The Machinist

I'll be honest, I was disappointed with this film or maybe I just was not in the right place to appreciate it. I am usually able to follow these dark tangential sort of films pretty well but I seemed to have missed somethoithing along the way and just ended up confused and a bit bewildered.

Looks great though in a dark, dismal, grimy, industrial sort of way; even the shiny-shiny airport looks ill.

♥ ♥ ♥

Dancer in the Dark

What, Lars van Trier makes a musical! With Bjork!

Unbelievable and harder to imagine what it might be like. But better still is the cast including Catherine Deneuve & David Morse amongst the usual von Trier selection of international film faces. As well as starring Bjork, it features what became her "Selma Songs" album (Selma being the name of Bjork's character); a surprise to me but totally obvious now when seeing the tracks performed in context.

I had already been warned that it was a seriously emotional film with an overwhelming ending. All of this added up to a "must see" and it does not disappoint.

Shot with a hand-held camera for a very intimate feel and the rawness of Bjork's performance manages to just keep to the good side of raw. The quality of the supporting cast help lift the film keeping the story-line on track in a wonderfully natural way. The musical sequences emerge out of the dialogue though for me the dream-like dancing allusions didn't quite work. Nonetheless the musical transitions worked really well with many of songs enhancing the emotional temperature of their containing scenes.

Very little of the emotional content is delivered directly through action nor script nor even subtle glances. Rather, as the story proceeds, each new titbit of information adds it own emotional payload and gradually we take on the responsibility for the emotional reaction to events that Selma eschews for her committed life-goal. With the depth and weight of this emotional burden, we yearn for Selma to release us from our torment.

Not for the faint-hearted but go out of your way to watch it!
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Kate Mosse: The Winter Ghosts

A bit of easy reading if you are not up for much more. Handy enough tale hinting back to Cathar times in southern France. Sadly the author gets a bit stuck in her Englishness and doesn't quite capture neither the French nor Cathar cultures - Brighton seems more exotic.

♥ ♥

Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children

This is a hard book to read. Trying to document the history of India as it transitions from the Raj to Independence. Structured in 3 parts possibly before, during and after independence - not sure cos I couldn't get past the first part.
Not entirely sure why I gave up, since I almost enjoyed the first part. When the action moved to Bombay it seemed to lose something, perhaps the surviving characters lost their appeal and the prose seemed to get a bit bored with itself.
♥ ♥ ♥

Jodi Picoult: Songs of the Humpback Whale

This is absolutely appalling; how on earth can this author be "best selling" anywhere.
This would give story-tellers and authors a bad name.
Avoid like the plague.
♥

C.J. Date: Database Design and Relational Theory

Or to give its full title : "Database Design and Relational Theory: Normals Forms and All That Jazz"

Recently I found it necessary to re-examine a rather complex database I built over 7 years ago. The database had travelled through MySQL to Postgres with dalliances with ZODB and looked - with much benefit of hindsight - pretty crufty. If I was going to use the dataset, I would be using Django and probably its ORM, for convenience. To do this would require some reconstruction of the table definitions to suit the ORM and well if I had to do that, perhaps I should also spend some time evaluating the schema design and doing it right the nest time DIRTNT (rather than DIRTFOOT).

It has been a seriously long time since I earnestly poked at database theory so I reckoned it was about time I caught up. Hunting the web threw up a bewildering choice of possible guide books but none really seemed to pitch their content at an appropriate level for me; by now I don't need a guide to managing a database nor instruction in SQL. But I did feel the need for some real, man-sized theory.

This little volume was on the money and for once I opted for a dead-tree version even though it took a few days to arrive (instant gratification is not everything when it comes to reading textbooks on a Kindle). This is now sharing my bookshelf along with Donald Knuth and the Gang of Four; I hope they don't mind rubbing shoulders with C.J.Date instead of Dr. Codd.

Mind you, I seem to have forgotten how to learn from heavy-weight textbooks. Grinding through this one is quite demanding, something I only seem to be able to do in small chunks these days. And I am not even convinced the content is actually getting embedded in my grey cells. I am actually forcing myself to attempt and study even the exercises provided with each chapter - I never used to need to do this. There you are, that old tortoise age has almost caught up with me and I think the finish line might be in sight!

✔✔✔✔✔

Norman Davies: Europe: A History

We were heading off to France for a few weeks of touring and I realised I knew very little about European history. In fact, various sojourns through Ireland had demonstrated the huge gaps either in my education or my memory though probably both. Anyway I decided to remedy this by grabbing a few books from the library and other sources to read as we travelled. Most of them failed to survive past the first page; this one didn't. It was brilliant!

As I am writing this, I have not finished the book - it is quite long at almost 1400 regular pages - only up to chapter 4. Apart from the subject matter, which is all very interesting, there are quite a few features make this book stand out

• First off, the author's wonderful style. He writes as if telling you a favourite story with all the idiosyncracies that make a story personal to you and the teller - little tidbits of background details and colour 
• The book is written almost like a simple narrative. An ambitious task for a subject so broad, complex and interwoven with itself. It is very easy to read and for the parts I have read, the continuity from one protagonist to another makes the whole feel like a narrative
• There are quite a few out-takes. The subject is really complex and it must be impossible to deal with this complexity in a single book; easily solved, just create a brief (can be several pages long) out-take as an aside which you can choose to follow as the mood takes you.
• The book is structured in chapters which attempt to be self-contained usually covering a period dominated by a particular theme such as "The Romans" or "Greek culture"

With all these devices, the book is a pleasure to read. My copy was on a Kobo/Kindle which worked great for the text parts but the graphics and tables were dreadful, worse than useless on the Kobo. And it was very easy to lose context when reading through the lengthy. A hard-copy would be probably be a much better experience, but then it must be a weighty tome. Tough call - get both.

✔✔✔✔✔