movie: birdman

Birdman (2015) is a borderline-arthouse movie. The camera dances around the key characters in long, continuous shots – it’s the kind of film you can get lost in. If you’re looking for a Fight-Club level tilt from Edward Norton, an only-slightly Galifianakis from Zach, and an amazing performance from Michael Keaton.

There are underlying themes of life’s purpose, legacy, reputation, and a surreal bent with the ever-present gaze of Birdman. The rules of the film’s universe are not made entirely clear until the end of the film, which could – in my opinion – be stronger without the last few minutes. But it’s quite the character study, and – despite plenty of content that earns its MA rating – asks some big questions.

addressing the challenge of staying present

Anyone who has owned a smartphone for long enough will know how much it taps into your attention span. Put your smartphone down for a while, and go for a walk: see how many times you feel the twitch to pick it up again, whether it be to check the weather, look up the answer to a trivia question, take a photo, jot down a note or a calendar entry, check social media, or have one more tilt at a particular game you’ve installed.

This is not such a problem when you’re by yourself.

It’s something of a problem: being able to direct your attention from one task to the next is something you would want to control, but the smartphone device tends to win more attention battles than it loses.

How can you stay present? Here are some ideas, in descending order of severity.

  1. Leave the phone behind altogether: hand it to a trusted friend
  2. Set the phone to “airplane” mode to reduce its capability, and to screen out a lot of the notifications.
  3. Turn off notifications on the phone, so the onus is on you, not on the device, to decide its schedule of interruptions.
  4. Delete apps from your phone, to limit the scope of distractions it can offer
  5. Deliberately schedule the time that you’re going to spend on particular tasks, rather than reaching for the phone 

What about when there are other people around you? This is where staying present can be even more challenging. Even if you’re succeeding in leaving your phone in your pocket (or bag), the person you’re with may be checking their phone. And if they’re not going to be present, why should you? 

But no-one wins this kind of battle. If someone you’re with produces their smartphone for whatever reason, stay present. There are situations where sharing on the smartphone can support what’s being discussed: – either illustrating something that’s being discussed (here’s a photo of an entertaining creature in my life) or answering a question (who was the director of the film we’re discussing?) – but if the risk of distraction is too high for you or for the other person, then it’s not worth introducing it.

For me, I struggle to put down the phone again after producing it, and it’s easy to be distracted and go back to some other task than to return to the moment that you’re sharing with the other person.

Best to keep the devices away as much as possible. What’s your strategy?

book: what’s happening to our girls?

Book: What’s happening to our girls?

A book for parents to think about the changes in culture and society as it affects their children,  since they were children themselves. It’s not a positive picture: lots of challenges with girls growing up too soon, with too little a sense of self-worth.

A good starting point, but you’ll need to look further than the book itself for what to do about it.

movie: the hobbit: the battle of the five armies

movie: The Hobbit: the Battle of the Five Armies

Put aside for a moment the complaints that a short book is turned into three high-grossing movies. If you’d like to go back to Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth for one last visit, then you’ll be headed there. There’s lots of blood-less CGI fighting, hand-to-hand combat, a dragon (for too little time on-screen), and the kind of character interplay that you’ve come to love. 

It’s faster paced than the other two Hobbit films, with an all-action opening, then a number of scenes of creatures travelling from one part of Middle Earth to another. It delivers the kind of thing that you’ve come to expect from a Jackson film. If you’re a fan, you’ll go and see it.

movie: penguins of madagascar

Movie: Penguins of Madagascar

One requested by the kids. Again, we took them to the Dendy for their family pricing and smaller screens. 6yo enjoyed it throughout, 3yo (almost 4yo) was a bit scared by the final set piece action sequence.

It’s more an action movie than a comedy, though there are plenty of things to laugh about. 

dendy direct: The Ides of March

Dendy Direct: The Ides of March

I liked the idea of having my movie rental money go through Dendy direct instead of to Apple’s coffers, so I’ve tried this out now a couple of times. It’s a fairly smooth process, although you have to log in via both a web browser and an app, so it’s a bit fiddly.

The movie itself is beautifully shot and lit, the Hoffman performance (the reason I rented the movie) is good, Clooney and Gosling are also solid, and Paul Giamatti is watchable. But overall, it’s a longish short film stretched out to feature length. There’s plenty of atmosphere, but it doesn’t seem to tell much of a story beyond a simple morality tale.

Watchable, but not destined for re-watching, I suspect.

transitions

I read the Bible this morning, as I do pretty-much every morning. I’ve been crawling my way through Acts a few verses at a time. This morning I finished chapter 25. Paul is slowly, slowly, making his way towards Rome. When Acts is read quickly, it’s dominated by the big narrative arc: a bunch of people taking Jesus’ message to Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. When you read it slowly, Paul’s frustration emerges. After heading back to Jerusalem, and being the centre of a riot, he’s been in custody for two years, waiting for charges to be brought against him. Two years. For the last few days (of my reading), we’ve been building up to something. Someone who can make a decision about the charges has been on the scene, and Paul is about to have his chance to speak. 

Paul’s transition from Jerusalem to Rome is agonisingly slow.

I went for a walk this morning, as I do most mornings. The path was familiar: I didn’t even walk down any unfamiliar streets. But things are a little different today. I’m trying to work out a new morning routine. When I opened the front door on my way back inside, something was different: there was no four-legged creature waiting for me to come home. I miss being annoyed about the way he would jump. It’s too late now to teach him not to.

Some transitions are sad and unexpected.

Today is the first day of a new job. If life was a movie, then it would just be a jump cut: life has completely changed. But life doesn’t have jump cuts. Much of life is exactly the same, though a big piece will be new. I know broadly what this new job will look like. This transition involves figuring out the specifics.

I remember starting my first job out of uni, where I had no idea what it was like to have a job. The commute, the arrival, where to have lunch. I was so used to working alone in a home office up to that point, that it didn’t occur to me to try and have lunch with anyone! This is less of a problem these days.

To transition well in this case is to check the habits I’m bringing to this new job, and make sure I’m only bringing the best ones across. It’s easier to do this with a blank canvas, but without the experiences, there’s no way of telling what is worth keeping, and what is not.

Some transitions are routine.

apple TV – Guardians of the Galaxy

Apple TV: Guardians of the Galaxy 

I heard a lot of positive things about this film when it was out at the cinemas, but it wasn’t something I made time for. Seeing it available for rent, and having an unexpected free evening, I hit the “rent” button and checked it out. This seems a film that would be more fun to watch with a group of people.

It’s textbook “Marvel Tent-Pole” movie fare, hitting the general beats of such a film, but with a fresh sense of humour and self-awareness, while advancing the overarching Marvel Universe and its narrative arc.

If you’re in the right headspace for a mostly-brainless action movie with a bit of an emotional core, with a very Joss Whedon sense of constructed family, then it’s worth a look: perhaps think about skipping the opening 20 minutes or so, as it drags a bit at first.
 

24 ways, 2014 edition

Each year, a team of experts from the web community put together an advent calendar of posts about the web. This year, it kicks off with an overview of what it takes to build a website.

If you’ve been out of the web development game for a while (as I have), it’s a useful refresher to see the state of play, and to think more broadly about the nature of web projects. 

You probably already have an appreciation for the idea that a web project doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that a website combines design, content and technology, but it also has a lifecycle that doesn’t culminate with the launch of the site, and it exists amidst a range of business processes, and lives in an ecosystem of interactions with different people and technologies.

If you’re at all interested in improving the depth of your understanding of the web, read what it takes to build a website, and consider bookmarking the entire series.