Movie month

This post contains some spoilers (mainly about The Golden Compass), so if you intend to see these movies, it may be advisable to skip past this post.

This month my wife and I saw many films, and I'll give a quick review on each of the ones we saw at the cinema. We've watched many more on TV/DVD, but those are less appropriately timed I guess.

Beowulf (3D)

The majority of movies we saw were at Village Jam Factory in South Yarra, who have one dedicated theatre to 3D films (RealD). I've been there before for Meet the Robbinsons, and when we saw any movie was also screening in 3D, we just had to go along to that. You get corny glasses to wear, but 3D films are just so much fun with the increased immersion.

Beowulf was presented in RealD, and to me enhanced the immersion into the story/movie, and made it all that much more enjoyable.

I could detail the story of Beowulf, but you'd be better to read the Wikipedia article on it.

Beowulf was definitely movie of the month, and is well worth seeing. IMAX apparently have it in 3D at their massive cinemas, or its in 3D in a few select cinemas, or be boring at see it in 2D.

Death at a Funeral

Death at a Funeral was an odd movie. It took awhile to get into, doesn't really go anywhere (the movies timeframe is one day). I quiet enjoyed the film while we were watching it, but afterwards didn't have the same sense of enjoyment as I do with other movies (such as Beowulf or Hitman), such as replaying scenes in my head or discussing the movie with others.

It's not to say the acting, humour or story were poor, I guess the format of the movie just didn't leave a lasting impression on me.

Hitman

Based on the game series by the same name, I can't say I was expecting much of a movie, but being the geek I am I just had to go and watch it. To my surprise, it actually wasn't a horrible movie. The plot follows the hitman Agent 47 (just as the games do), and his struggle to come to terms with the betrayal of 'The Company' that employed him. He sets out to finish the hit, but encounters a woman who changes everything.

The ending, in-fact the entire story, isn't exactly hard to guess after the first five or so minutes, but it was nice to watch a movie that wasn't trying to be much more than an action movie.

Bee Movie

Bee Movie was surprisingly good. The trailers certainly made it look like yet-another-3d-film-that-has-cutesy-characters, and while the film did play that card on more than a few occasions, it was still funny enough that my wife and I enjoyed it. If you go in looking for a riveting story, you'll be disappointed but perhaps not too badly - it is the one line jokes that made it enjoyable.

The story goes one young bee has just finished his intensive 9 days through education and is getting ready to choose the one job he'll be stuck in for the rest of his life. He leaves the Hive with the Pollen Jocks, gets caught in the rain, but is saved by a human. He thanks her by breaking one of the Bee Laws: don't talk to humans.

The Golden Compass

For me, this was easily the worst movie of the month. While it may have had a fairly highly acclaimed cast (Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Ian McKellen, Sam Elliott and Christopher Lee), the (what I feel is weak, having only watched the movie) story combined with cramming it into a short (113 minutes) film did not give a chance for any acting talent to come out at all. This is often a problem of movie adaptations of novels - its just too hard to get everything into 2 hours without diluting the story, events, and sense of time (which is why more successful book/movie adaptations opt for 3 hours…)

Every advertisement for it I saw suggested that the movie was aimed at children, and for a large section of the movie you could very well be mistaken for thinking that. It isn't until a jaw is ripped off one of the Ice Bears that it starts to become much "darker". It is undoubtably riding the "Harry Potter made fantasy cool for kids" wave, but that sort of reasonably graphic violence could disturb at least some of the children who were in the cinema with us.

The story seems to resemble (at least in the first part of the trilogy) much of the Star Wars story. The Magisterium (The Empire) is bent on controlling the world with any means possible, while a bunch of Gyptians (The Rebels) defy them and rescue Lyra (Luke + Leia Skywalker combined). Lyra can operate the last Golden Compass (The Force), and near the end, Mrs Coultard (Vader), an employee of the Magisterium declares the Golden Compass is actually hers, and that she is Lyra's mother.

In short, unless you've read the book, skip this movie. It's story, acting, and effects are all a bit nothingish. It's not absolutely terrible, edging out daytime television, but it certainly isn't stimulating.

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AllowTransparency=Sucks (Hardware Rendering Sucks)

Oh, sorry, that should read 'AllowTransparency=True creates poor performance'. In WPF, if you have AllowTransparency=True (and thus WindowStyle=None) set, you're able to create non-rectangular applications as well as making use of semi-transparency. It is certainly a welcome 'feature', especially when you're trying to go along the general guidelines of WPF of bringing design back to the desktop.

Unfortunately in reality, it sucks. Using WPFPerf, the same animation (in this case, resizing of text from 16 to 24 over 0.5s) goes from ~50FPS with AllowTransparency=False to between 3 and 14FPS with it set to True. I can manipulate multiple high definition video fine, but throw in just the mere thought of transparency, and it slows to a crawl. This is extremely disappointing, as I've said the performance of WPF isn't too bad.

There is a solution however, an entirely unworkable solution! That solution is….disable hardware rendering. Yes, that's right, if you force software rendering, performance of AllowTranparency=True goes up to usable levels. It wasn't as good as hardware acceleration + AllowTransparency=False, but it never dipped below 30FPS which is more than usable.. You can do disable hardware rendering by adding a registry key (note, the page says 'Microsof' as the key, but it needs 'Microsoft'). There is meant to be a way to disable it on a per-application basis, but I can't seem to find many details apart from the one blog post that mentioned it.

Yahoo's Vista/WPF IM client has been noted to have poor performance, particularly around their emoticon selection popup. Sure enough, disabling hardware acceleration saw a large improvement to the speed which it popped up, and how smoothly the emoticons animated. Some things were slower with it disabled, but that isn't really the point. Hardware acceleration was supposed to bring an age of enhanced performance with more complex/prettier UI's!

Knowledge base article 937106 acknowledges the performance issue…for Windows XP and Server 2003. That's just great, good thing nobody would run WPF on Vista, eh? Apparently .NET 3.0 SP1, .NET 3.5 and Vista SP1 address these performance concerns, but unfortunately, my application was targeting .NET 3.5, and I already have .NET 3.0 SP1 installed.

Long story short, the idea of WPF/XAML rocks, but the odd performance of it needs to be fixed, and in the meantime much better documentation on what triggers poor hardware (or poor software) rendering performance.

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No net makes Paul go somethingsomething…

While the apartment we have moved into is fantastic, the lack of a net connection isn't so great. Both of us are going crazy, its just simple things like "What's the number for the dentist?" that trip us up. At least today (19/12) we got a phonebook from the post office.

The Good

• The exchange is only 500m away
• The apartment/complex is capable of ADSL
• There are several ISP's in the exchange with their own DSLAM for ADSL2/+

The Bad

• Optus DSLAM is out of ports, meaning no Exetel, Netspace, or a few others that had good value plans (we were knocked back already)
• Only ADSL2+ providers in the area are out of our price range/poor value/money.
• This means..ugh..line rental

The Ugly (Reality)

• We'll go for 1.5mbit connection through Exetel (TELJ plan). It has a good amount of quota, for a pretty low price.
• Natalie had been already been using that plan at her parents place, so we'll just move locations….there is a $100 'moving-inside-contract' fee if we do it sooner than 25/12 (Christmas day), so we're toughing it out without the 'net.

This post was uploaded from the the inlaws ADSL

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