It's no secret my personal life hasn't been a joy in the last couple of months. Shattered hopes in love, frustrations related to the work to be done, and witnessing a couple of very depressing cases of character rape (I coined the expression as a derivation of 'character assassination' — it means someone is having his/her personality and tastes changed quickly and greatly by the action of someone else, as in 'brainwashing' but somewhat more extensive as it results in the practical loss of the person you knew). Therefore, I spent the last few days feeding myself some soul-sugar, meaning, cathartic entertainment. I closed a couple of serious cinematic gaps as I finally watched Cinema Paradiso (the Oscar-winning Fellini-esque tale of a kid who grew up as a film projeccionist) and Apocalypse Now (in the longer, Redux version of the best war movie ever, up there along with Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, but then again, I'm a Kubrick junkie). Then I also re-watched Lost in Translation.

Then, to the theatre proper. Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent confirmed my opinion I truly dislike this director (therefore going against film school political correctness), as an interesting concept — and interesting characters — is turned into a confusing film with no real sense of dialogue or interaction between players (and I believe the director should know having an epilogue explaining everything that went on is a symptom something is wrong about the film). I also went to see I, Robot to confirm the total destruction of Asimov's work I suspected about when I saw the trailer. Of course, they say the film was 'suggested' by Asimov's I, Robot in the end, which is in fact true since the film is based, at best, in the back cover of the book. Needless to say then, the makers didn't resist and went for the whole evil robots taking over the world drama, with obviously rogue policeman Will Smith kicking their metallic bottoms while advertising Converse All-Stars (just the stupidest, blunt example of product placement ever). Not even the art direction was worthwhile, this film featured a disinspired futuristic scenario full of clichés such as the evil computer with its 'core' on top of a huge shaft, full of shiny plasma and metal and Christmas Tree lights, and which must be overrided by injecting some nanobots in a complicated place because blowing it up just wouldn't work in... providing an action-packed climax to the movie. Wow, it was a piece of cinematic crap indeed, but at least I felt happy because I had been right. I told you so, like Will Smith's character was itching to say.···

sIFR looks like a clever hack (using Flash, CSS and Javascript) to allow webdesigners to embed any font they wish in their websites, so that I could, for instance, finally have the headers of this weblog set in proper Helvetica Bold or Univers Condensed (trust me, it'd be pretty). Problem is, I tested it and it tends to break down pretty easily, and the number of comments in the page makes me feel other had the same problems. Sometimes it doesn't render at all, it's slow, sometimes larger text sends it spinning out of control. And although browsers should be stable and its caches should work properly, the concept of ten instances of the same Flash file running in the same page makes me kind of nervous. So, this is a clever hack for one ocasional use, but still not ready for widespread use. Just a cool trick for portfolio use. Someone still ought to come with proper font embedding, so people start doing hideous stuff like setting whole paragraphs to Microgramma.···