Below are the graves of the Brothers Grimm, which I saw on a detour to Schöneberg. There seemed to be papers at the ground, children’s notes held down by stones. Not sure if that was a particular school trip or some sort of tradition I’m unaware of.

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Berlin is very much alive.

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Miao Miao was the first movie, and a very good start. It’s Hsiao-tse Cheng first film, and it can easily be described as younger eyes looking through Kar Wai Wong’s glasses (you’d probably like it, Annie). Both lead actresses are perfect for their parts, and while the actor playing Chen Fei mopes around a bit too much, his is a secondary role – it’s the two girls who define and carry the movie.

Baraka I’ve already spoken about, as I have about The Dust of Time.

Meotjin Haru, which was translated as My Dear Enemy, was charming. This time we move from Taiwan to Korea, for a bittersweet movie that has just a couple of dashes of Woody-Allen-when-he-doesn’t-suck for flavor. The two hours went by in a flash.

Adam Resurrected should probably be called Goldblum Resurrected, since it gives him his first brilliant part since The Fly in a movie that is so odd that its closest spiritual cousin is Naked Lunch – only that in this case the oddness comes only from behavior and character, not environment and sphincter-bugs. Willem Dafoe is also great in a very subtle mix of cruelty and weakness, and for a specific scene, an inversion of his role in another movie involving a desert. Goldblum is in general not a great actor, but I do wish he would get these perfectly tailored parts more often.

The Casuarina Cove was a well-done short from Singapore about police entrapment of gay men. Recommended for its focus – director Boo Junfeng (when they said his name I thought he was named like the central character from Ashes of Time) stated before the screening that his intention was to bring to light the entrapment and homophobia issues in Singapore and that’s exactly what the short does, without taking two hours retreading the same ground until nothing will grow on it. Contrast that with End of Love, a 95-minute movie that felt like I was watching Ben-Hur in slow motion – and dubbed to Dutch. When you have little to say, you should be brief about it.

The Turkish production Mommo was very refreshing. It’s a straightforward look at the lives of two very young brothers in a village in Turkey going through a difficult period, and doesn’t make any attempt at shoehorning this into a current plot structure. The movie comes in, shows you the characters, makes you care for them, kicks you in the stomach, and then it’s over – no major turning points every 30 minutes, no grand resolutions, no initially dislikable foils turned allies, no initially likable characters with ulterior motives. It was very refreshing to see a movie that doesn’t attempt to push the same worn-out buttons.

The director and two of the main adult actors were on hand to answer questions, of which I didn’t understand a single word since it was held on Turkish and German.

The Korean Members of the Funeral is well acted and competently photographed, but otherwise pedestrian. Nothing to see here, carry on.

It was amusing to see a reissue of Basil Dearden’s Khartoum, a 1966 movie about manipulative figures using religious zealotry and faced against myopic colonialists convinced of their own righteousness, which if anything tells us that the world never changes (except for the official I will not take it upon this country to police the world bit). Heston is great, but Olivier as The Mahdi felt stilted and fake – funny that I didn’t remember perceiving it like that when I first saw it.

Finally came a presentation of Blindsight, a 2006 documentary about a group of blind Tibetan kids climbing the Himalayas. These are not former athletes who lost their sight, but six random children out of a small support center. Not only are they completely, absolutely blind, but you have to see the way blind people are treated in Tibet, even by their own family. I can only imagine the effect on your self-esteem of having been told throughout your life that you’d better have died, or that you are supposed to take whatever abuse is thrown at you – you deserve it, or you wouldn’t be blind in this life. I should get a copy, stick it in a plank of wood and use it to beat over the head anyone who says something like I can’t stop smoking, it’s too difficult or exercising is hard.

Oh, but they have time, it’s not like they have a job and family… SMACK!

The festival was a great experience, and one that I’m looking forward to repeating. Maybe the next time I won’t take a detour to Hamburg in the middle of it and get to see more films.

I just wish they didn’t hold it in winter.

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How the art reviews will probably read: A deeply personal movie, crafted with a daring, lyrical beauty, Theo Angelopolous’ The Dust of Time challenges the viewer with a juxtaposition of time-disjointed set pieces about an elderly love triangle, with the main story – if one dares call it that – revolving around Willem Dafoe’s understated performance.

De-bullshit-fier: Only Theo Angelopolous knows what this confused, boring set of kitchen-sink scenes is supposed to mean. Dafoe somehow manages to sleepwalk hurriedly through something that should be titled Alzheimer – The Movie.

Four countries produced the movie. It seems that they also took turns writing and editing it.

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Turns out it wasn’t just a presentation of the film, but the first-ever projection from a new 70mm print. With DTS sound. Displayed on a huge screen.

If you haven’t seen it, the film is basically a slideshow of film vignettes set to music, filmed in about 26 countries. There isn’t a single word of explanation, and the effect of the impeccable montage superimposed with the music is stunning: since it is almost impossible to know immediately where each scene comes from, or what it will switch to in the next few seconds, you spend the whole movie wondering – is that Brazil or Indonesia? Mexico or Morocco? The stratification alternates between the obvious and the obscure, with the latter never detracting from the film, since one of its intentions seems to be precisely to have you question why the image is there and what your preconceptions about it are. Is the tattooed asian a yakuza gangster, or meant to be one, or is he just another example of how we brand ourselves to indicate our tribe, much like the young Australian aboriginals early in the film?

My only regret is I saw it sober.

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Oh, and Batman’s in it too.

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Here’s the trailer.

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One of the books I’ve recently gone through is The Medici Effect, also available as free PDF from the author’s site.

I’m glad I managed to fight the impulse to pass on it – the oh-so-clever title and Tony Robbins-like site were a bad augury – by figuring out hell, I can dump it any time if it sucks. It’s a very quick read on creativity, full of interesting anecdotes, interviews and stories from inventors, enterpreneurs and innovators. It can easily summed up as it’s damn near impossible to be creative if you focus too much only one thing, expect immediate success or don’t take any risks. It’s a simple piece of advice that you probably already knew, but which the myriad of examples will help you grok.

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It’s very readable, and I’m all for anything that promotes adapting quickly to changing times, but at least on the technical side of things it all too often gets the details dead wrong. The errors go from saying Half-Life is a mod of Warcraft, to confusing Stallman’s free-as-in-beer with free-as-in-freedom in an analogy (and ignoring the more important one), to saying that Linus Torvalds founded a company named Linux (ironically ignoring the fact that great things can and do come from outside corporate structure). It gets so many things wrong on the areas I have good knowledge of, that I have to wonder how many of the stories on graffiti or hip-hop are wrong too.

I was suspicious that a book with a title closer to Who Moved My Cheese or The monk who sold his Ferrari would be more style than substance, and it’s unfortunate to have those suspicions confirmed. You’re better off reading Larry Lessig’s Free Culture. On a good example of practicing what you preach, Lessig’s book is available for you to read and distribute online.

Mason’s answer? He lets you remix his logo.

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As for Y: The Last Man, I’m waiting for the series to play out before continuing to get the books. They read too quickly, and I keep having the distinct feeling that Vaughan is pretty much guessing as he goes. I’ll wait until it has run its course to avoid getting attached to another initially-promising-but-later-meandering Powers.

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For example on The Accomplice, one of Vernor Vinge’s short stories written in 1967 which I’ll spoil on this paragraph, a company owner is outraged to find that one of this trusted men has been stealing valuable processing cycles from their mainframe – a seriously outdated concern nowadays. Two particular details mark that story as the work of a technology seer. First, the reason this employee is stealing processing cycles is in order to make a computer-generated movie. Seventeen years before The Last Starfighter, Vinge had already seen that some special effects were just too expensive to make anywhere else; when whole worlds need to be generated, nothing else will suffice. Second, the movie they’re generating is an adaptation of a certain J.R.R. Tolkien book.

Even aware of the man’s genius, Vinge still manages to catch me unprepared. I’d never read True Names, but I knew it was written years before Neuromancer and was effectively the source of the cyberpunk genre, so when I recently got the book I didn’t expect any surprises to be lurking within. And it turns out, what hit me like a sledgehammer was not on the novella itself but a bit that Vinge wrote near the end of his introduction, when speaking about wether computer networks will hinder or help human freedom.

On the other hand, there are the “Four Horsemen” that Tim, Alan and Lenny remark upon. All four horsemen are good excuses for the incremental tightening of regulation and enforcement (some being more effective with one constituency than another), but I think the “Terrorist Horseman” is the one that could shift our whole society towards strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion. It’s not hard to imagine the entire country run the way airports were run in the late twentieth century.

He wrote that in August 1999.

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That’s the only possible reason why Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s careful examination of where current politics are leading us, is being passed on for any relevant Academy awards while Babel, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s tepid brew of facile conflicts and contrived connections is receiving nominations left and right.

Its characters’ problems do not stem from the distance created by language barriers, like the movie propaganda wants to present it. It’s not some sort of vocabulary gap keeping people apart, harming their prospects and screwing with their lives. The real problem is that all of them insist on acting like either masochistic sub-morons or outright dicks. And while I’m sure that the immigration problem is close to González’ heart, the way to make the point is not to attempt to make us feel sorry about somebody who consistently makes idiotic decisions. It very hard to related to relate when their bone-headed choices finally catch up with them.

Any other points the movie may have attempted to make are similarly frittered away, along with the great performers in them. Brad Pitt – wasted. Cate Blanchett – squandered in the worst manner I’ve ever seen. Gael García Bernal, Clifton Collins Jr., even Rinko Kikuchi whom I’d never seen before but who I’m looking to watch again. All are dragged down by González’ insistence on shoving the story’s square peg down his usual fragmented narrative style’s round hole, a style which was fresh back in Amores Perros but has now become a dead giveaway that we’re in the presence of a one-trick pony.

González seems to have only one movie in him, and I’m officially tired of watching it.

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I’m now convinced that Vaughan is going nowhere fast, or at least has no bloody clue where the story will take him. He has his formula down pat, and follows it with surgical precision to weave one page turner of a series, but much like the series 24 it’s basically a long string of cliffhangers and surprises, with little else going for it.

Will I keep reading it? I’m not sure, but I might. The series comes out ahead of most movies in book cost vs. hourly recreation value, plus the series is entertaining enough that it keeps me hooked, no matter how empty I may consider it. I can always act as a palate cleanser between the Vernor Vinges and Alan Moores. There are worst things that could be said about a one’s efforts, I suppose.

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Livingston: What advice would you give to a programmer who’s thinking about starting a company?

Spolsky: I’ve got a lot: [laughs] Don’t do it. It’s going to suck. You’re going to hate it.

Can I steal one from Paul? Don’t start a company unless you can convince one other person to go along with you. If you don’t have two people (or I would even say three) that you’ve convinced to devote their lives to doing this, it’s just going to be a different thing. There are a lot of programmers that are very tentative about starting their own companies. There are a lot of working programmers doing something they hate, with some company that they hate, but they need money to pay the mortgage. So they figure, “I’ll develop something in my spare time. I’ll put in 1 hour every night and 2 hours on the weekends and I’ll start selling it by downloads.” And you say to them, “Who’s your cofounder?” And they say, “My significant other—husband or wife. My cat.”

But because they never really take the leap and quit their job, they can give up their dream at any time. And 99.9 percent of them will actually give up their dream. If they take the leap, quit their job, go do it full-time—no matter how much it sucks—and convince one other person to do the same thing with them, they’re going to have a much, much higher chance of actually getting somewhere. Because they either have to succeed or get a job. Sometimes “succeed” seems like the easier path than actually getting a job, which is depressing.

So quit your day job. Have one other founder, at least. I’d say that’s the minimum bar to getting anywhere.

From the Joel Spolsky interview from Founders at Work.

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