Archive for July, 2009

Good, Bad Action Movies

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

There never seems to be enough time to do anything these days; and blogging keeps falling to the bottom of the priority list.

Work has been… odd to say the least. There have been a lot of organization changes in the last month. This all leads to uncertainty for everyone as to what product they will be working on next. There are some great opprotunities career-wise, but they don’t sound like fun. There are also some fun sounding opportunities, but they won’t necessarily be good career-wise. I guess we will all just have to wait and see what happens.

We’ve been watching some movies lately. It has actually been quite a while since we spent much time watching movies. Generally we stick to the longer, more involved, plotlines of good television shows. (Speaking of which Torchwood – Children of Earth was absolutely fantastic and you should go watch it right now if you haven’t already seen it.)

However we have managed to have a run of good luck with some quirky, yet excellent, smaller films. In no particular order:

Franklyn (IMDb)
- An interesting split narrative. Essentially one story is taking place simulatneously in two different realties and time periods. Pulled off quite well.

The Fall (IMDb)
- This one is by the director of The Cell. I’m not sure I need to say too much more. The bulk of the film is a story told by an injured stuntman told to a little girl as seen through her imagination. It is well crafted and well acted. I’m not sure how the world managed to miss this film.

The Science of Sleep (IMDb)
- A quirky french film about a man who often gets reality and his dreams mixed up; and how that complicates both his work and his personal life.

After watching those movies, which were all basically independent films, I started thinking more about all of the movies made around the world that don’t make it to North America. I miss the days of my youth when so many of the Asian action movies would make there way here.

So, I started looking around for some Top 10 lists for various countries. Japan, Korea, France, even good ol’ Canada. And much to my delight I discovered that martial arts action movies (which have slowly been dying out in North America) are still very much alive over seas. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about epics like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (IMDb) or John Woo’s latest Red Cliff (IMDb). I’m talking about campy, over the top action like Crows Zero (IMDb) and Marine Boy (IMDb); or what people like myself would call “fun” movies.

Along the way I found some pretty cool sites for Asian movie reviews such as:

It is indeed good to know that there are still good, bad action movies being made out there. Even if I do have to watch them with subtitles.

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The Work Marathon

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

Somewhere along the way towards our fourth milestone, and then alpha, life started getting a little fuzzy. I was at work for 28 out of 31 days there at one point. The worst thing is that on a team of close to 40, there were only 7-10 of us there getting things done.

That kind of situation is never good for team morale.

Regardless, that period is behind us now. I am now on the last day of a three day weekend and I am finally starting to feel like a normal human being again. I know the push to all of the milestones between now and beta will be tough, but at least we won’t be getting heaps of new features piled on us.

Alpha to Beta is one of my favourite parts of a project. It is the home stretch of the project. The point at which you are just fixing bugs. Grinding away at them until you finally hit zero and then scrambling to keep them at zero.

As much as I do enjoy this part of the project, I really can’t wait for the whole thing to be pushed out the door.

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