• Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is a rather belated attempt to capitalize on the "psuedo-historical epos" trend of the last few years which was ironically started by Scott's own Gladiator (in case you were wondering, Braveheart was not a little too early for its own good, having come out in 1995). Synopsis: Balian, the son of Lord Godfrey, is knighted, takes up the task of defending Jerusalem from the forces of Saladin and ends up saving the day etc. Throw in a bunch of clichés about love, what it takes to be a humane leader back in the crusades and some generic morality crap and you've got a seriously badly written film. In its defense it does feature some superb photography, OK action and a huge cast consisting of some favourite actors of mine: Orlando Bloom (who finally appars capable of acting), Alexander Siddig (of DS9 fame), Brendan Gleeson, Jeremy Irons, Edward Norton (who does not appear visually), David Thewlis and finally Liam Neeson, who isn't actually on my list but does deserve a mention. Too bad the movie just plain sucked.
• Nicolas Cage's latest movie Lord of War was an absolute blast. It is an amasingly cynical, mostly funny and quite surprising satire of what makes third world countries wage war, as well as what makes greedy people tick. It doesn't make any excuses for the clichés it employs, and in my opinion it hits the spot precisely: some messages simply do not come across until you bang them into someone's head with an allegorical hammer. My only issue with it is that it fails to keep the satire simply as that, and culminates in a verbal political message which is an exercise in redundancy.
• Instead of making a long point I'll skip to the very end with a summary of The Exorcism of Emily Rose: good acting (particularly by Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson), reasonable dialog, crappy predictable storyline and no boobs at all. In short, a movie not worth your time; if you're interested in the legal/judicial aspects do yourself a favour and go watch Law & Order, it's what they do.
• I've heard a lot of conflicting opinions on I, Robot. Maddox went as far as to say:

  Here's how I would have changed this film: start out with a shot of Will Smith in a grocery store buying a 6 pack of Dos Equis beer, except instead of paying, the cashier is a Dos Equis marketing rep who hands Smith a thick wad of bills. Next shot: Smith finishes the last of the beer, walks over to Isaac Asimov's grave and lets loose. Why not? Same message, none of the bullshit.

  I won't deny that this movie has some serious issues (particularly with product placements; here it was even worse than The Island, if that's even possible) but I would take an opposite view to Maddox's: I enjoyed the movie immensely. Having read the book quite recently I find that the only place where the movie deviated completely from what is detailed in the stories (because I, Robot is not a single coherent storyline, rather comprised of several short tales) is in the depiction of Susan Calvin's character, who is actually very true-to-form in the beginning of the movie. Regardless, the movie features rather imaginative photography, some great action sequences, a plot which ultimately doesn't suck and some of the funniest dialogue I've heard in years (the only competition comes from the underrated Constantine). Bottom line? Recommended.

Update (27/11/2005, 15:40): After putting the remote logging framework to use on an actual commercial project I've found that the hack I used for mapping a method to its concrete (nonvirtual) implementation wasn't working properly for explicit interface implementations. One horrible hack (which fortunately never saw the light of day) and a little digging later I've come across a useful trick on Andy Smith's weblog and added some special code to handle interfaces. The new version is available from the download section.

As part of the ongoing project I'm working on I was asked to implement a sort of macro recording feature into the product engine. The "keyboard" (as it were) is implemented as an abstract, remotable CAO interface which is registered in the engine via a singleton factory. I figured that the easiest way to record a macro would be to save a list of all remoting calls from when recording begins to when recording ends; the simplest way would be to add code to the beginning of every remote method implementation to save the call and its parameters. Obviously, that is an ugly solution.

About a year ago when I was working on a different project (a web-service back end for what would hopefully become a very popular statistics-gathering service) I faced a similar issue: the QA guys asked for a log of every single Web Service method call for performance and usability analysis. At the time I implemented this as a SOAP extension which infers some details using Reflection and saves everything to a specific log (via log4net). A couple of hours of research, 30 minutes of coding and I was done - the code even worked on the first try! - which only served to boost my confidence in my choice of frameworks for this project. My point is, I figured I would do something along the same lines for this project, and went on to do some research.

If you're just interested in the class library and instuctions skip to instructions or download.

I eventually settled on writing a Remoting server channel sink to do the work for me. I'll save you the nitty-gritty details; suffice to say that the entire process of Remoting sink providers is not trivial and not in any way sufficiently documented. There are some examples around the internet and even a pretty impressive article by Motti Shaked which proved useful, but didn't solve my problem. I eventually got to the point where I could, for a given type, say which methods on that type were invoked via Remoting and with which parameters, but I couldn't tell the object instance for which they were invoked no matter what. A sink may access the IMethodMessage interface which gives you a wealth of information, including arguments, the MethodBase for the method call etc., but the only indication of which object is actually being called is its URI (the interface's Uri property). Unfortunately I couldn't find any way of mapping a URI back to its ObjRef (something like the opposite of RemotingServices.GetObjectUri), only its type.

After a long period of frustrating research and diving into CLR implementation with the use of Reflector I came to the conclusion that the only way to convert the URI back to an object (outside of messing with framework internals via Reflection) would be to implement ITrackingHandler and maintain a URI-object cache. Another annoying hurdle was that the framework internally adds an application ID to its URIs and forwards the calls accordingly; for example, connecting to a server at URI tcp://localhost:1234/test would in fact connect to the object at local URI /3f4fd025_377a_4fda_8d50_2b76f0494d52/test. It took a bit of further digging to find out that this application ID is available in the property RemotingConfiguration.ApplicationID (obvious in retrospect, but there was nothing to point me in the right direction), which allowed me to normalize the incoming URIs and match them to the cache.

Finally, inferring virtual method implementations and URI server types are relatively costly operations, so I've added a caching mechanism for both in order to cut down on the performance loss. I haven't benchmarked this solution, but I believe the performance hit after the first method call should be negligible compared to "regular" remoting calls.

Obviously the first thing to do would be to download the source and add a reference to the class library. I've built and tested it with Visual Studio 2003; I'm pretty confident that it would work well with 2005 RTM, and probably not work with 1.0 or Mono (although I would be delighted to find out otherwise, if anyone bothers to check...)

Next you must configure Remoting to actually make use of the new provider. You would probably want the logging sink provider as the last provider in the server chain (meaning just before actual invocation takes place); if you're configuring Remoting via a configuration file, this is very easy:

Doing it programmatically is slightly less trivial but certainly possible:

Now it is time to decide which types and/or methods get logged. Do this by attaching a [LogRemoteCall] attribute; you can use this attribute with classes (which would log all method calls made to instances of that class) or with specific methods:

Next you should implement IRemoteLoggingConsumer:

Finally you must register with the remote call logging framework via RemoteLoggingServices.Register. You can register as many consumers as you like; moreover, each consumer can be set to receive notification for all remotable types (for generic logging) or a particular type (for example, macro recording as outlined above).

Download

• The F.E.A.R demo was absolutely terrific. Admittedly my (now two year-old) machine is no match for the souped up 3D engine, but it still managed perfectly playable (>40) framerates at 800x600 at very high detail levels. This will not do so I expect to buy a new console/machine pretty soon (probably the latter, I'm not very fond of consoles), but regardless the hour or so of gameplay featured in the demo was very satisfying indeed. The graphics are absolutely top-notch and the bullet-time effect is finally something to write home about (although it seems more like a last-minute addition than a feature based in solid design) and the gameplay is very good indeed.
• I also played the Serious Sam 2 demo and enjoyed it quite a bit. It's not as slick and tongue-in-cheek as the first game was, but the 30-minute-odd level was very fun indeed. This time, however, the 3D engine is anything but revolutionary; it's decent enough, but not quite as fast and not quite as good looking as some of its competition (F.E.A.R, Doom 3, Half-Life 2 come to mind). My laptop (Dothan 1.7GHz, Radeon 9700 Mobility) couldn't handle more than medium detail at 1024x768; considering that the game isn't really visually groundbreaking (the laptop handles HL2/Doom 3 fluently) this isn't very encouraging.
• Half Life 2: Lost Coast is out and kicks a lot of ass. Aside from the top-notch map design (which isn't annoying, stupid or frustrating like some parts of HL2 itself), the new HDR mode is absolutely stunning. On my gaming machine (same one that couldn't handle F.E.A.R...), as long as I don't run with AA everything is very smooth and looks beautiful. There is also a nifty commentary feature which allows you to hear (on demand) audio commentary by the team responsible for the game. On the negative side, Source is still a horrible mess as they haven't fixed the millions of caching and sound issues, and the loading times are dreadful to boot. Plus, 350MB for a demo based on pre-existing resources seems a bit much.
  
• I had amazingly high expectations from Indigo Prophecy considering all the hype. To make a very long story short, it got uninstalled about 5 minutes into the tutorial. The controls are horrible, horrible to the point where I couldn't figure for the life of me what the hell the tutorial wants with me. Aside from the already convoluted interface, the tutorial at some point wants to "test your reflexes"; it does this by showing you a sketch of a D-pad controller (I guess the game was originally devised for consoles...), and at the opportune moment one of the controller buttons lights up and you have to press the same button on your actual controller as fast as possible. As the reigning deathmatch king in the vicinity I think I can safely say that my reflexes were NOT the issue here, not after about 20 attempts by myself about about 20 more by my brother. Either the tutorial does a terrible job at conveying what it is you're supposed to do, or the game is simply badly programmed. Either way, removed, gone, zip, zilch. Unless some future patch seriously alters the control scheme I'm not touching this game with a 60-foot pole. This only goes to prove my theory that consoles are directly responsible for the lower quality of PC titles today; not because of technology, not because of cost, but simply because of shitty controls originating in consoles and badly ported to the PC. Want a counter-example? Psychonauts has absolutely perfect controls, even on the PC.
• I spent about 25 minutes watching my brother play Shadow Of The Colossus on the PlayStation 2. Graphically the game is very impressive, however it tries to do a lot more than the aging PS2 platform can really handle; I've seen framerates in the 10-15 range, which for a straightforward console title is simply not cool. I haven't actually played the game, but from watching my brother I can safely say that the controls are either poor or difficult to get a handle of, but a couple of days later my brother said that the real problem is simply an ineffective tutorial and "it's really quite alright once you get the hang of it." Gameplay-wise it didn't seem overly exciting, but I may yet give it a shot at some point.
• After a couple of hours playing Five Magical Amulets I believe I can safely conclude that, while I appreciate that it is a labour of love and a lot of work went into making it, it's simply not a good game. The plot is very simple and uninspired; some of the dialogs are very poorly written; the quests are either too simple and easy to figure out or simply make very little sense (minor spoiler: combining the fly and the pitch made some sense, but the bag?!) and the graphics are very amateur. The whole game is Kyrandia-esque but without the high production values, although in its defense the music is actually quite good. Bottom line: there are better independent games for sure. The White Chamber is one.

• The Life Aquatic is a unique movie. Not quite comedy, not quite drama, it still manages to be interesting, never dull, often hillarious and even moving at times. It tells the (fictional) story of oceanographer Steve Zissou (played by Bill Murray) in his last great adventure: trying to find and kill the shark that ate his life-long friend Esteban. Although this may sound like a modern-day Moby Dick, the rest of the movie certainly isn't. With an insane cast including Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Anjelica Huston, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum and Michael Gambon this movie seemed to have faded into obscurity simply because it is so odd and unusual most people simply can't figure it out. Recommended.
• Versus is a Japanese action flick which includes Yakuza, zombies and supernatural forces. Despite terrific action scenes and some amusing characters (particularly the, er, protagonist) it completely fails to mesmerize; unlike some of its Chinese counterparts (such as Black Mask) the movie doesn't flow, it just drones on and on into monotony. Stay away.
• Four Brothers is the story of, well, four unlikely step-brothers (two white, two black) whose mom is shot down by gangsters and they seek revenge. Although the base plot is pretty standard fare the movie itself is very well made; it reminded me strongly of The Boondock Saints (itself a highly recommended movie). Four Brothers isn't quite as good but still works very well and manages to combine comic relief with some drama and lots of action. Recommended.
• Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story is a hillarious movie with Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller. I usually dislike Stiller intensely, but in this particular case it works very well. The (relatively stupid) plotline pits Peter La Fleur (Vaughn) as a proprietor of Average Joe's Gym, a gym for people just like you and me (well, not really - I hope I'll never be as pathetic) facing foreclosure, against White Goodman (Stiller), owner of Globo "We're better than you, and we know it!" Gym who's trying to take over Average Joe's. Fast forward a bit, you got the guys at Average Joe entering a dodgeball tournament to win a reprieve from Average Joe's mounting debts; Rip Torn in one of his most bizarre and hysterical roles yet; great actor chemistry and goofball humour which all adds up to a really fun movie. It's not quite as good (or satirical) as BASEketball but it's great fun never-the-less.
• I saw the first two episodes of Planetes and couldn't figure out what the big deal was; my brother (who usually knows his stuff) spoke very highly of the series but the episodes I watched bored me so badly I stopped watching in the middle, instead preferring to finish playing The White Chamber.
• In other news, Serenity will be coming to Israeli theaters sometime in mid-November. Hoozah! Since the tickets to the screening at Icon were long gone by the time I tried to order this means I might yet get the chance to watch the movie, and might even do some catching up on Firefly beforehand.