Adventures in .NET & Agile Development…
This just came across my aggregator today courtesy of Roy Osherove’s blog. Roy thinks it’s weird, but he’s from Israel. I just about fell out of my chair laughing when I saw it.
You can now choose Elmer Fudd as a language option on Google. Select the preferences link and change your language; “Groups” becomes “Gwoups” and “Directory” becomes “Diwectowy”. It only affects Google’s site of course, but still hilarious.
I’m not changing mine back to English. This is better than Ebonics.
Horror movies are rarely about true horror; about finding one’s self in a very bad situation and having to deal with that reality. Instead, horror films typically rely on stupid, brain-dead characters to advance a flimsy and tired plot that focuses on some supernatural killer, like Jason from Friday the 13th or Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The Descent is not one of those films.
The Descent is what horror is really all about; about finding yourself in a situation that is truly terrible and hopeless and then being reduced to the most basic of human instincts: survival. It is about how normal, intelligent, atheletic people can find themselves in a the worst circumstance, and how those people cope and adapt and attempt to survive.
The Descent follows six multicultural women on a spelunking expedition to some caves in the Appalachian Mountains. Most of the women have known each other for a long time, and this is their yearly get together for some outdoor adventure. Bumper stickers on their vehicles hint at past mountain climbing expeditions, river raft trips and other thrillseeking expeditions. For one of them, Sarah, the trip is an attempt to get back in the saddle of life after suffering the loss of her husband and only child the previous year. She is joined by longtime friend Juno, along with Beth, Rebecca and Sam (siblings) and a newcomer to the group, Holly. After an uneventful evening spent in some wilderness cabins, the ladies drive several miles along majestic Appalachian backwoods and then start their descent down into what is supposed to be a well established “level 2″ cave system. Things aren’t what they seem though, as one of them has elected to keep a secret from the others, and soon things start to go awry.
The film has been compared to Ridly Scott’s classic Alien; right on the poster they are so bold as to declare it the “best horror film since Alien.” Only this is not some promotional balony – this really is the best horror film since Alien.
Much like Ridly Scott does with Alien and Steven Spielberg does with Jaws, the director, Neil Marshall, refrains from revealing the “monsters” to the audience too soon. Instead, we are treated to events that unfold naturally, with a slow and deliberate pace that begins building tension from the first moments inside the cave. The first mishaps that happen have nothing to do with the creatures lurking in the dark. Instead, unfortunate events occur because of actions the characters take themselves. We get to see cause and effect in full force, instead of mechanical plot devices, and we are easily able to imagine ourselves in the position these ladies find themselves in. We start to wonder what we would do if confronted with similiar obstacles, and how we might feel trying to overcome them.
The predicament these women find themselves in once they get a little ways inside the cave is bad enough. Then the creatures show up, and the world for these characters becomes a lot more terrifying and a lot less hopeful.
The second act of the film is spent dealing with this new threat to their survival (a threat, I should note, that is not supernatural, and thus makes it entirely more frightening and real). However, instead of employing the ridiculous and tiresome plot device of splitting up the victims and sending them down individual paths so that a singular threat can slay them in isolated circumstances, we’re treated to a much more realistic scenario as the women attempt to stick together and move rapidly through the cave system toward escape, trying to work as a team.
I won’t reveal what happens for the rest of the film. It is sufficient to say it is a horror film, and enough blood is spilled to make other horror films look like trips to Disneyland. But what is truly great about The Descent is that at no time does it stray from it’s realistic roots; we are always presented with characters that make logical, rational decisions and behave as we expect them to. We are never forced to suffer through illogical behavior or irrational decisions for the sake of an advancing plot. These are intelligent and physically fit women, and they react to their situation each according to her own abilities and mental state. Transformations take place though, and much like Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later, some of the ladies find themselves stripped of their inhibitions and relying on pure survival instinct. It is a wonderful thing to behold – to see the characters forced to confront such a dire situation without any false intervention from the writer or director.
The film is shot wonderfully, and the clausterphobic confines of the cave system are very apparent. I actually had to look around the theater a time or two to remind myself I was in a very large and open space because I was finding myself feeling uncomfortable. The movie is directed with a perfect hand; the pacing is right on, the buildup is superb, and the horror feels very real. There’s even a surprise or two along the way, yet nothing out of character. We’re shocked when certain events transpire, but not to the point of disbelief. We can imagine these women actually making these choices in this situation.
The Descent is one of the best films I’ve seen, and maybe the best film of the summer. It’s just superb filmmaking. This is how horror should be done.
Whenever someone asks me what I do for a living I’m never really sure what to tell them. Saying “I’m a programmer” is a one-way ticket to the Kingdom of Glazed Over Eyes. “Oh,” they reply, as if they are unsure whether to console me for the plight my life has become, or shun me as if “programming” were a contractable disease; but they know for sure to immedately change the topic of conversation because they have no clue what I really do and talking about someone’s boring job ranks somewhere between “root canal” and “public speaking” on their list of Things To Avoid In Life. You can always tell that they have no clue what a programmer does, except that it must take place in a dark cave with a computer screen and require hideously long hours that result in the poor S.O.B. not being able to bathe or see his family for weeks on end. If you press these people I bet they would tell you in the strictest confidence that they think programmers eventually turn into werewolves and live the remainder of their days in the wild chasing down rabbits for food.
The truth is most programmers – at least the ones I’ve known in my lifetime – are very smart and creative people. The smart part almost goes without saying – we’re not serving hamburgers here. No offense to the people in food service (hey, haven’t we all done that at one time in our life?), but when I order “ketchup only” and get back a hamburger with everything but ketchup, I know i’m not working with a potential Mensa candidate. What most programmers deal with on a daily basis is what I liked to call “mental gymnastics.” In my life I’ve never worked in a field that required this much mental heavy lifting day to day. There’s gotta be something upstairs to do this line of work.
But the creative part is probably what would surprise most folks. Despite the steriotypes, programmers and software engineering people are able to make complete use of their right brain. Many of the ones I know are musicians, or artists, or both. We are not simply drones pounding out lines of code.
So it wasn’t surprising to me to see this post from Chris Sells run across my aggregator today. It’s a pointer to a musical parody by Ted and Carl from DotNetRocks, called “Why Did Shipping Vista Turn Out To Be So Hard”. It’s done to the tune of “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard,” by Paul Simon. Click it – it’s a good laugh.
I caught a brief blog post running through my aggregator today by Chris Donnan, and he linked to a fascinating article from a Java guy about where C# is in the computer development world. The article is fascinating because it is so out-of-touch with reality that one can only draw a few reasonable conclusions from it (like Chris, I had to check the publish date to make sure it was recent):
You pick the mostly reasonable explanation.