I'm dismayed at the lack of quality personal finance apps for the Mac. Is it just me or do they all suck? I'm actually to the point where I'm seriously considering writing my own. I've been wanting to play around with Core Data anyway.

All I want is a Mac app that will:

• Download my banking and credit card statements (or at least remind me to do it)
• Suck the data in and save it in some kind of database
• Automatically categorize the transactions according to rules I configure
• Produce some cute graphs and pie charts to tell me what is going where
• Do all of the above with a simple, no-nonsense UI

The point is to give me some additional visibility into what is happening and a permanent store of the information that I control, with as little effort on my part as is possible. I don't want to manually reconcile my balance. I don't want to write checks. I don't want to enter anything by hand.

That doesn't seem like it's asking a lot, but I can find no application that does these things. Quicken kind of does is but the UI is terrible and the auto-categorization doesn't exist. I've tried a dozen or so shareware and freeware apps, none of which do what I want.

Last night, Jesse got Dac and me in to see another AIFF film, Linda Linda Linda. Four Japanese high school girls have three days to put a band together, learn some songs and play at the annual Rock Festival. That's about all there is to it and I couldn't have asked for more.

Thematic simplicity is what is so refreshing here. Subplots are suggested but never given center stage. Hints of romance remain unresolved. Even the plot point that you'd think would be made into a Big Deal (a Korean exchange student is recruited to be the lead singer) is really only added for texture.

In the end, the only themes that matter are the simple ones:

   Youth is fleeting. Friends matter. There is no point. Just rock.

The essence of punk, distilled and bottled in Japan and now shipped back to the US. I haven't walked out of a theater so happy in years.

Only problem is now I can't get that song out of my head...

My friend Jesse works at the Asian American Film Festival every year, and this year is no exception. He was kind enough to get me in to see Café Lumière at the Castro on Sunday night.

This was the new(ish) Hou Hsiao-hsien movie. Shot in Tokyo, it explicitly establishes itself in the opening credits as being an homage to Ozu Yasujiro. Critics have jumped on the bandwagon, calling this film a Tokyo Story for the 21st century.

I take issue with this comparison.

Granted, the camerawork, composition, and pacing are all pretty Ozu. And a number of establishing shots and at least one scene were direct copies from Ozu's work. But the narration completely lacks Ozu's detachment and insight, and that's really the key piece of the puzzle (at least for me, opinions may vary).

Ozu famously gave his characters time and space to breathe so that the audience could examine their relationships in great detail. By contrast, Hsiao-hsien gives them breathing room so that we can watch them mope. He is unable to examine their relationships in any meaningful way. Certainly not in an Ozu-esque way. Relationships here are just a backdrop for introspection-as-spectacle.

If this truly is the movie Ozu would have made had he lived long enough, then it's probably a good thing he didn't.

It did have a lot of neat shots of trains and train stations in Tokyo, though.

"I know! Let's get into the search engine business!"

"But how do we differentiate ourselves from Google?"

"Hmmm...good question. Wait, got I've got it! We'll make the text REALLY BIG."

"Brilliant! Let's go build it!"

Unsurprisingly, Russell Beattie thinks this is cool.