You may recall me musing about my girlfriend bringing me home a copy of The Walking Dead on DVD a couple of weeks ago. Well, readers, you’re not going to believe what's just happened.
Director: Jon M. Chu
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, Daniel Radcliffe
You may recall me musing about my girlfriend bringing me home a copy of The Walking Dead on DVD a couple of weeks ago (with me being understandably outraged). Well, readers, you’re not going to believe what's just happened.
My new girlfriend swung by the flat last night with a little surprise for me. “What is it?” I casually enquired.
Having just had my fingers burnt you can forgive me for being somewhat apprehensive when it comes to ‘surprises’.
Perhaps she had upgraded her internal firmware and was now on personality 2.0? I decided to let this play out, choosing to hold off on pre-emptively serving her breakup papers. But to my horror, she reached into her pocket and presented a USB memory stick, before placing it directly into my brilliantly wireless laptop. I’m not joking readers, I literally threw up.
“Legacy equipment” I coughed whilst wiping my mouth; “in my personal computer! Sacrilege!”
Before I could send the laptop into the fiery pits of hell, the USB memory stick started to auto play (to my credit I was running a slick failover operation where entertainment media seamlessly streameed upon insertion) and something curious happened; most, most curious.
In a brilliant reversal of fortunes, my anger melted away like butter on a hot metaphor and a small smile started to creep across my face as a title card appeared on the screen:
Now You See Me 2
“They made a movie about UC? And it’s a sequel? I never even saw the original! Unbelievable! I don’t quite understand the spelling but still, this is brilliant!”
"I’ll allow it," I said internally before realising I should perhaps say this out loud as to emphasise my point further.
“I’ll allow it,” I said without ever breaking my gaze from the screen. I then gestured for my girlfriend to take her leave as I needed absolutely zero distractions as perhaps I was about to learn something new about UC that I never knew before.
“Not likely though!” I bellowed simultaneous both out loud and internally which amused me, my girlfriend and, as I would later learn, UCHero1996, who I had been video conferencing synchronously with throughout the entire exchange.
Being incredibly inquisitive, I started to make a list of questions that I absolutely required this movie to address at the bare minimum. I’m sure, yes, that Now You See Me 1 covered the basic features of a UC Platform like interoffice calling, automatic updates, instant messaging and sometimes being ‘in the cloud’.
No, I wanted this to go deep into UC mythology and talk about the all-seeing-eye that is presence, the war between Cisco and Polycom, the numerous CRM’s it can integrate with and the worldwide DDI’s (a telephone number – lol muggles) that it can support. Will a love story unfold using unified conferencing, will the Webex platform make a comeback and by god, what softphone will they use?
I waited then baited breath as a playing card-filled pre-movie animation dominated the screen. 52 cards made sense as there were circa 52 unified communication features – with the four suits cleverly winking towards the fact that it works for small, medium, large and enterprise customers!
Oh yes this was ticking so many boxes I almost had to turn it off and go and make a call on my DECT phone (I have multiple around the flat, all working together), just to savour the crisp sound quality of a VoIP phone. I went with my perfect judgement and persevered on and before I knew it the animation was over and an actor appeared on the screen.
“Hey, it’s Harry Potter,” I cleverly quipped in a subtle nod to the actor being Daniel Radcliffe: “But why is he doing a card trick? Where is the productive workforce and where are the millions of features?!”
What then proceeded was 212 minutes of magic, drama and mystery as Mark Zuckerberg (lol) defeats a bandit of scheming magicians by using clever card tricks and sleight of hand.
And do you know what, it was pretty damn awesome; being in The Magic Circle I got a real kick of it. It turns out that’s why Lucy brought it around in the first place.
Four out of Four Stars
