peteg's blog

Mid-afternoon paddle at Gordons Bay. All round absolutely perfect — the water is quite warm, the day temperate, little wind and some waves.

Crazy Heart

This feted vehicle of Jeff Bridges's performance-of-a-lifetime took an age to get to Australia. I caught it at 2:30pm on this, a cheap Tuesday, a week after release, four rows from the front of cinema #2 in The Ritz. I'm sure the oldies had their fun up the back.

Bridges is indeed awesome, inflating his character as Mickey Rourke did in The Wrestler, even looking like he'd been drinking steadily since The Big Lebowski to just this end. I'll admit I enjoyed the music, though I can never tell if it's country or western, or whatever it is that Leonard Cohen does.

Maggie Gyllenhaal lit up the screen as she always can, but the script cast a shadow long enough to prevent her being anything interesting. Indeed the narrative arc, the possibility of plot development, was restricted to wondering how the whole thing could possibly conclude, preferably satisfyingly. I don't think Cooper figured this out either. Redemption is popular in the U.S., and probably everywhere that God is thought to be a friend of humanity, and for it to fail as blandly as it does here makes one wish for the grand follies of past times. It couldn't even manage a decent double-dip. These days even failure tastes like success.

Robert Duvall is always a bonus to me, playing those unforgettable supporting roles in great movies like Apocalypse Now and Magnolia. (Didn't these movies show us how to screw up properly?) Here his character is too minor to rescue anything from anything. The IMDB boards are saturated with pointers to his earlier take on the same theme, Tender Mercies, a Beresford effort. It's enqueued.

This movie is worth seeing on the strength of Bridges alone; be placated by the musical interludes! ... and certainly don't read any reviews before you go. Afterwards you can nod along vigorously with Dana Stevens, Paul Byrnes and Stephanie Zacharek. Or not.

In the Line of Fire

I got sucked into this early-90s Eastwood thriller by an article in the New Yorker about his movies. Malkovich is a good psycho, but I rank him below his contemporaries Spacey and Hopkins. The plot has myriad holes large enough for a plethora of successful assassinations; perhaps the most ludicrous is Eastwood pulling up in a taxi on an otherwise baracaded and barren street, just in time to show us how intel was done prior to computers and save the PUSA. Eastwood is fun to watch, at times, but wooden at others, and while the scaffolding of his later signature moral complexity is assembled, nothing is made of it.

The article is better than the movie, trust me.

The Truman Show

This one just scraped into the IMDB top-250; I guess the next blockbuster or two will push it off that highly esteemed list. I've never been a fan of Carrey and have definitely seen more of his movies than have been good for me. I had the distinct impression that he'd packed in after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so much wishful thinking on my part.

I doubt this is worth watching now that the reality TV bubble has come and gone, but perhaps it will be in a decade or two, when old things are new once more. The movie is thoroughly American, right up to the saccharine ending.

Witness for the Prosecution

Agatha Christie made this for the stage and it shows. Dietrich is weird, unattractive and hackneyed here, a frosty scheming German who spends the dying parts of the movie pretending to be a woman overpowered by her emotions. The occasional good line for the barrister does not make up for the myriad dei ex Christies. I'm sure her fans think it really does rank around #150 in the IMDB top-250, but there's no need to inflict this stuff on the rest of us.

MPD on the nixie clock.

Slow and steady progress compiling software this week. It is tedious as hell, and I am mystified as to why mature projects still have such baroque configuration management systems. For example, GLib (a part of GTK) does not support cross-compilation out of the box. A few hacks later and it does compile relatively painlessly, so why haven't the hacks been folded back into the project itself? I think the lasting effect of Debian's packaging of the known universe is that these nasty problems get patched but not pushed (or accepted or whatever) upstream.

Anyway, I was shocked, surprised and relieved that my long-in-the-making cross-compiled MPD ran first-go on the ts7250. It took me an age to configure — ALSA calls the mixer "Speaker" instead of the conventional "Master", and ALSA is so overengineered that even something this simple requires forensic deobfuscation. Everyone's had problems with ALSA, so Google is full of unanswered questions from noobs with poor grammar, or pages from 2005 describing now-obsolete obscurities.

Well, yeah. Using the pleasant MPD client Theremin, I can now blast tunes from the Nixie clock and control it from the laptop. It sounds fine, and uses less than 60% of the CPU with the clock driver doing its thing. I feel like I have finally joined the class of 1998.

The last of the desiderata is a remote control, so I can park the clock on the mantelpiece and do less sophisticated things without the MacBook. The receiver half of this cheap-arse infra red thing I bought does not get along with the ts7250 too well, though it might be OK on stock hardware. Having pretty much given up on it, I will flog its carcase in all the fora known to Cirrus EP93xx sufferers as a public service. I would so dearly like to be cool and trendy and BlueToothy, but I have no cool and trendy mobile phone to pair a receiver with.

Return to Cape Banks.

I went for a mid-afternoon snorkel with Rob at Cape Banks, our second foray to the aquatic reserve beyond the golf course. The rescue helicopter was returning from somewhere-or-other, and I hope the rescuee survived.

We leisurely snorkelled from the south-eastern corner of the island eastwards towards the wreck. There were loads of fish out, the usual suspects for the most part, though I did see a fairly large maroon-coloured cat fish. Rob got this photo, again so much better than my usual efforts. One has to get up close and stick the camera in the creatures' faces.

Weather-wise today slotted between the short drizzle of yesterday and the promise of storms for the foreseeable.

Late afternoon paddle at Gordons Bay. The water was a bit filthy, but not too bad. Beautiful temperature and quite a clear day.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

More dreck from Spielberg. Connery is implausible from the first. Given that this is ranked #100 in IMDB's top-250, I can see the population at large is fascinated by this mangling of mythology, a sort of Lawrence of Arabia for twits. How dumb would you have to be to invest that much effort in traps that are not reentrant?

Presently I'm chugging through Richard Burton's A Thousand Nights and a Night, which is more fascinating for Burton's footnotes than the stories themselves. The narrative structure is cute, and I now see where Salman Rushdie got a lot of his ideas from. Much doughtier fare.

Lunch and an early-afternoon paddle at Gordons Bay. Strong on-shore wind and relatively large surf (even some breakers). Pleasant enough in but not very tranquil.

Bloody hot day. I figured I'd try snorkelling at Little Bay, for it has been a while since I was there last. The building of Stocklandton continues apace. The water was warm, clean and clear though I didn't see much. Three blue bottles right near the sand should have forcibly ejected the constituent zooid who was responsible for inflating the sail in these conditions.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

More dreck from Spielberg. All of the characters are irritating infantile stereotypes, and I fail to see how anyone could consider it fun to know that each problem will be solved within a few minutes, usually by an omniscience blinded only by the requirements of plot. Apparently all Sikhs are evil, unless they're smurfs, in which case they're good because they're fighting with the English Empire... or something. The female offsider whines and squeals like C3PO, but with even less humour, and the child offsider is just plain awful.

The best part of it are the occasional iconic photographs, such as Harrison Ford wielding a whip on a rope bridge, but these are easy to get over.

Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Unbelievably #18 in the IMDB top-250. Riffing on all the cliches and motifs of Orientalism, there is little worth seeing here. Harrison Ford is at his wooden best, being marginally less banal than Karen Allen who plays his presumed-shaggable offsider. Totally unsubtle — the baddies are Nazis for god's sake! — but perhaps we can be thankful that it is certain that Indiana shot first and that's the way it's gotta be. Lucas was involved in the production and writing, and it shows: the treatment of anything human is entirely infantile.

It is much better than the recent one, for all that is worth. I remember now why I haven't seen many Spielberg films.

Cool Hand Luke

A Paul Newman classic, perched precisely midway up the IMDB top 250. Not really to my taste. I watched it in two sessions about a week apart, and that might have been why.

Early evening paddle at Gordons Bay. Loads of people on the northern side near the scuba ramp, which looked somewhat like a postcard from some European beach. No rubbish in the water meant that it would have been great for a snorkel. The sea was a lot calmer than yesterday. Quite warm out, 30 degrees earlier in the day, and very pleasant in. About as perfect as it gets.

I met up with Pete R. around midday and walked with him to Bondi along the coastal walk. I haven't been along that track in many years, and the improvements are vast. We had lunch at the park in Bronte, where the beach was closed, as was Tamarama due to some hefty surf. Bondi itself was relatively tame, and surprisingly uncrowded.

The Game

I remember seeing this, apparently five years ago. It's a twist-piled-upon-twist sort of flick, not as successful as Fincher's best but still watchable.

The days are definitely getting shorter again, the sun sets before 8pm now. Yet another early-evening paddle around an almost entirely deserted Gordons Bay. Some sea birds (maybe gulls, I dunno, I didn't have my glasses on) were dive-bombing for fish quite near the beach. The water was warm and less choppy than yesterday. A moderate amount of leaf litter and sundry crap in the water.

Fritz Lang: M

Apparently a classic, and highly-rated on IMDB to boot (#57). I couldn't get into it.

Late-afternoon snorkel with Rob at Gordons Bay. The sea was continues to be unsettled so we didn't see much. We poked around the northern scuba-ramp and swam across the bay to what we hoped would be the more sheltered southern rocks. I think I saw some juvenile gropers. Very pleasant in the water, though there was a lot of matter suspended in it.