w/e 7 January 2018

‘Good Time’, ‘The Florida Project’, ‘Spiral’, ‘McMafia’ and nearly getting some code live.

There were a few films I missed towards the end of 2017 and this week I managed to see two of them at the Prince Charles: Good Time and The Florida Project. They were both really good. Good Time was a relentless descent as one thing after another went inevitably wrong for the desperate characters. The Florida Project had more great performances, especially from the young children and showed an odd side of American life, around motels and strip malls and novelty stores. Together, although they’re both fun to watch, the films present a grim view of a side of life in the US.

Also in watching things… we were pleased to see Spiral / Engrenages return for a sixth series. I think I’d take this over any scandi-noir. The characters generally seem interesting in more believable ways, often a bit worse-for-wear, and always interesting to watch.

We also started watching McMafia which my personal jury is still out on. So far I’m wishing they’d spent less effort on zipping between global locations and more on convincing dialogue. For example, conversations between characters discussing hedge funds seem obviously written to be clear for all viewers, rather than in a way those characters would actually speak. There’s no room for any viewer to be even momentarily confused, resulting in dialogue that’s weirdly superficial. Consequently it’s hard to believe Alex Godman knows anything about running a fund because he’s not demonstrated any knowledge beyond the ability to stare at complicated screens and to send money by clicking large “Authorise” buttons.

I spent some time this week getting my almost-finished new code for this site up and running on a server at Heroku. Inevitably several bugs reared their heads in my code, in third-party code, and in code used by third-party code (fourth-party code, I guess?). It’s all pretty much there now, fixed, patched or worked around. Aside from the Flickr API throwing “502 Bad Gateway” errors a lot of the time. Small pieces loosely joined by sticky tape and frayed string.