den brysomme mannen
July 15, 2008
The Bothersome Man is not a film you will come across on the shelves of your local video shop, or at the pasar malam, but we managed to borrow it from our online video club. It’s an extra-special film as a classmate of Mr. Snow’s was its associate producer, and of course it’s always fun to watch a film set in the city where you live.
The trailer sets the scene perfectly for this surreal, good-looking film. Andreas finds himself dropped off by bus in a wasteland with a lead-grey sky. A one-man welcoming committee is ready to meet and drive him to his shiny new life as an accountant in the big city.
All is going swimmingly well – a pretty girlfriend, a good job, a nice apartment, yet Andreas just can’t shake the feeling that something is not quite right in his perfect new life. And then there’s the matter of the body impaled on the railings in the street…and a hole in a wall, from which beautiful music can be heard.
What worked nicely was the juxtaposition of the stylish and slick city life with the blood and gore that accompanies Andreas’ attempts to unravel the mystery. The music clearly inspired by Wong Kar-Wai worked only sometimes. The ‘other side’ as exemplified by the music could have worked much better, but was fun anyway.
A quirky and very likeable film about life and the rat race.
just browsing
July 15, 2008
I browse a lot online for pictures to illustrate this blog, but this article pointed me to the coolest way to do that yet. Piclens is a Firefox add-on that allows you first to search Google, Smugmug, Flickr and Youtube among others for photo or video content, then displays it in the most stunning, fullscreen, fluid wall display. Easy and fun to navigate, so great for browsing.
The only slightly clunky thing about it is that once you have found a photo you would like, a click brings you back to your regular Firefox view. A smooth transition to saving it or importing it might have been nice. In the meantime, just try it for yourself. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Even so, this is definitely a glimpse of browsing in the future, and I like it! I hope to try some other new browsing tools and will definitely report back.
