It wasn’t until after I’d finished watching Nebraska and looked up information on it on Wikipedia that I realized who director Alexander Payne is. This is the same person who directed Sideways, one of the most memorable road-trip films I’ve ever watched. Duh – I went. That’s because this is another road-trip film and it is once again an excellent one.
I’m someone who has only the vaguest of ideas of what the Mission: Impossible franchise entails. I’ve never watched any of the films starring Tom Cruise and was never a fan of any iteration of the television shows. In fact, when a character in the movie talks about disavowing the IMF, my first thought was to wonder how it had anything to do with the International Monetary Fund.
Continue reading Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
In between films of more obvious artistic merit, I like to throw into the mix some movies that are selected just for the fun factor. Think of it as a palette cleanser. Hollywood action movies are obvious choices for this role for many people. But I also have a soft spot for ultra-nerdy movies and This is the End is a great example of that.
Mother is another one of the Korean cinema recommendations from my cinephile friend. This was directed by Bong Joon-ho who also made Memories of Murder which I really liked, though he is probably best known internationally for The Host. It also shares a number of superficial similarities with the former film.
I first read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy not long after it first came out. Like everyone else, I was left gobsmacked not only by the multi-generational scale of the epic but also by the eerie sense that the scenario was all too plausible. It felt like we could wake up one morning and discover that it all came true.
I’m not sure why television shows in the UK are organized by series rather than by season. This post refers to the third series or season of the show that was released early in 2014. In any case, this is a highly unusual show since each season consists of only three episodes and the length of each episode is closer to what is expected of a movie than a television program. Also, each season seems to take two years to make since the first one appeared in 2010 and the previous one appeared in 2012.
This one is the follow-up to the previous C++ course that I took. As such it is taught by the same team from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and is again conducted entirely in French. This course focuses on the object-oriented portion of C++ which was ignored in its predecessor.
Once again, this is a very high quality course taught by instructors who obviously have had a great deal experience in teaching this material and have given a lot of thought to the examples and exercises that are included. The course schedule covers seven weeks of lectures and the obligatory course work has five programming assignments, of which only the last four count for the purposes of earning the certificate.
Continue reading Introduction à la programmation orientée objet (en C++)