Yi Yi (Movie)

Few things in life are as simple as ones and twos.

The best thing a director can say should probably be found inside the film he has made. This film is very much as simple as the ones and twos in life. The film is simply about life, portrayed across a spectrum of its span. Therefore the Chinese title of the film is Yi Yi, which literally translates to "one-one" and "one-one" means "individually" in Chinese. This signifies the film's portrayal of life through each individual member at each representing age, from birth to death.

The movie is about the currents of life. Maybe the movie is not simply about knowing half of the truth, but about knowing the wrong half of the truth.

Mr. Yang, like his colleague Mr. Hou Hsiao-hsien and many other Asian directors, prefers a fluid point of view, one not tied to any particular character; his is a slightly set-back perspective that allows the audience members to choose their own identification figures, or shift their focus of identification as the drama unfolds. Mr. Yang and Mr. Hou have both been pioneers in a long-take, long-shot style; the camera, for example, will be positioned on the far side of a room, observing the characters for long moments without a cut or a close-up as they circulate around a dining room table or a tea room. For a viewer accustomed to the continual assault of Hollywood films, with their high-impact close-ups and rapid, analytical cutting, these Asian films seem blessedly calm, cool and respectful of the viewer's ability to make his or her own judgments and connections.

Cape No. 7 (Movie)

This was an excellent experience - and I state this despite a sappy romance, a constantly-whiny Japanese model, and unfortunately some of humor may be lost in translation.

But the greatest strength of the film is its characters. Somehow, the actors, director, etc. imbue even some of the minor roles with significant depth and complexity. Shrug off some of the corny elements of "Cape No. 7" and maybe you'll see why it's been wildly popular in Taiwan.

Casino Royale (Movie)

Daniel Craig makes a superb Bond: Leaner, more taciturn, less sex-obsessed, a guy who doesn’t really give a damn.

"Casino Royale" is fresh, actually fresh. Sean Connery was first to plant the flag, and that's that. But Daniel Craig is bloody damned great as Bond, in a movie that creates a new reality for the character. Craig has two big things in his favor. The first is that he's young. At 38, he's the youngest Bond since 1969. The second is that he's an excellent actor.

Year after year, attending the new Bond was like observing a ritual. It could be terrific, it could be routine, but you always knew about where you were in the formula.

"Casino Royale" brings vigor to the Bond franchise and the possibility of new directions. Pierce Brosnan played the same fellow that Dalton, Roger Moore and Connery played, and that was a burden. Craig gets to start from the ground up and create a brand-new guy. He's not the old James Bond but someone more interesting.

After the Wedding (Movie)

After the Wedding is a modern creation with a classic theme involving haves and have-nots, bloodlines and family ties. Life's a mess, it says, but you can't sweep up the dirt until you've taken a good, hard look at it.

Mikkelsen plays a Dane who resides in India, helping its poor children with food, company, etc. Soon enough, he has to return to Denmark for what he believes will be a dog-and-pony show with some rich guy in order to drum up funds for the Mikkelsens work in India. The story starts to unfold at this point, the director using many effective close-ups of faces (and particularly eyes, both alive and not) to bring home the core point that there are people to be helped everywhere, and not just in the poorer communities of the world.

Beautiful images and words throughout, with a plot that all told is probably not what you think it is.

Pareto chart

The Pareto Chart shows the relative frequency of defects in rank-order, and thus provides a prioritization tool so that process improvement activities can be organized to 'get the most bang for the buck', or 'pick the low-hanging fruit.'

Pareto charts are extremely useful for analyzing what problems need attention first because the taller bars on the chart, which represent frequency, clearly illustrate which variables have the greatest cumulative effect on a given system.

In the 1940s, Pareto’s theory was advanced by Dr. Joseph Juran, an American electrical engineer who is widely credited with being the father of quality control. It was Dr. Juran who decided to call the 80/20 ratio the "The Pareto Principle." Applying the Pareto Principle to business metrics helps to separate the "vital few" (the 20% that has the most impact) from the "useful many" (the other 80%). The chart illustrates the Pareto Principle by mapping frequency, with the assumption that the more frequently something happens, the more impact it has on outcome.

Because the values of the statistical variables are placed in order of relative frequency, the graph clearly reveals which factors have the greatest impact and where attention is likely to yield the greatest benefit.

Innocent Voices (Movie)

Innocent Voices chronicles the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s from the perspective of Chava, an 11-year-old boy (Carlos Padilla) a year away from being drafted into the army.

The scenes of civil war are devastating. What sets "Innocent Voices" apart from other civil war in Latin America films is its resolute point of view through the eyes of Chava. He has no political opinions. It's an allegory about all countries where men with guns control the daily lives of the people. Some of the men are with the government, some are guerrillas, some are thieves, some are armed to protect themselves, and to the ordinary people it hardly matters: The man with the gun does what he wants, and his reasons are irrelevant -- unknown perhaps even to himself.

That is certainly the case in "Innocent Voices", where politics seem meaningless at the local level and it is simply a matter of armed men, some of them boys, who have machine guns and fire them recklessly, maybe because it is fun. Tactics and strategy seem lacking in this war; the armed teams on both sides travel the countryside, rarely encountering each other, intimidating the peasants, for whom the message from both camps is the same: Support us or we will kill you.

The movie is effective without being overwhelming. Guns make it so easy, even a child can do it. Currently 300,000 children serve in armies around the globe, losing not only their innocence, but often their lives.