson.id.au and The Thin Line have been moved off the computers in my bedroom to a real webhosting service. There’s a number of reasons for this. First, my blogging software has a memory leak in it somewhere, which necessitates the restarting of Tomcat every so often. I think the problem lies in the way I’ve configured Tomcat (probably with the database connection pooling stuff) rather than in the code itself. In times past, I might have had the time and the actual desire to track down this problem; I have neither of those two things right now. I’d rather be writing blog entries than debugging my crappy blog software. :-) Second, I’ll be moving house soon. I’ll be taking my workstation with me, which has the Tomcat install on it, but leaving the firewall, which was doubling as the web server. So my blog configuration was actually distributed across two machines, and separating the computers would completely break my blog. Now you’re wondering why on Earth I had such a convoluted setup. Well, when Tomcat was running on the firewall/gateway, which is a very low end machine, my blog site loaded very, very slowly. It improved enormously when I switched it over to my workstation, which just goes to show that network communication is by no means always the bottleneck in a network/distributed application (requests for my blog were still coming through Apache on the gateway, and were forwarded to Tomcat on my workstation via the Apache JServ Protocol). I suppose I could have moved Apache to my workstation too and just done port forwarding on the firewall, but for whatever reason I didn’t go down that track. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the process of moving would mean my website and my blog would have been offline for quite some time. Lastly, I’ve given up trying to update my blogging system with the latest cool feature. I got as far as adding an RSS feed and pinging Technorati whenever a new post is added, but where’s the commenting system and support for trackback and so on and so forth?

So, I got myself some web hosting, transfered my web site to the web host, installed WordPress and then imported my blog via RSS. For now I’m just using one of the WordPress templates. I might try to revert to the gray look later on.

Hopefully your browsers and aggregators are being automatically redirected to the appropriate URLs. Just in case the feed redirection isn’t working for you, the RSS feed can now be found here.

Categories
Random observations

Engaged

It is with much elation that I announce that Karen and I are engaged, and due to be married next year, probably in mid-April. We’ve been engaged since our Queen’s Birthday weekend holiday in Noosa, but I delayed announcing it here so we could tell all our friends and family first. Needless to say, we’re both looking forward to April next year!

Categories
Random observations

Blair, the metrosexual

I found this article about the amount of money Tony Blair spends on make up each year highly amusing.

Categories
Random observations

It’s been a slow Saturday

So…

I Am A: Lawful Good Human Ranger Bard

Alignment:
Lawful Good characters are the epitome of all that is just and good. They believe in order and governments that work for the benefit of all, and generally do not mind doing direct work to further their beliefs.

Race:
Humans are the ‘average’ race. They have the shortest life spans, and because of this, they tend to avoid the racial prejudices that other races are known for. They are also very curious and tend to live ‘for the moment’.

Primary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.

Secondary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.

Deity:
Mielikki is the Neutral Good goddess of the forest and autumn. She is also known as the Lady of the Forest, and is the Patron of Rangers. Her followers are devoted to nature, and believe in the positive and outreaching elements of it. They use light armor, and a variety of weapons suitable for hunting, which they are quite skilled at. Mielikki’s symbol is a unicorn head.

Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy of NeppyMan (e-mail)

Categories
Random observations

Guus Hiddink

One of the world’s most widely respected football coaches, Guus Hiddink, has been appointed as the new coach of the Australian national team. Hiddink, a dutchman, has twice taken teams to the World Cup semi-finals: the Netherlands in 1998 and, more remarkably, South Korea in 2002. He has now been charged with enormous task of guiding Australia into the 2006 World Cup, which means overcoming the fifth placed South American qualifier in November, assuming Australia first manages to beat the Solomon Islands in September. Hiddink’s first game as manager of Australia will be the first leg of the playoff with the Solomon Islands.

Until November, Hiddink will share his time between the club team PSV Eindhoven and the Australian national team. In last season’s European Champions League, the world’s top club competition, Hiddink was at the helm as PSV made it to the semi-finals of that competition, and so nearly overcame AC Milan to make it to the final.

In Guus Hiddink, the FFA have appointed the best man they could have. But now Hiddink faces a challenge the like of which he has never faced before. Let’s hope he can do what his predecessors could not.

Categories
Random observations

Suffering

Ecthelion says:

Suffering is cause by desire. Stop desiring to waste you money on sparkly stuff and you’ll be a lot happier!

A contrary point of view is that one ought to spend all one’s money, so that one has none left, and only then will one be happy because it is only then that the really important things in life become apparent. I leave it to someone else to test this theory.

Of course, Master Yoda, whom is totally unconcerned with money, would say:

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

Ecthelion et al, pleez bewear tha Monkey King; not a fliverous fret.

Categories
Random observations

Random’s new coat

Karen made this cute new coat for Random. Unfortunately the material didn’t prove to be the sturdiest choice, as Random’s already managed to pull a few threads. I suspect there might be a corduroy coat in the making soon.

Randoms's new coat