Subtle as a Bazooka

The Dark Knight: Perhaps a Little Too Dark

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:19:05 GMT

So I managed to see the new Batman movie last night, and if you haven't seen it, Warning: Spoilers Ahead! Overall I thought it was a good action crime drama, but not a Batman movie. Now I'm not a Batman expert by any means, but I have seen all the major movies, several of the animated ones, even read a graphic novel or two. I like Batman. And I had several problems with this movie (warning: rant ahead!) Here are my Top 10:

    1. It's dark. It's so dark. Any fantasy and poetry that existed in the Batman mythos has been completely removed. Yes, Batman is one of the darkest superheros out there, but come on: can you imagine taking your kids to see this movie? It's as if they tried to inject so much reality into the film that they lost the magic that is Batman. As a comparison, the Spiderman movies made the character of Peter Parker very modern and real, even tortured in some instances, without ever losing the fun and fantasy that is Spiderman. If Christian Bale wasn't wearing a cape and a mask, there'd be no reason to call this a Batman movie. Perhaps that's why the title is simply The Dark Knight? At any rate, to me the movie had more in common with a Tarantino film than the Batman franchise.

    2. I believe the movie is technically PG-13, but this is by no means a movie to take kids to. I heard several people freak out in the theater when they showed Two-Face for the first time. Anyone else think that his face was needlessly gross? And oddly unrealistic for an uber-realistic movie?

    3. Considering how much action there was in the film, I was a bit annoyed that so much of it occurred in close-ups. That, combined with the visual darkness of the film, means that a lot of the details of the fights were completely lost to me. Seems a shame since they went to a lot of effort to make them cool. The lassoing of the truck was cool though, I saw that well enough.

    4. Batman's voice. Ok, I get that Batman's voice is supposed to be deep and cool and significantly different than Bruce Wayne's voice, but Bale's voice was put through so many crazy filters and distortions he almost sounded like a robot. It was particularly disconcerting when Batman would have a quiet conversation with Gordon and you could really hear the difference between the two voices: one human, one cybernetic dj. There was at least once instance where I couldn't understand what Batman was saying at all due to the distortion. Also, is anyone else annoyed that Batman now has a pronounced lisp?

    5. Can someone please explain why, with decades of Batman material, do the filmmakers feel the need to redo existing Batman movies? The Joker? Two-Face? Are they going to redo the Riddler, Penguin and Catwoman as well?? They've rewritten the history of Batman and the subsequent characters so many times it's hard to keep up.

    6. Rachel what's-her-name. Not only did the actress not do a particularly good job (she kinda sucks), but I think a lot of people had trouble feeling sympathy for someone macking down on two guys and claiming she loves them both.

    7. Remember seeing the Scarecrow for that one brief instant? What was he doing there in the first place? And where did he go?? It seems like a lot of people in this film just showed up and disappeared without any explanation as to how they got there and why.

    8. Was that whole Hong Kong bit really necessary? To me it was just another thing that could have been cut so the movie wouldn't be 3 hours long. Batman goes to China -- wee.

    9. Yes, Heath Ledger did a fine job as the Joker. But I'm annoyed at the reviews that claim his performance was so different from Jack Nicholson's portrayal. If you watch the first Batman again (easy since they've been replaying *all* the Batman movies on tv lately), you'll see that it's incredibly similar to what Nicholson did; Ledger just took it a step further and put his own twist on it. Admirable performance, yes. Completely invented, no. Although the new, crazier Joker was interesting and fun to watch, I missed the eloquence and sophistication of the original. I always thought of the Joker as a little like Hannibal Lector: brilliant but psycho, with a whacked out sense of humor. Now the Joker is kinda smart, but mostly just crazy.

    10. The dialogue was pretty crap. Nothing as bad as the dreck from Batman and Robin of course, but there were still a lot of lines that made me want to gag a little bit. "Some villains aren't after money -- they just want to watch the world burn" or some cheese like that. Cheezy with a capital C. And speaking of writing, what was the plot again? Something about gangsters? They catch a bunch of gangsters, then the Joker starts killing people? Or something like that?

Happy 4th Everyone!

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:21:06 GMT

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July! As fireworks are legal in Pacifica (although they taken out most of the good ones), I spent my Friday night on the beach setting things on fire with a bunch of other people. My parents joined me, and despite the fog, we all had a good time.

On the agile development front, we have officially finished our first 'sprint', i.e. 2-week chunk of schedule, and are halfway through our second sprint. Everyone in the company gave comments on the whole scrum/index card process, and the general consensus was:

Everyone likes the super-short what's-everyone-doing meetings (the scrums); it's nice to know what everyone's working on, they're over quickly, and they seem to have cut down on the total number of meetings as well. In general, we've been able to keep these meetings to 15 minutes, often less.
The index cards are a pain in the ass. There wasn't one specific person to tell us exactly how the cards worked, how to update them, how to verify that a task is 'Done', etc. so not everyone was doing these the same way. I *think* we're all on the same page now.
There is often confusion over which group a particular task should be assigned to. For example, I am in the Design group as well as the Games group. We had to specify that any purely creative task, like creating new proposals, falls under Design. Creating levels for an existing game, however, falls under Games. Can be confusing, but somehow we (design, at least) have worked this out.
This also means that on occasion tasks are listed twice, showing up in two different groups. But to be fair, this is usually spotted pretty quickly.
All our individual tasks are available in online spreadsheet form, so we can still see a complete list of our tasks in one place.
Now into the second sprint, things do seem to be moving faster and cleaner than before, now that we kinda know what we're doing.
Overall, no one thought that they got any more work done than when we were working off of a standard schedule. I'm curious to see if that changes at the end of this week when this second sprint ends.

Right now, I have 3 index cards I must get back to, so it's back to the grind. :p

4 Legs Good, Two Legs Bad

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:40:25 GMT

So this week our company restructured our entire scheduling process to follow the agile development process. I had to look this up, and there's a handy wiki explanation here. The basic idea is that, instead of a normal schedule and one project manager/producer in charge of it all, everyone is organized into small groups or scrums and sorta self-manage. Each task is written on an index card along with the name of the person responsible for it, and all the cards are organized onto several large boards. Each group meets every day, but these meetings are supposed to be short 7-minute information only kind of things.

The whole thing is weird and I'm not really sure what to think of it yet. The initial scheduling for all this took over 2 days alone, but now that we understand it (somewhat) better, things are going much quicker. From what I've read, a number of software companies swear by this technique, but I've also found criticism of the method as well. If anyone has ever done this, I'd be very interested to know your thoughts on this and how the overall results differed from standard scheduling. Good? Bad? Meh?

On a side note, my cat brought home a mouse last night around 2:00 am, his first mouse in quite some time. As it's been a while, I felt inclined to let him enjoy himself a bit . We played several exciting rounds of Dead Mouse Fetch, a game I unwittingly invented one night when he kept bringing the mouse back into the house. He's surprisingly good at it, and despite it all, he's a good kitty. :)

My First Post

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:48:13 GMT

So after my most recent trip to LA (friend's wedding, the boys all wore kilts, it was very nice) I discovered that virtually all of my friends are on livejournal. Not to be outdone, I too have now become a dork with a blog! Hurray! The only problem I ran into was that my main handle was already taken (BazookaJane) as well as my backup handle (Fister). I mean, what are the odds?? So behold my backup backup handle, JaneGrenade!

But I will always be BazookaJane.

Now, one is supposed to rant in these things, yes? Well, today I'm annoyed by people who use the same clever handle as me! Are they cleverer than me? Unlikely. I'm sure they just stumbled upon the genius of it purely by accident. Well, except for the other Fister. Seeing as how he creates porn websites, I can guess how he came up with the name. But I needed no such inspiration, no sir. In fact, I don't even relate the name 'Fister' with anything sexual -- it's just a name. Though I will admit, it's not a subtle name.

But I've never been good with 'subtle'.