A clutch of movie reviews...
OK, I promise this is the last "I've just been to Singapore" posting... ;^)
The flight takes about 12-13 hours, and as I went with Singapore Airlines there was a great choice of in-flight movies. They have a video-on-demand system with about 60 films and a lot of music as well. I don't like to over-burden the brain when flying (there's not much oxygen up there anyway), so I went for pretty standard block-buster fare:
1 - Batman Begins (Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson)
Adequately-scripted re-hash of the genesis of the legend... though I'm starting to wonder how many times the franchise can stand another 'here's how Bruce Wayne's parents died' sequence. Michael Caine contributes a strangely down-market Alfred, and I don't think this was Liam Neeson's finest hour. However, Gary Oldman is very good as a young (pre-Commissioner) Gordon. I don't want to give any plot-spoilers, but there's an interesting and even vaguely plausible rationale for those 'fins' on the forearms of Batman's suit. If I was being catty I'd say they couldn't afford James Spader to play the suave but psychotic Dr Jonathan Crane. And can we
please have no more films where characters outrun an exploding fireball in an air duct/lift shaft or whatever!?!?! That one is so old it's got a bus pass.
2 - Mr and Mrs Smith (Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie)
Good mindless shoot-em-up yarn, deftly squeezing the occasional joke out of the basic premise: husband and wife are, unwittingly, the top assassins for rival organisations. Umm.. guess who they get assigned to kill...
3 - Crash (Sandra Bullock ... )
Gosh, for all my attempts to stick to pulp, damned if this movie didn't make me sit back and think a few times (Metaphorically speaking. Singapore Airlines may have a great movie selection, but you still don't exactly get to stretch out). I like stories told this way... an overlapping timeline in which we see linked series of events from the perspective of different characters (Jackie Brown is another good one, but then Tarantino does this a lot). Crash turns a probing light on personal prejudices of various kinds (class, colour, race, culture etc.), including your own assumptions about the characters involved, and stings your conscience rather than bludgeoning it. Classy stuff. Sandra Bullock was probably the biggest name in the list, but there weren't any dud performances --- a strong cast.
4 - Hostage (Bruce Willis)
Well-plotted thriller, with a solid performance by Bruce Willis, who ends up having to juggle a fiendish assortment of balls to get the right outcome from a hostage-taking. Visually opulent, too.
These comments may or may not count for anything; you have to factor in the possibility that I enjoy worse movies than you... But I've seen my share of stinkers, and I can honestly say that these four flicks did keep me watching. On the one hand, I couldn't exactly walk out, but on the other hand, there were plenty of other channels available.
Posted by racingsnake
@ 05:13 PM GMT+00:00
Some interesting blogging
here from James McGovern, on 'what the Identity Conversation ought to involve'. Having spent over three and a half years trying to explain the interface between identity technology and identity requirements, I have to agree with a lot of what James says.
The 'consumer' perspective on identity is one approach to the topic, but by no means exclusive or exhaustive. For better or worse, it's the perspective most often used to try and explain the concepts of identity, identity management and identity federation, partly because the consumer model of online transacting is one of which we all have first-hand experience. But to draw the analogy I often use... people tended to talk about e-commerce in terms of the retail consumer model (and for exactly the same reason); however, if you probe a little deeper, vendors and implementers alike will confirm that it's the B2B market which represents the greater volume and durability of traffic.
In terms of identity management, catering to the requirements of the 'consumer' is always key, whether that consumer is acting in the role of citizen, retail customer, employee, tax-payer or whatever. But James' blog entry correctly notes the importance of attending to the corporate (or service-provider) side of the relationship too. And that's the point I want to bring out: assertions of identity always involve at least a two-party relationship, and usually a three-party one. Either you, as a service-requester, are returning to whoever issued you with a particular set of credentials (OK, let's resort to the consumer model again... you're a banking customer, presenting yourself at an ATM and authenticating yourself with a PIN issued by your bank), or you are using the credentials issued to you by one party to authenticate yourself to another: for instance, you present your passport to the immigration official of another country.
What these transactions represent are multi-party relationships, over which assertions are made with varying degrees of trust. Those relationships are not technical ones, they are 'real world' relationships which often transcend the boundaries of any given technology implementation. That's why James is right to say that the identity architectures we implement need to be able to interoperate with other implementations; hence the Liberty focus on both openness and interoperability.
Posted by racingsnake
@ 04:20 PM GMT+00:00
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