Looking Out To Sea

We saw Good Bye Lenin! yesterday, the second film in the Filmhouse’s little series of German films. This one was also about pre-unification Germany, but it was a comedy. So not at all like The Lives of Others.

It’s about a family whose father escapes to the West. The mother throws herself into the communist society and becomes a recognised idealist and champion for improving society. But she falls into a coma and sleeps through the fall of the Wall, and all the other changes that came along with it. When she wakes up the doctors advise that she not be made to suffer any excitement… so the grown-up children decide to hide her at home and pretend that the German Democratic Republic is the same as always.

This gives great scope for embarrassing social situations, awkward moments as you think the cat will be let out of the bag, and so on. It was a very funny film and a neat counterpoint to the misery and paranoia of The Lives of Others. Really recommended.

We’ve just received the new Filmhouse catalogue for February, and now that we have memberships we have to go more often to make it worthwhile. Feel free to join us at any of the following:

• The Educators (5.45pm, 11 February). German comedy (I think) about pranksters who sneak into rich peoples’ houses to rearrange the furniture. The last in the German Film Season. The other two have been really good.
• Inherit the Wind (5.45pm, 16 February). Classic Spencer Tracy court-room drama with Bible-lovin’ good-ol’-boys and such. There’s a talk afterwards from some science bloke about science and such. I’m looking forward to this one.
• I’m Going Home (6pm, 24 February). Family dies leaving small boy and grandfather alone in the world. Probably quite moving. French, I think. I’m writing this with the guide in the other room…
• Hunger (6pm, 9 March). Bobby Sands and hunger strikes in prison. It’s probably quite miserable, but who knows.
• The Counterfeiters (6pm, 17 March). About the people brought together to produce forgeries for the Nazis — I guess making fake newspapers, currency, whatever else seemed useful for propaganda purposes. Sounds pretty good, anyway, like a heist movie but without the heist. Just lots of random people with different skills doing intricate stuff.

Finally, this Sunday there’s a screening of Hero at 1pm to mark the Chinese New Year. Be there (if you want).

Geoff Pullum had a good whinge about poor user interface design the other day, so I feel inspired to do the same. Or similar.

We really had no clue what to judge when we started looking for a television but we quickly realised that nobody puts any effort into the design of the remote control. In the end we went for the TV with the nicest picture because that’s where the manufacturers put their effort. There was almost nothing to choose between the remotes. They were pretty much all terrible.

Even worse, though, is the design of the remote for our Humax PVR. With a PVR you either want to record or to play previous recordings. So why is the first step to playing previous recordings, the button to list everything you have recorded, hidden beneath a sliding plastic cover? To prevent you accidentally watching TV?!

But it’s sad that there are no good television remotes. It’s impossible to buy something to encourage the good manufacturers if they’re all equally bad. Though if you do a search for criticism of remote controls most of the complaints revolve around how ugly it looks. Clearly no one cares whether the device is usable as long as it looks like a bloody Apple product.

RSS: really simple syndication. Neat packaging of online content in a computer readable wrapping. Like barcodes for websites, no?

It’s a great idea that I really want to use properly. But I’ve never found a good way to read syndicated websites. They all seem to miss out on something important — either by skipping out important content like images and embedded videos, or badly processing the text so half the text turns into gibberish.

Anyone have a recommended way of reading RSS sites? I’m reaching the limit of the number of sites I can remember…

Helen’s been doing some swotting for a “journal club” presentation and so we’ve been having some nice chats lately about genetics. I think I’ve heard the term single nucleotide polymorphism enough that I might remember what it means in future.

I’ve also been reading Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought which I was given at Christmas. The two came together in this article which Helen forwarded — Pinker writing about “personal genomics” in the New York Times. It’s an enjoyable read and, to my eyes, quite level-headed.

The best bit, the bit that really latched its claws into me, was this sentence, in the final paragraph:

So if you are bitten by scientific or personal curiosity and can think in probabilities, by all means enjoy the fruits of personal genomics.

You see that? You’ve got no business learning about your genome if you’re not equipped to interpret the information — and the only information you’ll get is in terms of populations and probabilities.

You may think I’m being a bit harsh. But I don’t mean that in the sense of “you must be this tall to ride”. Height isn’t something you can change — but learning about the terms used in statistics, and then being faithful when talking about statistical data, is possible.

Normal Distribution
© Hendy Ongkodjojo

The alternative is to experience the full horror of misunderstanding which can be seen every day on the news stands. The Daily Mail’s science coverage has been proven to double risk of heart attack.

The media report statistical information very badly; and most people probably understand it just as well. All this despite the incredible relevance that “population” thinking has on modern people. Mark Liberman draws the comparison between our inability to think in terms of aggregate risk and medians and the same inability of hunter-gatherer tribes to understand basic counting. I honestly think that’s one of the most important things that Mark Liberman has written on Language Log, certainly on the subject of public understanding of science.

Unfortunately it’s not up to me or Mark Liberman how mathematics is taught or how newspapers cover stories relating to statistics. But it’s nice to see that Steven Pinker highlighted this issue in a popular newspaper.

I’ve been saving these up, so it’s three movies in one post today.

The Lives of Others or Das Leben der Anderen

This film is a few years old but we only just got round to watching it. There was a German film season at the Filmhouse, which was a great opportunity. Just before the screening, a lecturer from the university gave a small introduction to the film and its relevance to the political landscape in Germany. By her interpretation, it had done a lot to bring the topic of East German affairs into the public again.

This is an amazing film, and if you haven’t seen it you really ought to. This is also the first time I’ve felt some anger that there is a special award for foreign films at the Oscars. This film could have taken best movie from The Departed, I think.

Slumdog Millionaire

This is a Danny Boyle movie though it’s a bit of a departure from everything else I’ve seen of his. Fewer heroin addicts and zombies than I’m used to.

It’s about a boy from the slums of Mumbai who gets on the Indian edition of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and does extremely well. Is he cheating? Is he really a genius? Was it all luck?

His interrogation forms the framework on which the film hangs the little vignettes from his life that “made” the boy who he is. A mixture of dark comedy and romance in an unusual setting. It deserves to make the term “chai-wallah” a household word, too.

The Wrestler

The first Darren Aronofsky film I’ve seen since Pi, the amusingly-clichéd but interesting debut about numerology and the stock market. This one stars Mickey Rourke, making a come-back after his career as an old boxer… to play an old wrestler.

Some martial arts movies make a big deal about the action. This is not that kind of movie — after all, this is American pro wrestling we’re talking about here. The appeal, or whatever you call it, is in its showmanship. The heroes and the villains, the staged fights, the comedic action.

The point of this one is, I suppose, what happens to old warriors. People who can do nothing else, but who are too old or decrepit to do what they want. It’s quite a slow film, without any sense that it’s stopped or spinning in circles. Mickey Rourke is excellent as the lugubrious Randy “The Ram”. Watching him ruin his life and his body and his relationships, to the point where the only thing he can do is carry on, is a little bit heart-breaking.

We’ll be watching more films this year. Helen got us a joint membership at the Filmhouse, which gives us a bit of a discount at the box office and at the bar. We hope to make good use of it, and we’ve been marking the calendar with stuff that we’d like to see.

The blind man at the back takes firm hold of the tail and says:

But why do we need to call it an elephant? No-one knows what that is. Everyone knows what a rope is, so we should just call it a rope.

And that is how the elephant came to be labelled a rope in all the guide books.

Spent rather a lot of money on CDs yesterday. Though it could have been worse…

• Ocean Beach, Red House Painters. The Red House Painters seem to be Mark Kozelek’s original band. I’ve been really enjoying his other stuff released under his own name and that of Sun Kil Moon, so I chose this one at random.

• Flock, Bell X1. Chosen because it was the only album they had by this band. It may be their only album, for all I know. It includes a song which I have on an HMV sampler disc from a few years ago, which is why I bought it. It was a good sampler that one — also introduced me to Death Cab For Cutie.

  Edit: It turns out that Bell X1 are the band that Damien Rice left behind when he went solo, though at the time they were called Juniper. Small world.

• Carmen Symphony, Bizet. I couldn’t resist this one because it was quite cheap and, you know, it’s got yon Toreador tune.

• Movies: The Ultimate Collection, Various. Bit of a silly one this. A 3-disc compilation of various famous themes from the movies. So lots of John Williams, lots of action movies. Mostly recent stuff and unashamedly populist. But it has a high enjoyment factor.

Helen also splurged on similar things — a Karl Jenkins box set (including The Armed Man), The Proclaimers, Stevie Wonder, Simple Minds and some project with Roddy Woomble’s name on it. Lots of exciting new music here!

I suppose there are plenty of mediocre films which have won an award or two, but it’s rare to find a film that’s generated so many awards and is so uniquely bad. I recently had the dubious honour of being introduced to just such a film — Children of a Lesser God.

It is a romance: a study of the relationship between a “hot-shot” speech therapist moving to a deaf school in New Brunswick, and a deaf woman who works at the school.

It fails to impress on nearly every point that it makes an effort — as a romance, as a statement about deafness and as entertainment. The characters are either uninteresting or hateful. I could find no redeeming features in the leading man. I could see no reason why the leading lady would want to have anything to do with him.

Some points in particular really rubbed me the wrong way. The treatment of ASL, both as a language and as an important part of the characters’ identity, was downright shoddy. Many of the shots were framed so that the signer’s hands were offscreen msot of the time. There were no subtitles for the signed speech. Instead, the leading man provided a tedious running commentary whenever someone signed to him. As if we didn’t hate him enough, we now have to listen to his voice for all the other characters too!

For some reason the two main characters fall for each other. The reason for their affection remains a complete mystery to me. I would guess that she is the ultimate difficult student for him, while he is a suitable target for the anger she feels as an outsider. How all this translates into romance is a complete mystery to me. Their relationship seems to be based entirely on mutual antagonism. But unlike stories like The Shop Around The Corner it seems utterly unlikely that the animosity is just a front. They really do hate each other.

It seems the film was adapted from a play. I only hope the play wasn’t nearly as bad as this.

We’ve been neatly sidestepping the “massive pile of books, slowly growing” issue for… well, long enough anyway. And just at the point where it seemed we’d make our merry way to IKEA and find something suitably jolly-sounding — Billy or Lindesfarne or similar — I had one of those crazy ideas that stalls us for many weeks or months to come.

We were at an art exhibit at the Corn Exchange before Christmas, discussing mahoosive paintings. We do have a couple of pictures up in the flat, but it wouldn’t be terrible to have more, or at least space for more. But the only big wall left in the flat is where the bookshelves would go.

I had an interesting thought. The problem is that we have too little storage space (or maybe we have too many books? I’m not sure) to display everything nicely. We’d also like to keep as much wall space as we can. I imagined some kind of work surface, maybe about waist height, with all the books stored underneath. But they would be side-on bookshelves, that slid out on rails like the wardrobe space we had in our old flat. In fact, the nearest thing I can think of are full height versions used in kitchens — from the front they are quite slim, but seem to be quite effective.

We had a visit today from Jackie and Carley from Ampersand to discuss it. I gave them some sketches, showed them a photo of the kitchen equivalent that provided the inspiration, they measured the wall and were off. Now it’s just a question of waiting to see what they can come up with. Quite alarming, really.