aka “This Special Friendship”
Director: Jean Delannoy / Genre: Drama / Year: 1964
Coming of Age Based On Novel Child Gay Boarding School YouTube

The Film…
a 1964 film adaptation of the Roger Peyrefitte novel Les amitiés particulières directed by Jean Delannoy. The plot revolves around Georges de Sarre, a fourteen-year-old boy who is sent to a Catholic boarding school in 1920s France. Georges starts a “special friendship”, i.e. a friendship with homosexual overtones, with a twelve-year-old student, the beautiful Alexandre (Alexander) Motier.

My Thoughts…
My word was this film difficult to track down, it doesn’t seem to have ever been released with english subs, at least not on DVD. Believe it or not I ended up watching it on YouTube split into 18 parts. Crazy!

This film has some parallels with Romeo & Juilet. Only where the forbidden factor of their love being entirely different and it is incredibly touching (I say that too often). What probably makes this tragic love story even more affecting is the incredible and joyous charisma of the kid who plays the younger boy. I also feel respect for the older of them for not showing any sign of shame, and for freely talking about his love with a friend of his own age.

The ending kicked the air out of me, twice infact, but I’ll try not to spoil it. Ugh, it all seems so unfair.

My Rating:93

Strange title for a strange song, actually it was a remake of an Amiga based ditty from the edwardian era.

Made in Fast Tracker 2 and Cool Edit Pro during the 1997/98 darts championship  (again ???)

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If I can’t post these on the right day then what will become of me? Potty attendant clerk is all I deserve.

This was taken in Abersoch in Wales.  Lovely lovely place, and somehow the sun always shines there.  Anypoop, I just kinda like this photo ‘cos the boat was freaking bizarre looking and the kid I guess helps the composition?  Dunno mate.

I’ve been in one of those coding moods these past few days.

It’s funny really, when the mood bites wanting to work on some code is all I can think about. Unfortunately it never lasts, and most likely next week I will run a mile from anything that involves endless debugging and depressing stares at code that refuses to function correctly.

Took advantage of all this to work on one of my little pet projects. A php bases web service for cataloging and taging films, music, books etc.

Implemented a couple of things I’ve been meaning to do for a while now. Got rid of the whole movable-type style publishing paradigm, it just isn’t intuitive interface wise.

Instead I’ve made some simplified functions that can be embedded into any php app, such as wordpress. It was a bit of an effort because with these functions I kinda have to avoid using session variables, especially class objects in sessions. Annoyingly php classes need to be declared before the session is started if you’re going to use them this way, and if you’re embedding it you have no control of the whole session start affair. Anyway, you can see all this down the right on the sidebar, lists the recent films I’ve seen and all that. And now you can click on them and be taken to a page, which is also embedded into wordpress.

I want to take the embedded functions a stage further and implement XML-RPC so that the service can be on another server.

Speaking of XML-RPC, I’ve also added posting to blogs. It uses the metaweblog api plus a few extra fields derived from movable-type strangely, for doing tags. When viewing a title you just click a link and it does the rest, plus I ajaxed it up so it doesn’t even have to reload the page. Plus it adds the post-id to the DB so that it knows when to do a post update instead.

Also ajaxed up the tagging of titles, so that it doesn’t take so long. And seperated out user oriented tags such as “watched” or “own” from everyone based tags such as “Spanish” and “Gay”.

Oh yeah, that’ll be why you’ve started seeing stupid film reviews in the main blog. Ah well. That’s progress for yerz.

Oh yeah and image support is new too, and quite funky.  I’ve used PHP’s GD library to automatically create a unified sized thumbnail of the image you upload for a title.  And you don’t even have to upload it, you can simply stick in the url for an image on another website and listrbl will grab it and make a copy for itself.

Director: Jason Reitman / Genre: Comedy / Year: 2007
Pregnancy Teen Divorce Adoption Drama Romance Independent Film

The Film…
Ellen Page stars as the title character, a sharp-tongued teenager confronting an unplanned pregnancy. (cc) Wikipedia

My Thoughts…
The great cast really make this film sparkle, or was it the script. Could be both? Wizard. So anyway, I guess Lovely would be the word for this one. Awww, Ellen Page is so…. Well I can’t wait to see what she does next career wise.

But my overwhelming feeling after watching this is, I reeeeallly want to watch some episodes of Arrested Development right now… For the 200 millionth time.

Oh and the adorable asian girl protesting abortion so totally reminded me of Monica Wolf.

My Rating:92

aka “Bear Cub”
Director: Paul Andrew Williams / Genre: Comedy / Year: 2004
dvd Gay Sex Spanish Parenthood Boy

The Film…
Cachorro (known as Bear Cub in English-speaking markets) is a 2004 Spanish gay-themed (in particular, the gay Bear community) drama film written and directed by Miguel Albaladejo. It is about a bearish gay man who ends up looking after his nephew while his sister goes away to India and in turn makes him develop a fatherly bond with the boy as well as forcing him to alter his lifestyle. The Spanish word cachorro describes any young, furry animal such as a cub or puppy. (cc) Wikipedia

My Thoughts…
This film explores quite a bit, including a fair few sides of gay culture without getting muddled at all. It attempts to put right some mis-conceptions about gay men bringing up children. I especially liked how the boy simply didn’t care about what his uncle got up to and as is typical is a lot wiser than a lot of the adults. Which makes me wonder, what age is it that people start seeing things that are different as being wrong? Ah well.

The film doesn’t flinch at all from what the “bears” can get up to, ding-a-lings et all, which is really strange considering the general tone of the film. But I guess, the whole message then should be… why should any of it matter?

My Rating:92

Well I must ask, ¿who let all those ukulele’s in here?

It wasn’t me bishop, really is wasn’t.  This song was written in buzz during the 1997/98 era.

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Director: Ethan Coen / Genre: Drama / Year: 2007
h.264 720p Psychopath Serial Killer Assassin Adaptation Crime Thriller

The Film…
No Country for Old Men tells the story of a drug deal gone wrong and the ensuing cat-and-mouse drama as three men crisscross each other’s paths in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas. (cc) Wikipedia

My Thoughts…
Ooh, this film wasn’t as complex as I had imagined which is always a bonus in my book, feared I’d have to be joining dots all over the place. Nah, it felt a bit like a western actually, albeit in modern times. Javier Bardem is awesome, and scary as heck, even if he does look freakily like that guy with the un-pronounceable name from “Look around you” and “hardware”.

Jolly good then is the summary.

My Rating: 94

This films page 

Finally got around to buying an Extension Tube for my camera. An Extension Tube is pretty much a way to do macro shots with your existing lenses. You attach it to the camera like a normal lens, but the tube is really just that, a gapping hole with the bayonet connection on its end, connect the normal lens to that, mounting the lens further from the sensor, which somehow brings the focus length closer.

Here’s the photo thursday taken with it, a strange miniature figurine. Scary.

I’ve been wanting the Olympus EX-25 for yonks and only just got around to nabbing one. Most of the fun with it isn’t with the images but the bonkers-ness. There are many trade-offs to using an extension tube rather than forking out for a dedicated Macro Lens. You lose Auto-Focus, which is understandable because I doubt the camera would be able to cope with how freaking sensitive the focusing is with this thing on. Just spinning the focus ring what must be a nano-metre goes right through unfocused to focused and back to un-focused so much you can’t even tell what it is! It also requires massive amounts of light, with this thing on the DoF is incredibly shallow, you need to crank up the F.Stop to the max (to the smallest aperture).  Couple that with the loss of light inherent in the extension tube and even in daylight you may end up with just a photo of black.  Therefore I’ve found I need the big ol flash gun mounted at all times.

Another thing that is really difficult to get your head around is what the zoom ring does, it kinda seems inverted somehow. For instance at say 100mm you can be a distance from the object that you might expect from the macro mode of a compact camera. At say 30mm you can get so close to the object that you risk bashing the glass of your lens into it, at 14mm (the widest my standard lens goes) you can’t get close enough, the object would have to somehow merge into the lens like some strange atomic gloop.

Here, is the box to an xbox game, I’ve taken the box with a lens without the extension tube so you can see the whole thing. And then I’ve take it with the tube attach to show how close you can get. Pretty close eh?

Snappy title.  This is about a recluse.  Or something.

Written in FastTracker 2 and Cool Edit Pro during the 1997/98 football season (wha?)

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