Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Wednesday – New Site Launched/RSP Day
Am pleased with the work I’ve done on the revamped SeaView Displays Web site. It’s been in need of an overhaul -- the previous guy who worked on the site knew just enough HTML to be “dangerous”. This meant using PNG graphics instead of GIFs and JPGs, which once led to an embarrassing incident at my father-in-law’s place in France, when he tried viewing the site (he was interested in getting a waterproof display for his yacht), and wondered why he couldn’t see any of the graphics (he was using an older browser which couldn’t view PNG files). Without going into further detail, let’s just say that at the very least, the site has been fixed up. It’s dynamic, it uses PHP, all of the former .html pages forward to their new .php equivalents (why don't more web developers do this? It is so simple to do that there's really no excuse for it.), some further direct sales mechanisms have been added. I can’t claim credit for the graphics though -- that was one of the last things that Ali D. did before he was let go from the firm.

Anyways, am proud of the work. It only took a few days to do the revamp, but I like the results. It's also the first site I've done -- perhaps surprisingly given the fact I've written a book about it -- whose formatting is wholly rendered using CSS (though to keep things browser-compatible, I still use such HTML 4.01 things like tables to give it structure. It is still far easier to develop a browser-compatible Web site using tables than you can get using absolute positioning elements).

The only other thing of note is that I did my RSP contribution today. Would love to have put in more than I did, but at least I did it.

Tuesday - Saw "Metropolis"
No, not the Fritz Lang version, but the new anime by Rintaro. Visually stunning, but empty. Neo-Tokyo go boom again... ;-)

Left work a bit early and ended up meeting Bill W. at the Paramount, as he had also expressed a wish to see the film in the theatre (it’s a rare thing to have the opportunity to watch an anime in a “regular” film theatre). So we got there, sat down and chatted for a while over a couple of beers and then got settled in our seats.

It was a fairly full theatre -- primarily college-aged students were in attendence. It being "cheap Tuesday" probably also helped.

Things started off well. An interesting plot, which is basically an investigator and his nephew from Japan visit an impossibly art-deco-ish city, trying to find criminal robot maker. The robot maker is found dead after a fire destroys his lab, and the nephew meets his final creation, a young robot girl named Tima, whose construction was ordered by a “Duke Red” who effectively runs the city. Interesting so far, but then things fall apart, and scenes run together without much coherence (or reflection upon their importance to the plot). The Duke has a super-weapon, there’s a revolution in the city, many robots get destroyed, and Tima’s human “brother” tries to hunt her down and destroy her before she takes her rightful/designed place on the throne of the super-weapon. Meanwhile, she falls in "love" with the nephew of the investigator. Tima then discovers her robot-ness, takes the throne, plans vengeful destruction of humanity, plot is foiled, but Neo-Tokyo still blows up. Nephew finds "bits" of Tima strewn through wreckage, decides to stay in middle of wrecked city, his Uncle leaves. Uh hunh.

Well, I’m glad I saw it, but as Bill said to me afterwards, “I can’t honestly recommend it to anybody”.

There was a lot that was promising – it started out as something of a mystery, but too much was thrown away for it to hang together. Lots of interesting sub-plots and themes: such as sibling rivalry between a robot and human "children", the rights of robots, interesting political plots, etc but it all seemed to be thrown away without effectively resolving or examining all of these plot elements effectively.

The real reason to see the film ultimately would be for the stunning graphics, both for the computer-driven and the hand-drawn work. For the most part the sections that are animated by computer are obvious – the movie wears its computer-animation credit on its sleeve. The style is art deco, and borrows styles from lots of other pictures long on style: there were hints here and there from Blade Runner, Akira, the original Metropolis, Brazil and Things to Come. This was obviously an "A" project for the animators, as the film is filled with fine details -- the movie is very lush, visually spell-binding. While I can’t say I’m a fan of the plot, I think I’d have to buy the DVD when it comes out just so that I can get a better look at some of the detail (I arguably did the same thing when I bought The Fifth Element on DVD when it came out – another movie with an improbable plot, but stunning visually). The character animation was interesting too -- very much a mix of "French" animation (borrowing heavily from Tin Tin) and more traditional Japanese animation – ranging from Akira gritty-ness (the character “Rock”), to Astroboy (the nephew character) to “hair” characters (such as “Duke Red”).

I say that “Neo-Tokyo blows up again”, but it clearly wasn’t set in Japan (since the investigator and his nephew came from there). I would argue that it is supposed to be an “everywhere” city, but it was interesting at one point to see a map on the wall at the revolutionaries’ HQ, which was clearly a map of the cities flanking the north shore of Lake Ontario, listing such cities/towns as Oakville, Hamilton, Milton, Burlington, etc. “Maybe the city was Toronto?” asked Bill jokingly over a beer afterwards. Who knows, though I suspect that an animator involved with the movie simply liked the area -- it's close to Niagara/Niagara-on-the-Lake, which are popular Japanese tourist destinations.

The soundtrack is good, filled with lots of Art Deco-era energetic Jazz. Unfortunately there's a bit too much symphonic drudgery for the "tension" bits of the movie. Probably worth tracking down though...