Author: BillSaysThis

Watching this 1954 film by Alfred Hitchcock, I was a little surprised by how mechanical everything seemed, and how little suspense generated, and then I read this review by B. Kite of a recent revivial and found out the original release was part of that mid-’50s craze for 3-D movies. Unlike most of the movies he made, Hitchcock came on late in the game with Dial M for Murder and had less opportunity to make it his own.

Set in post-WWII London, Ray Milland plays former tennis pro Tony Wendice and the lustrous Grace Kelly his rich wife Margot, who’s having an affair with American mystery novelist Mark Halliday (played by Robert Cummings). Supporting them are John Williams (I remember him from Sabrina and To Catch a Thief) as a classic British police inspector and Anthony Dawson as one of Milland’s long-ago university classmates.

Milland uncovered the affair a year before but Cummings returned to America and is just returning to England as Dial begins; Milland has spent the year preparing and now thinks he’s plotted the perfect murder. The lovers think they’ve been discrete and one of the early scenes, with the three of them in the Wendices’ flat talking, is painfully amusing. Milland even asks the novelist if he’s come up with the perfect murder for one of his books but Cummings says such a thing is not possible in the real world.

And of course it isn’t. The plan develops cracks from the moment it goes into motion and this is where Hitchcock can work his gleefully intense magic on what began life as a minor stage play. Lighting, sounds, carefully designed movement, even purposeful looks combine to overcome the bloated, talky opening act.

recommended

Nothing much appealing on last night so we watched Vin Diesel’s essentially failed attempt to broaden his proven base beyond big budget flicks with this look at a cop driven beyond the pale. A Man Apart didn’t do the box office New Line Cinema had hoped nor did it get the kind of critical reaction Diesel wanted.

The story is basic enough, and Diesel actually gives a fine performance, so I blame director F. Gary Gray (who did a much better job on his next movie, The Italian Job) or perhaps writers Paul Scheuring and Christian Gudegast. This is a police thriller, not science fiction, and I really don’t expect to have to suspend my disbelief quite as much as A Man Apart demands. For instance, at the begining Diesel and his DEA team take part in a raid of a Tijuana nightclub by their Mexican counterparts; while officially the Americans are not allowed guns, someone reaches in a bag and passes enough of them around so everyone has one but in the end their are no repercussions and the targetted drug lord is simply whisked off to American justice (second impossibility as their would be years of court battles over extradition).

not recommended

Just got a chance to watch Concert for George via PBS (previous entry). Some awesome performances from Clapton, McCartney, Jeff Lynne, Joe Brown (a musician from Liverpool who was just a little bigger than the Beatles back in the day, got to do Here Comes The Sun and lead all the rest in the closer, I’ll See You In My Dreams) but I especially loved My Sweet Lord which featured Billy Preston on vocals and organ and Clapton on acoustic guitar before the rest of the band came in towards the end. Harrison’s catalogue is like an iceberg and he suffered badly in comparison to his two much more famous badmates but he made plenty of gems too. If like me you’re not oging to buy the CD or DVD, try and see if any accessible PBS station will be rebroadcasting this and dig it!

Big thanks to Anatoly Lubarsky for his help in solving at least one CSS issue, getting a <div> to a minimum height in IE since IE doesn’t implement the min-height property.

Plus I did get Carl’s menu code working, which is very sweet, though I’m still having width problems. But not girth.

Lately I’ve been trying to work up a very simple CSS-based dropdown menu, one where the top level item under the cursor changes colors and if there is a submenu it is displayed. Many sites have these, I’m sure you’ve seen them. However, most use JavaScript, a language I’ve never learned, and so I’m looking for a pre-built solution. There are many of these, some free, some inexpensive (for commercial use, which the intended use is) and at least one other ridiculously expensive (the site wisely does not display the pricing but I was quoted $1500 as the standard single site fee, which instantly dropped to $500 when I pushed back but even at that amount I was laughing to hard to manage a reply to the salesperson).

One thing about all of these implementations is that they require customization for each use. Clearly that makes sense because, at the least, every menu will have different choices and then there are factors such as color, size, location and behaviors as well. But what none of the implementations have, which really truly surprises me, is some sort of wizard to generate the menu source code.

How hard would this be to write? Instead of adding some ridiculous tweak that no commercial site would use, and here I’m thinking of the first days of laser printers when corporate geeks constantly created ransom note-like memos, why not spend some time developing a real value-add. Since I’m getting paid for this effort, albeit not all that much, I am willing to pay a modest licensing fee for this and I imagine that so would quite a few others. And even if the market wouldn’t bear a higher license fee than what seems to be the norm just now (between $30 and $50), these developers should think about the savings in support costs of such an enhancement.

So please, Milonic, Dynamic Drive, Imposter and the rest of you bunch, somebody get busy and deliver this ASAP, m’kay? How about you, Foo?

Samuel P. Huntington has published a lengthy essay in the current issue of Foreign Policy titled The Hispanic Challenge. A friend forwarded the link to me with the comment “I say we should seal the borders tight like a …” This friend is an intelligent, well-meaning guy but (sorry dude) sometimes I think that he is very representative of the modern self-centered American.

Huntington is chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and I’ve often seen him described as, essentially, one of the top academic thinkers on history and government. He’s perhaps best known for authoring the 1993 essay/book The Clash of Civilizations?, a look at modern history that stood in stark contrast to the contemporaneous The End of History by Francis Fukuyama.

In The Hispanic Challenge, Huntington goes to extreme length to show that Mexican immigrants are not assimilating into the American melting pot in the way that almost all nationalities have previously done. Perhaps because the group is so numerous and has tended to settle in their own neighborhoods, these new Americans haven’t felt the urgency to adopt American attitudes or even the general use of English in order to fit in. Huntington cites Canada and Belgium as stable democracies split between two major cultural/language groups but then dismisses them as trying to hard to achieve their stability and equality.

While all that he’s written may be factually correct, overall this piece comes off as nasty and racist to me. If we are not free to retain what elements of our origins we choose, we are less free. Personally I would prefer that all residents of the Estados Unidos speak understandable English, that’s just because my life would be easier.

My answer to my friend’s comment was even simpler: “I cannot begin to imagine how America could change this immigration pattern unless and until Mexico and the other Latin countries can provide jobs and quality of life as are available here.” And that is the bottom line from a practical level.

Yet another film made in New Zealand but Whale Rider is to Scarfies what Airplane is to Scary Movie 3. In this movie based on Witi Ihimaera’s novel, we get an honest emotional trip by a young woman who refuses to accept the place in life others want to assign her. Kind of resonates with my recent reading of The Secret Life of Bees.

The movie begins with a tragedy, the mother and one of a pair of twins, a boy, die as she gives birth; though the other twin, a girl, is healthy and lives, the father is driven away and the grandfather is shaken to his core. Whale Rider is set in a Maori village in New Zealand and the grandfather (Rawiri Paratene) is the tribal chief. According to tradition, the firstborn son must succeed him as chief but after his wife’s death, the son (Cliff Curtis) leaves the village, his daughter and future behind to become an artist in Germany. The grandparents raise Pai, their granddaughter, but the tradition-bound old man cannot bring himself to allow her a place mandated by present-day mores. Instead he goes so far as to re-open a school to teach the village teenage boys enough so they may participate in a contest to find the new chief.

But Pai will not go along, hanging around outside the school, practicing mostly on her own, sneaking help from her uncle at times, and all along simply looking for the normal approval any child wants from the man who raised her. Keisha Castle-Hughes won a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her effort; while she lost that to Charlize Theron, I can see why she was shortlisted–Castle-Hughes did win the New Zealand version of the award as well as numerous others–and look forward to seeing her in Star Wars Episode III (even if I end up waiting to see that on TV).

Niki Caro did an excellent job of adapting the novel into a screenplay and directing the film. People in America generally look at the landscapes of New Zealand and break into excited words, which Caro uses a bit here, but more than that she connects the characters to their territory visually. The dialog does well by avoiding overt sentimentality as would be all too easy in scenes such as when Pai’s father returns for a brief visit or when her grandfather is let down by the young boys.

definitely recommended, this is not a chick flick

First thing after I get a job, this kitchen is getting remodeled!

Some sadness here this morning as I cut the remaining financial ties to Sun Microsystems. Back in the day it fueled some big dreams but foolishness inserted itself into my reality and erased these romantic dreams in my head. In the end, I think I paid more in AMT and other taxes than I actually made in profit, which shows what a wonderful system we have.

Or not, perhaps. On the one hand George Mitchell says his role as chairman is not the usual strategic leadership but instead will be focusing on winning back dissafected shareholders. On the other, still-standing CEO Michael Eisner says he “would address shareholder concerns by focusing ‘100 per cent of my time’ on rebuilding earnings at the company.” Eisner further said Eisner said: “It allows me and the rest of the management more time to run the operations of the company and give up a lot of the responsibility I had as chairman.”

If you ask me, these two statements of their respective responsibilities are in pretty direct conflict with each other and I believe the Disney PR staffers better get the leadership talking from the same script ASAP. The two will have a tough enough time getting shareholder confidence back as it is without this kind of muck-up.

To the Mercury News, in regards to a Letter printed today written by an election field inspector:

Janis Lassner writes from an informed but biased position regarding her experience with Tuesday’s voting process. While I would not question her veracity, she conflates her limited anecdotal experience with statistically valid evidence. Further, her observation that using the machines is “fast, fun and easy” for many voters in no way addresses the security issues that many researchers have found.

I do agree with Ms. Lassner that the Mercury News should expand coverage of this issue, though, and would especially appreciate articles that look at open source projects like (http://open-vote.org/) Open Vote Foundation. and (http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/) Open Voting Consortium. Only when the voting public can examine the source code and hardware designs used in our voting machines will we truly be able to trust the results.

I was drinking a Big Brew this morning when Foo pointed me to SMALL, MEDIUM, LARGE but fortunately there was no coffee in my mouth when the squirrel started ranting.

VC Ed Sim says something I’ve been saying ever since I started writing software: Build your business around customers. [via the Scoblemeister]

You have to love the cluelessness that corporate directors sometimes show. Enron, Adelphia and Tyco were simply out of control, illegal to the core. While no one is accusing Michael Eisner of malfesance, the man who has ruled the Mouse Kingdom for 20 years is certainly not making many friends lately. The Roberts family have made a so-far inadequate takeover offer and Walt’s nephew Roy has been campaigning to SaveDisney.

What did the board do today as part of today’s annual meeting? After 43% of the shareholders withheld their votes to re-elect Eisner to the board, they took away his Chairman title. Who did they give it to in his place? This is where the entertainment comes in, stay with me. Former US Senator George Mitchell. And why is this funny? Because over 20% of the shareholders also withheld their votes from Mitchell! (Hint: if the independent board members actually had a clue, they would have brough in someone new from outside the empire.)

I’m listening to a live recording of Bruce and the E Streeters doing a beautiful version of Jimmy Cliff’s Many Rivers to Cross right now, very calming and uplifting! Slow, gospel backup vocals, Danny providing the primary instrumental backing on organ and some very subtle guitar strumming but not nearly long enough at 3:37

Plenty of people have written and spoken out against the current proprietary electronic voting systems. During the Morning Coffee Walk we discussed the idea of an open source system to replace Diebold et al. However, others have fortunately had the idea and gone to work already:

Open Vote Foundation and Open Voting Consortium (related Wired News article).

Campaign Desk: What You See is Not What You Get, very interesting behind the scenes at major newspaper websites.

I usually avoid stuff like this page like the plague but what the heck, it’s so sweet and funny.

I you live in one of the 10 states holding primaries today, don’t not vote. That is, VOTE. Don’t use lame excuses, especially the one that begins “My vote doesn’t matter because…” Too many people felt that way in 2000 and look where we are. Think of this as a practice run for November, to ensure that GWB is shown the door.

I had the privilege of escorting a first time voter to the polls this morning. She was a little nervous about the whole thing but afterwards admitted that her fears were groundless–she even thanked me for the encouragement. Very nice.

VOTE!

Pandora’s Star: Peter F. Hamilton, who wrote what I consider one of the masterworks of recent science fiction, starts a new series of books. I’m referring to The Night’s Dawn Trilogy, which sprawled over 3400 pages or so and was actually published in America in six separate volumes. Looks like I missed a standalone novel last year but since it’s now out in paperback…