6 August 2006
Where was I?
Thursday was The Maltese Falcon (and Key Largo) at The Fox. We got restless and hungry after The Maltese Falcon so skipped the second feature and had dinner at Ecco. Su-poib.
Friday was finishing up on a release to QA at work. We were to have all of the code in by 4, but several events conspired to continue the fun until Saturday afternoon. A post mortem:
- I missed a key design decision and expected a low-level module to have access to data within a high-level module. It took a few hours to write a proxy to the low-level module.
- Our database server ran out of space (!) at noon.
- A database configuration change that didn't make it in until Thursday broke everything and had to be backed out Friday morning.
- The low-level libraries we use from another group were reorganized on Friday morning and caused some build issues.
All-in-all, not horrible but still something to learn from.
Saturday night was Fellini's 8 1/2 [ IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes ]. The DVD had an interview with Terry Gilliam praising its examination of the life of a movie director. I thought that was the least interesting aspect simply because it was the most indulgent. I would focus less on the specifics of the director as character and more on the generalities of the character in life. Throughout the file, the lead and others are doubting the path they've taken in their lives and are responding to that doubt differently. The lead has tried to achieve everything and now doubts that he's accomplished anything and fears that he has lacked focus. His wife feels that there was no alternative choices to those that she made. The movie is filled with dream sequences that get silly at times but still ring true. Their drifting logic is in fact not much different from that of other scenes.
I wasn't as happy with it as La Dolce Vita (that I'd watched back in March) but still recommend it. These are the only Fellini films I've watched and I have to say his signature is unmistakable.