Shoplifters

We went to see Shoplifters this evening, a film that won the Golden Palm in Cannes this year. In Japanese. With Swedish subtitles. And the film was just lovely.

Okay, I enjoyed picking up the odd word in Japanese (I had a semester's course decades ago). But there was not much in the way of words that we needed in order to understand that we were rather voyeuristically watching a presumed family that lived in very cramped quarters and did things that may seem morally reprehensible in order to survive.

At first it is just Mom, Dad, Auntie, Grandma, and Son who live together, eat together, and steal together. On the one hand it is a bit jarring to see how they live and sleep in the same room, how they slurp their noodles, and needle one another. On the other hand, they would probably find our way of living jarring as well.

On the way home from stealing stuff for dinner -- Dad explains that things in a store don't belong to anyone, so it's okay to take them -- they come across a child of about five, out in the cold of a balcony, frozen and hungry. They take her home and share the food they have with her. They are going to take her back, but discover that she is bruised all over, and when they are at the apartment, they hear loud shouting going on. They decide that she can stay the night with them.

And she stays longer, becoming part of the family, and also learning how to shoplift.

I don't want to spoil the story for you, so I'll stop there. Suffice it to say that there are lots of interesting twists and folds to the plot. But it is really a wonderful film, expertly filmed and edited, with a host of excellent actors. The actress who plays Grandma, Kirin Kiki, is apparently very well know in Japan. She died of breast cancer shortly after the film was aired at Cannes. Both of the children, especially the youngest, were just magnificent. They must have had a very patient producer who was able to draw out the thoughts they were to be having and have them be readable from their facial expressions.

In a way, it was very fitting to hear it in Japanese, I think I prefer it that way to a dubbed version. But of course, it it better to see it dubbed than not at all. Because you start thinking after the film: What exactly is a family? How do we choose the people we live with, the people who are important to us? And why does such a rich nation not care adequately for its people? The latter is a question we have to also ask ourselves in Germany, as well as in many other countries.

Ocean's Eight

So there were lots of bad reviews about "Ocean's Eight", but I assumed that this was because all of the leads were played by women and anyway, Sandra Bullock was playing in it and I need to see all of her films. So the usual suspects gathered and we managed to find a theater showing the film in English (and German and a few other languages I couldn't identify) with German subtitles.

My expectations were exactly zero, I was tired and afraid I would fall asleep if it was boring. It wasn't. I only looked at my watch once towards the end of the film! There were, of course, some tired references to the Ocean's 11/12/13 films, but there were lots of interesting quirks to the film. I really loved the guerilla scene in which they place a female version of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" at the Met (the Germans didn't understand this reference).

It was a lively film (nothing to ponder, just summer fun) with some great acting. And fascinating to see so many women in major roles, including Rhianna as the superb hacker Nine Ball. A couple of things didn't quite ring true, but it was a nice night out on a hot summer day.

#BadStockPhotosOfMyJob

The Twitter hash tag #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob has me in stitches at the moment. These stock photos are trying to transmit visually what we as scientists do all day. It is boring seeing people think or write, so they try to come up with some ideas - and of course, this gives the general public a rather strange view on the world.

I surfed over to Shutterstock to have a look. "female computer scientist" gave me lots of men in lab coats with colored water in beakers next to computers, so I tried "computer scientist" next just to see. Oh my, still a lot of lab coats around, but some mighty strange stuff.

And some of them are cartoons of this state:

An old white guy staring at a screen looking over his reading glasses. Uh ha. Lots of glasses, by the way:

One might think that computer scientists are camera shy. But oh, no, here they are with neural nets projected onto a bluish screen next to a map. This is machine learning, and the bosses all wear ties!

This one does, indeed, convey a bit of the frustration one feels at times:

and I just love the caption: "Angry man businessman male scientist hipster smashes laptop furiously in office with board for copy space on white background." He has pens and pencils, an ancient book, two newer ones, a microscope, some paper, a laptop and a white board with nothing written on it. Hands up, who has ever seen a whiteboard in a scientist's office with no writing on it or things held on by magnets? I thought so.

Men in suits staring at blackboards are quite a thing:

It hurts my back just to think how I would have to get down on my hands and knees to write on the bottom of this blackboard. Okay, it might be one of those movable thingys, but it's already about 4 meters wide, so it must weigh a ton.

Oh, I see, it's the same guy, it's just the graphic designers going wild with Photoshop:

I'm impressed - even though there are few women (and they are kind of silly, wearing lots of makeup or postits with their short skirts), there are a number of persons of color and even a few hijab-wearing women (although one woman has a hijab in one photo and a sari in the next while they are using the same red book)

 

This guy looks real tired from typing with just one hand while holding his laptop in the air.

This is getting closer:

but I've never really had the ones and zeros fly off my screen at me:

But I think this guy is the winner:

His battery just caught fire while he is still balancing the laptop on his right hand, and afterwards, his brain is fried:

Now, here's a picture of my real home office (many years ago, it's gotten worse):

CC-BY-NC, WiseWoman

And here are some real computer science students in a real classroom:

HTW Berlin, Nina Zimmermann

and this is what is on their screens:

HTW Berlin, Nina Zimmermann

and sometimes we even don't work with computers!

HTW Berlin, Nina Zimmermann

Okay, enough fun. Back to work.

The Shape of Water

As a reward for finishing our taxes today we went to see the Oscar-winning "Shape of Water" film.

I probably would have left after 20 minutes, if it had not won all those Oscars. I mean, best film and all, surely something wourd turn for the better.

In my opinion: not. It was trite. Lots of clichés that I didn't find amusing. Woo-hoo 60s science fiction. Continuity errors (light outside while Elisa bathes, but when she is on the bus it is dark). Unnecessary sexual content and violence. The profanity got lost in the German translation, which was very wooden. And come on, in the 60s a starving artist has money for a color TV set?

I was wondering about the sign language, if it was American Sign Language or an adaptation.

One commenter at IMDB has it right: Guillermo Del Toro does "Amelie" meets "Creature from the Black Lagoon."  Octavia Spencer was, as always, stellar, and the cinematography and costuming were well done. But I could have made better use of my time.

The Post

WiseMan saw that "The Post" was being shown in English for the last time this evening at the nearby Odeon Theater, so we gathered the usual suspects for a nice film evening.

This is a must-see movie for the current "post-truth" times.

It is the story of the publishing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 by the New York Times and the Washington Post, and also about the Post metamorphosing from a local newspaper to a national one. The Pentagon Papers demonstrated that the government lied, not only to the people, but to Congress, about the situation in Vietnam. And they lied under many different presidents, Democrats and Republicans, just to save the embarrassment of having to admit that they were in over their heads.

The film by Steven Spielberg quite admirably shows Meryl Streep portraying Katherine Graham as she moves from being Daddy's daughter and her husband's socialite wife to being the publisher of the paper. She is torn between her social friends, her grandchildren, and what she feels needs to be published.

The IMDB Trivia page notes that the real Pentagon Papers were strewn about in the scenes dealing with them, and that the voice of "Tricky Dick" Nixon was taken from the tapes made public after the Watergate scandal. That's a nice touch.

I did rather wax nostalgic at the scenes showing the Linotype machines and the printing presses. As school children we were taken to see the printing shop of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and as a professor at the TFH Berlin I loved going on field trips with the students of the print and media technology program to see modern digital presses.

The scene at the Supreme Court (New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713) I found to be so realistic - everyone is nervous, but the brash lawyer for the Post, who had argued privately just days before not to publish, gives a burning defense of the freedom of speech. The court decided in favor of the Times 6-3 with Justice Hugo Black noting:

"Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."

I do remember getting into a fight or three with my father about the Pentagon Papers. He felt strongly that Daniel Ellsberg was a traitor. I was beginning to have an own opinion on the topic, and I didn't like being lied to. A cousin was up for the draft (there was a lottery held to determine who was to go) and I remember questioning why the country was waging this war so far away.

This is an important film about a very important turning point in American History. And it shows why it is important to have investigative journalists able to expose the mis-deeds of the nation. I'm happy to pay the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian a regular support amount so that they are there when we need them.

Three Billboards

Even though it was the middle of the week, we gathered the usual suspects to see "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri," mainly because this was the only night one of the crowd had time. And then he got sick and thus missed a glorious film!

You have to see it in the original, German dubbing just will not work here. The subtitles are nicely translated according the the slang meaning, not just a word-for-word translation. The southern drawl is absolutely necessary to be very clear about where this is supposed to be taking place.

The first thing I noticed was that, although I have never been in Missouri, it really looked like my birthplace near the rolling hills of the Appalachian Mountains. Turns out it was actually filmed in Western North Carolina (because they gave the film company tax credit) - along the Appalachian Mountains. Okay, and they made up the name "Ebbing" so that there would be no town that gets too many tourists showing up.

Mildred - like pretty much everyone else in town - is angry. It's been 7 months since her daughter was raped and murdered, and the perp has not been identified. She rents 3 billboards to ask

"Raped While Dying",
"And Still No Arrests?", and
"How Come, Chief Willoughby?"

Chief Willoughby is the police chief of Ebbing and is dying of cancer. There are a number of intertwining stories about hate and love and more hate and lots of misunderstandings. The humor is black-black-black, and especially well done. Frances McDormand (as Mildred) just radiates hate and revenge and softens at the end. Sandy Martin (as Jason Dixon's red-neck Mama) is soooooo in-character, I really enjoyed her brief performances.

This is a must-see film (Wikipedia has more details, apparently many protest groups have adopted the "Three billboards" form of protest). It's been nominated for a number of Oscars, I really hope they get at least one. The film deserves it.