Rebel Without A Cause, 1955.
Directed by Nicholas Ray.
Starring James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo.

Rebel Without A Cause is a classic that is very close to my heart, and undoubtedly an absolute favourite of mine. This is a film that realistically views rebellious, american, restless, mis-understood middle class youth. Its a story of youthful defiance which provides a rich and layered look at the world of the conformist mid 1950’s from the perspective of the main character- Jim Stark (James Dean)- a troubled teen with in effectual parents, in particular a father who fails to promise the adequate father image either in strenghth or authority. In actual fact, I should really say it is a portrait of 3 troubled, frustrated identity seeking teenagers- all outsiders, alienated and outcast from the world and values of parents and adults. These characters attain maturity and insight through rebellion and tragedy.

I love this film for one main reason. To me, this film presents teen anger as legitimate and serious. it really affects me, and makes me reflect on my teenage years every time I re-visit it. I feel everyone can relate to, or has been Jim Stark at some point of our lives. Do you remember the first time you discovered things in your life were painfully wrong? I cant really say what fueled my teenage rage- I can’t pin point a specific complaint with the universe other than there comes a time when absolutely everything is wrong and adults only complicate problems. This is why I also love Hamlet and the themes surrounding it- they really resonate with me- and in Rebel Without A Cause it is executed perfectly. A clear reflection of teen life, a true imitation of life and therefore true and classic art.

The opening scene is one of my favourites, but there are many more- if you haven’t seen this film, you must rent it today!!

Also interesting to note- all 3 main actors who experienced troubled lives themselves suffered premature deaths under strange circumstances.- a car crash at age 24 in 1955, a mysterious drowning at age 43 in 1981 and a stabbing murder at age 37 in 1976.

It’s a crazy time of year as we hit the final stretch to Christmas. One Christmas party after the other, drinks, food, shopping - fun but exhausting! Well, to help you slow down and regain some balance before the final stretch to the 25th, we’ve dropped our prices to $2 - for everything! This began yesterday (Tuesday) and runs to Thursday of this week. I’ve sent emails to everyone, so if you didn’t receive notification check your email address in your membership details (a lot of addresses have bounced), and make sure you’ve ticked ‘Yes I want to receive the monthly APPLEBOX movie roundup’.

Enjoy!

Our winner of 6 months free movies is Paul Goldacre! Paul says he’s never won anything in his life - until NOW that is

Here’s the winning ticket. This was drawn at last week’s Art In Place launch. Congrats once again Paul!

In Anchorman, Will Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, the top rated news anchorman in San Diego in the 1970s. Along with his posse of admiring co-workers Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) and Champ Kind (David Koechner) they rule the newsroom, that is until Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) arrives.

Dressed in an awesome 70s suits, being obnoxiously chauvinistic and portraying a complete moron, Ferrel shines in this role, and the whole cast is praiseworthy. The 1970s is an excellent setting to Ferrell’s corny and childish humour and the film’s exploitation of the 70s film aesthetic is actually done very well.

Largely nonsensical, the “plot” of Anchorman moves from one bizarre scenario to another, but narrative cohesion doesn’t seem like it was a high priority, this looks like a film that the cast had a lot of fun making. Highlights include the spontaneous ‘afternoon delight’ riff and the battle scene between competing network anchors.

This is one of those films where almost every line has made it into the everyday vocabulary of its fans. Among the lines I often hear quoted, “I love lamp” is probably the most popular. Not surprising, as Steve Carrell plays the absurd Brick to dim-witted perfection, and is one of the funnier elements of the film.

Anchorman is a well made, laugh out loud, ridiculous comedy with absolutely no hidden depth.
It is completely idiotic.
It is one of my favourite comedies from the last few years.

3.5/5

Margaret de Wolff of de Wolff Massage has moved in!

You may have noticed the stairs that run along the back of the shop. Well, book yourself a massage and head up those stairs for a well earned break from the December madness. Marg specialises in pre and post natal massage along with all your regular aches and pains.

Until the end of January, we’ll give you a free DVD rental following each and every massage you have with Marg. Now there’s no exuse to not go home and continue with the blissed mood you leave with!

The Crunchies is an awards event sponsored by four leading review sites: GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. They’ve created twenty award categories to “recognize the year’s most innovative technical, creative and business accomplishments of key companies, products and people”.

At APPLEBOX, we are what you call ‘hyper-local’, in that our online service really focuses on those within a small geographical area (i.e. around our store). So on an international scale we’re pretty much off the radar (although we recently raised some eyebrows as a showcase example at a tech blog).

Regardless, APPLEBOX is innovative in how we use technology to completely redefine the mass market offering of your local video store.

So we think we might have a remote chance of being noticed if you nominate us for the Crunchies! Nominations are open until Thursday, so just click the Crunchies circle above and enter APPLEBOX in as many categories as you like. I’d suggest consumer start-up, but there’s plenty of others and I think APPLEBOX also qualifies for the boostrapped start-up, design, international startup-up and business model categories. It’s up to you, there’s no right and wrong, and voting is anonymous.

If you do nominate us - many thanks from myself and Sarah!

UPDATE 13/12
Nominations are now closed!

Wow! and I was worried no one was going to come!! Last night was the launch party of ART IN PLACE and it went off.

All the boxes were ticked we had

- great art (thanks to all the local talent)
- good food (thanks to Michael and the team at Bean Counter)
- lots of cold drinks (thanks to Emma’s wheeling and dealing!)
- kids (thanks to all youse who had them)
- community (YOU)
- music (thanks Jim and Dave)

The gang from APPLEBOX, Bean Counter Cafe, SilverPrint, Carlo’s Upholstery and David Johns Gallery are THRILLED to the back teeth with the response we got last night. (spotted - 6.30pm one nervous presenter at the train station soliciting potential attendees with the promise of free drinks… what was she worried about?!) One estimate brought it in at 200 people at the 7.30pm peak.

I can’t tell you how nice it was to see people come together for last nights event. It was a perfect balmy evening and I think was a sign of many more events to come. I know sometimes APPLEBOX can tend to turn into a quasi bar but it would be nice to add that to the family as it’s a great place to hang out in the twilight. We had one customer researching us getting a license last night!!!

Keep your eye out for the Leader article in the next edition about ART IN PLACE. A big thank you to all the artists for sharing their talent and an extra big thanks to Emma Barnes who pulled the shebang together. We love our community and were so pleased to spend more time with you last night in a celebration of your talent.

I will get the technical one in the family to attach the photographs for all of you who missed the big night. Make sure you come down and have a look at all the artwork, will be up on the walls until the 23rd of December.

UPDATE - Photos are now online.
See all the photos (then hit the top right link for a slideshow)

Ok, time to geek out and talk about the technology behind APPLEBOX. Whilst we think our model for the local DVD store is a winner (we’ve reduced store overheads, embraced the Internet and kept a strong sense of local community even from the web) we also completely love the technology! Forget Rails, we’ve got a J2EE web stack that we think is second to none. Check it out:

• Our architecture is SOA (Service Oriented)
  All our application calls are SOAP, which from the ground up creates an API we will give public exposure to at a later date. For example this call returns a movie profile.
• Our storefront is Serverless AJAX
  The Web 2.0 movement has swept AJAX into the mainstream. We take that one step further and deliver our complete application as Serverless AJAX that makes stateless SOAP calls to our backend.
• Our development process is Model Driven (MDA)
  Rails gives the Ruby community productivity. For us, MDA gives J2EE a similar shot in the arm. Our complete stack with stubs for all business methods and web services, a default CRUD service layer, and all the J2EE XML config files are generated from a UML model. We can iterate from UML through to database and service layers in a matter of minutes. The MDA generator we use is AndroMDA.
• Our J2EE components are
  Axis (Web Services), Acegi (Security), Spring (Transactions), Hibernate (ORM), MySQL (Database) and JBoss (App Server).

The key to everything we do is the Serverless AJAX. As I mentioned in a previous post, we take the Single Page Application model, and chain multiples of them together as iframes within the browser. These SPAs are housed within a JavaScript controller that moves between each SPA as the application requires it. This is standard MVC, but the C and the V are in the browser, rather than on the server. So we’ve got:

• Static delivery of htm/js SPAs to the browser (no dynamic markup). All SPAs can be downloaded at startup or on request
• A stateful htm/js client where UI components persist until the app is closed
• Full containment of the view & controller in the browser
• A JavaScript controller that binds multiple SPAs together all with interfaces that can be called directly from other SPAs or from the main controller. With a pub/sub mechanism each SPA can publish and subscribe to global application events as well.

This is good because:

• The static htm and js resources can truly act as an application client, cached in the browser for next use. Cache headers are set to never expire, with versioning controlled within the URIs themselves (configured from a non-cacheable boot script).
• Each UI keeps its own state. For eg, when the user manipulates a page (eg magnifies the poster art, or respositions a cover strip), when they come back to that page it’s the same as when they left it.
• UI widgets don’t need to be rebuilt when navigating back.
• The complete JavaScript framework and model remain in memory. No reparsing thousands of lines of JavaScript to reload the object model that was there an instant ago.

Additionally:

• This scales well as repeat app use hits the server only for data. No pushing out reams of html, and app navigation is much less server bound.
• We build our backend as an application API from day one. We can re-use the same application services for other clients. Eg, our catalogue services are used in the public storefront, in our in-house administration systems, and from our testing framework. As SOAP services, we can also call these from Flash, Silverlight, or a native Win or Mac client if we wished. We can also choose to freeze a subset of the API and offer them publicly.

This stack works for us and delivers great productivity. To see it all in action, just click through to applebox.com.au and hit ‘Browse DVDs’!

This is quite stunning. These are web browsing stats by platform, as provided by Net Applications:

The iPhone hasn’t hit worldwide release, but already more people are browsing the web from it, than from all the Windows mobile devices, from all manufacturers, put together. That’s a pretty decent achievement for a first generation product.

Here at APPLEBOX we are Apple fans - we exclusively use iMacs in our shop, simply because they look so great and work so well. The new iMacs are even better, and we can’t wait til the iPhone gets here!