Die Angst des Tormanns vorm Elfmeter

Wim Wender’s Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (a.k.a. The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick), based on Peter Handke’s novel of the same name which I haven’t read, tells an uneasy story about a goalkeeper who aimlessly wanders through Vienna, picks up the girl selling tickets at the cinema, kills her for no apparent reason and then retreats to the hinterland at the border to visit an old friend.

His friend can tell that he’s uneasy, and he becomes even more so when seeing the village’s police, but nothing really happens and the film does not resolve his strangely ‘lost’ state.

Even though this film was made long ago in the 1970s and plays in Austria, it still has that empty American feel to it which seems a trademark of Wim Wender’s newer films. Odd how this sticks over decades. I guess it’s called a ‘style’.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The Limits of Control

Jim Jarmusch’s new film The Limits of Control will probably disappoint many people who saw the trailer and got the impression that it’s a crime thriller featuring Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton and Gael García Bernal. While technically those actors appear for a few minutes each, they’re not the films main point and neither does it qualify as a classical thriller.

Luckily I hadn’t seen the trailer beforehand and I’m not such a Bill Murray fan either, so this worked well for me. The real star and protagonist is played by Isaach De Bankolé who speaks very little and just receives codes on tiny sheets in match boxes of the club ‘Le Boxeur’ throughout the film (while doing what one may be tempted to call ‘out-Samuel-L.-Jacksoning Samuel L. Jackson in terms of determined coolness). The journey that’s apparently prescribed by those codes takes him to Madrid, to Sevilla - with special focus on the Torre del Oro - and further into the Spanish countryside. He dives into those locations, walking around, studying the paintings and ordering countless pairs of espresso of which the right one seems to be most suitable for swallowing little paper notes.

The tiny code messages are brought to him by wildly different people (which suggest that Mr Jarmusch tried to call all his cool actor friends and get them to participate), many of which have a story to tell after being assured that The Man doesn’t speak Spanish. And after many iterations of this process, each of which gives ample opportunity to explore cool buildings, interesting interiors, an amazing variety of simple yet interestingly coloured suits from the protagonists small suitcase, he ends up in the countryside killing a businessman in a tightly guarded building. Luckily, by then, it seems irrelevant how he manages to enter the building, it’s enough for him to be there to do his job.

In terms of a lone quiet man on his way I thought this film had a slight parallel to Dead Man and that extended to the reappearing slow music in the film which seemed very appropriate and sounded like Low to me (it is by Boris, though, Boris sounding like Low, I’d say).

It’s a cool and good looking film. It doesn’t need to make sense.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The Flowers of Shanghai

The Flowers of Shanghai is a an excursion into the world of Shanghai’s upper crust brothers (a.k.a. Flower Houses) that lets us meet their bosses (a.k.a. Aunties), their staff (a.k.a. Flower Girls) who were bought at young age and educated for the job and their patrons.

The film follows a few of the girls and the drama of their existence. Where drama does not mean anything ‘modern’ about how this job may be bad for them - they don’t seem to mind - but more the little fights between the different girls and their plans to marry one of their patrons who seem to be mostly old guys who like drinking games.

The whole film is richly decorated and shot in an extremely warm look. It’s also a bit boring as the drama doesn’t really make it across the screen and the film lasts over two hours. On the upside, the film is full of hot towels and opium! Whenever someone arrives at a flower house, a servant preparing an opium pipe and some hot towels isn’t far.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Home Planet

Without doubt drawing from the popularity of documentaries like Blue Planet or the goregous Planet Earth series (that stuff was the closest I ever got to admitting that HD television sets may be advantageous, but I have yet to indulge into a HD version of 2001…) as well as the feel good narrative of An Inconvenient Truth, there is a new film going by the name of Home which stresses both the beauty of the planet and the bad things we do to it.

All the usual suspects are there: energy waste, melting ice, killing rain forests for beef. The shots are nice, the story isn’t particularly new and I started wondering what films like these will change. They feel like preaching to the converted. A little drop of feelgood about the world combined with an extremely mild critique of the powers that are, we can lean back and appreciate the planet. Well done.

FWIW, the film has a home page as well as a YouTube page where you can watch it in a number of languages. Some comments I read suggest that there may be national restrictions on whether you can watch the film, so no guarantees for those links.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Workingman’s Death

Another Austrian film. What’s it with Austrian film makers? They manage to create the most depressing and weird films of social commentary as well as extra-dry documentaries. Michael Glawogger’s Workingman’s Death is in the later category.

The film opens with the following quote by William Faulkner:

You can’t eat for eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day - nor make love for eight hours a day - all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

Hence it focuses on work, the dangers of work and the meaning of work for people. In five parts, it shows us five jobs which are excessively unpleasant or unimaginable for people living in rich countries. It silently films the work being done and catches a few comments of the people who do it. A few of them are fine with their job, a few do it because it has to be done, many aren’t particularly happy but they don’t complain. They need the money.

Each of the sections comes with a title (covering the screen in what looked like a stencil version of Helvetica). In Helden (Heroes), miners in Ukraine run their own illegal mining operation simply for the purpose of heating their homes. The work looks exhausting and dangerous, but they’re fine with it. They have to make do. In Geister (Ghosts), people in Indonesia collect sulphur at sulphuric springs. They pick it up and carry loads of it over a mountain to earn their money. There are tourists taking photos with them. In Löwen (Lions) we visit a ‘butchery’ in Nigeria. People bring their cattle there to have its throat cut by the local butcher. The blood runs out and other parts of the market offer to handle the skinning and roasting. It seems perfectly normal, yet it looks fantastically gross with mud and blood abound - you’ll receive your roasted and skinned cow’s head freshly washed, though. In Brüder (Brothers) we visit a shipwreckking yard in Pakistan. Old ships are brought there and they are disassembled by the local workers. The ships are huge and cut into parts which then - spectacularly - fall down and are disassembled further until they end up on a big pile.

The final part Zukunft (Future) is in China. It deals with the steel industry and how it has been growing and becoming more modern in the past decades. Workers see the progress and acknowledge its importance. As a contrast to this some shut down steel plants in Germany are shown. They have been turned into amusement parks. Making it look like everybody is at a different stage of the progress curve and that it’s at least unclear in which direction progress leads.

A very interesting film, I think.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Contact High

Michael Glawogger’s current film is Contact High [official site]. It was highly lauded in the paper and in it’s drug induced - which reminds you of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from time to time, possibly crossed with a splash of Michel Gondry’s happy weirdness - it is far from the serious issues shown in Workingman’s Death.

The film’s setup is that of two guys working in a sausage stall in Austria. A bag with illegal substances needs to be picked up in Poland and because of a series of fuck-ups it becomes their job to do that. The mastermind behind the operation doesn’t agree and decides to follow them by car. We end up with people in Poland, substance use, a number of different bags ending up with the wrong people - bags of wildly different styles, it should be added, this isn’t a sensible story like What’s up Doc? -, including a bag full of sausages.

Needless to say, things end up being weird. In a funny way that’s amplified by everybody speaking Austrian accents.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Le Temps Qui Reste

Slowly filling the remaining gaps in my François Ozon watching by finally seeing Le Temps Qui Reste (Time To Leave). The film’s story sounds so pathetic that I almost decided to skip the film: The main character, Romain, is a successful photographer in his early thirties, then he learns that he has cancer and doesn’t want the agony of chemotherapy with a tiny chance of survival.

Films with such a storyline can easily end up being unbearable. Luckily this one doesn’t and instead we see how Romain tries to cope with this situation - at the same time trying to ‘live’ in his remaining days and being completely lost when it comes to dealing with it. Being a highly cynical person himself, he feels he can only tell his grandmother and not his parents, friends or colleagues. Yet, he tries to collect a few memories, to - sort-of - make up with his sister and to remember the nice things of his childhood. It’s a hard way Romain has to go, and he struggles.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Also by Ozon and worth seeing: Un lever de rideau (a.k.a. A Curtain Raiser), a short film about a guy dumping his girlfriend because she’s always late. They love each other but that’s driving him nuts. A simple story that leaves nobody happy.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

On the occasion of this special week they created a small exhibition about the history of the observatory and its relation to Gauß - who remains one of the city’s heros. A special lecture on the history was given by a retired astronomy professor today. It was a very interesting lecture (all talking, no slides) highlighting that astronomy, i.e. studying and mapping the skies, used to be strictly joined to subjects like mapmaking and study of the earth’s surface a few centuries ago. With mapmaking being essential for politics, war and other such pastimes, astronomy ended up in a position much more recognised than the ‘ivory tower’ science it may be perceived as today. Those in power didn’t see observatories as a way to gain maps of their countries, rather than fun for science nitwits. Hence, they were at least interested in building some.

As a consequence there was a plan to build an observatory in Göttingen even before Gauß - so it wasn’t ‘his’ observatory as I was told before. On the other hand he worked there for decades on many important things, so it became ‘his’ observatory over time. Despite making many measurements and baffling amounts of computations, it was Gauß’ aim to understand the bigger scheme behind the principles discovered.

Somewhat strangely, he got distracted from astronomy to map making and spent a decade of his life triangulating the kingdom of Hannover (then belonging to England) resulting in the famous map. While he developed cool tools like the heliotrope for that, his contemporary physicists and mathematicians saw his talent wasted in such menial tasks. A statement he apparently didn’t agree to.

Later on Gauß and his colleague Weber created what’s said to be the first electric telegraph. With a morse-style code they could transfer messages across town, without the need for good weather or opening the window. Gauß is said to have noted that he can imagine that once the technology has matured this could be used to transfer messages for several miles (I’m not sure about this, but from some other conversion I saw ‘miles’ seemed to be 10km or so back then). While he didn’t predict people twittering on the subway, this seems reasonably visionary for the web -5.0 era.

There were plenty of other discoveries made and tools discovered in Göttingen. One of Gauß’ colleagues, for example, invented a very precise way to determine your longitude on sea, winning a part of the prize for the longitude challenge that was big at the time. In fact, the time dependence of these things is amazing. Today people carry tiny GPS toys in their pockets which easily outdo the out tools. But that literally requires modern rocket science (and general relativity), compared to which the old telescopes and quadrants are amazingly simple tools. No black magic going on there. The skill consisted of knowing how to use them and knowing how to have the optical components made to a great precision.

As a final treat, one of the exhibits showed the odd black hat which Gauß is wearing on a number of paintings. Cool!

But sheer luck and discussing the virtues of the mighty Стерео Тотал after dinner recently, gave a spontaneous trip to Hannover to see them play at the Theaterformen festival. Amazingly the gig was free to watch and located a nice backyard in an area of Hannover which hides the city’s proverbial ugliness well.

They played plenty of songs for us, alternatingly using a guitar, drum set, some electro toys and an acoustic bass when a bassist joined them for a few songs. With their big ‘hits’, some old songs and quite a few of the newer ones, that made a great gig (even though didn’t play the - admittedly not particularly gig-like - Die Wäscheklammern which must be one of the most hilarious songs in existence.

The only thing irritating me was the fact that Françoise Cactus only stopped chewing her chewing gum for one of the very last encore songs - must have been a challenging one. And they had a chandelier on the street outside the venue - way to pimp your town!

Bling

The more critical points about Safari 4 are the changes to its user interface though. Some of them, like ‘Top Sites’ are vacuous pieces of crap (enquire within to make me argue that it’s visual overload, much less effective than typing the first letter of the address and may waste your time by reminding you of the existence of websites you shouldn’t visit so often), but unlike many other types of crap Apple introduced in the past years, these can be easily and turned off and ignored without any problem.

Cover Flow and lost opportunities

The same uselessness statement could me made about Cover Flow bookmarks, I suppose, but to be honest I hardly ever use my bookmarks at all, so to me it seems mainly a waste of effort (and judging from what I heard others say, a rather unreliable one at that as Safari doesn’t seem to be good at actually fetching those images. Personally I also consider that feature a missed opportunity. Not only did Apple decide to litter our hard drives with hundreds of megabytes of web page screenshots (opening the folder of which may be a good way to visualise the privacy implications of web bugs - particularly Google), they also missed out on the opportunity to create a good solution for this that offers search and offline access as well.

To me the current implementation of Safari seems ridiculous. For each page you visit it stores a reference in your browsing history, it saves a file with the page’s text for Spotlight searches and it saves a screenshot of the page for its Cover Flow bookmarks. Yet, there seems to be no way to actually look at the screenshots Safari stores for you. They are not displayed by Quick Look when invoked on browsing history items and they are neither used to give you an impression of one of those history items when you are offline. To me, saving a web archive with the actual page in it (plus a screenshot, possibly, for performance) would seem much more logical. And it would make those situations when you discover a page you visited in a Spotlight search while you don’t have internet access much less frustrating.

Tabs

Another big debate among browser users was Apple’s re-location of the tab bar into the window’s title bar which existed in some beta versions of Safari 4. While I could appreciate the space savings of that, I thought it was more irritating than useful in the end. Simply because it made the window’s title bar look extremely busy and made things hard to click. In addition, that idea also ruined other subtle display methods in Safari: The unique lock icon location for encrypted sites and the full window width page title. Without the latter it’s quite hard to see the page’s name at a glance.

Surprisingly Apple listened to the loads of the feedback they must have received on this issue and the released version of the browser come with traditional style tabs. Those aren’t perfect either, but apparently they’re the best you can do when working with the ‘tab’ metaphor. In particular, they still suffer from horizontal overflow problems, as tabs to everywhere. And Apple’s insistence on only giving you an overflow chevron with no way to actually move between the tabs doesn’t make that any better. In fact, they added some fancy background colouring to the menu coming out of the overflow chevron, presumably to give you a better idea about the context you’re looking at. But I am not really sure it helps me figure out anything.

The following two screenshots are an example of that. I opened six tabs in a narrow Safari window which could only fit four of them in. In the beginning, with the fourth tab selected, it looked like this:

This makes sense to me, assuming that the light colour indicates the visible tabs and the dark colour indicates the hidden tabs. Then I paniced and switched to the last tab:

Now, with the same window width and tab arrangement, seeing three of both the light and the dark items suggests that my initial idea about the meaning of the colours was wrong. I guess I’ll just have to avoid looking at this. Tabs aren’t good for you anyway.

Progress

Another contentious issue was that of the progress indicator. Safari used to have a progress indicator which coloured in the address field according to the page’s progress at being loaded. While a progress indicator that gives quantitative information may be extremely problematic on a conceptual level for loading web pages - you have to display some progress immediately after the request is sent to let the user know something is happening but you have no clue at that stage how long it will take to complete everything - I think that Safari used to fake it reasonably well.

Nobody wants to read precise information from the progress indicator. Usually people just want to see that (a) their request is being processed and that (b) some progress is happening. That is, you want a bit of the progress bar to appear as soon as a click is made and then you wa old nt the progress bar to move at a reasonable speed as long as data are coming in. That way a stalled progress indicator may give you a hint that something isn’t working properly and that a reload may be in order. Particularly in low-bandwidth situations, which web sites and browsers don’t seem to be particularly good with, this is a useful feature.

Apple decided to remove the progress indicator in the betas, replacing it by a tiny spinning progress indicator at the very right hand side of the address bar in beta versions. This was very irritating as the visual impact of that tiny graphic was so low that you always had to consciously look at that tiny bit of screen space to see whether or not the progress indicator appeared. Definitely a change for worse, big enough to penetrate Apple’s bug reporters (perhaps people at Apple are even using Safari themselves…).

Their ‘solution’ to the problem was to not just display the progress indicator but provide an easily visible dark background around it which you’ll immediately notice without having to make an effort to look for it. That certainly solves the biggest problem with the new progress indicator seen in the betas. The other problem, however, of seeing whether there is actual progress in the file transfers or whether they have stalled, remains.

I’d certainly like to read the reasoning that went into putting engineering resources into making the progress indicator worse than it was before. Seems illogical to me, particularly as Apple missed out on what looks like the only potential advantage of an indeterminate progress indicator to me: The ability to let it spin when further resources are loaded after the page finished loading, like many of those fancy web 2 pages like to do.

Reload button

Another problem with Safari 4 is that Apple moved the Reload button to the right hand side of the address bar. Web browsers were born with the reload button at the left hand side of the window. More importantly, they were born with the Reload button close to the Back and Forward buttons, which not only makes sense but also keeps distances short when navigating with the mouse. Internet Explorer 7 broke that tradition and its wrongly placed Reload buttons remains the second most annoying thing about it (the first item in the list, naturally, being the rendering mistakes which make me need the reload button and non-trivially test in that browser in the first place).

Safari is keen to follow in Internet Explorer 7’s steps in this respect and moves its combined Reload and Stop button far away from the other navigation buttons. That irriates the hell out of me - and apparently a few other people as well. As there seems to be no point in holding one’s breath (and Apple’s software regime on the Mac hasn’t reached iPhone level fascism yet), a little bit of clicking yielded this:

It’s not as good as the Safari 3 original as it doesn’t reflect the state change from Stop to Reload but it may be a reasonable approximation until somebody discovers a better fix. You can grab a copy of the files here and use them at your own risk.

Each coach is designated to a particular topic ranging from abstract astrophysics to ‘life sciences’ to information technology and more engineering-centric topics. The exhibits themselves looked like they were made with a lot of effort and the train looked well done and cool in many places.

On the other hand, we thought the exhibition was rather superficial. No more than a quick blurb was given on anything, and even the interactive displays (fun, but not particularly useful touch-screen stuff going on in a few places) weren’t particularly deep. Wherever there was more detail, it seemed to be either be related to corporate sponsorship or to some scientist getting the opportunity to feature their pet project with too much detail and too little context.

Design-wise I am split. Things did look nice and carefully made but in a number of places it was very hard to read the text because of the light or - with a lot of the text being on nice transparent panels - there being a patterned wall that’s too busy in itself or too low contrast compared to the text to make reading easy. Seeing that most of the exhibits seem to be aimed at children in their difficulty and depth, making them more accessible to smaller people could have been an advantage as well.

Another problem was that even without any seats and walls a railway coach is quite small. And it seems pretty much impossible to run large or even medium numbers of people through it at the same time, as all the natural ways you can pass each other in other exhibitions simply fail in that constrained environment. Add a guided tour and a bunch of running children to it and the you could consider it a stressful environment.

A final negative was the fact that many of the interactive exhibits didn’t offer much in terms of meaningful interaction. A few had ‘out of order signs’ on them, but quite a few more didn’t work, either because their buttons didn’t cause any effect or because their speakers seemed broken. That wasn’t too helpful.

Fun bits were the mention of Calabi-Yau manifolds - with a picture even -, a nice small experiment with a ferromagnetic fluid and - in a wierd way - their take on our web future. According to them the ‘semantic web’ is not an absurd idea but coming really soon (I can’t wait for my Direct Brain Link…)

Next to that description of the future they ran a graphically rather nice video on modern life running from local living to work live to national drinking habits to time zones. Unfortunately I didn’t catch where that bit of Helvetica-loving came from. Any clues?

Many thanks to Carl and Paolo for pointing out in the comments that this is a Röyksopp video. Without music being played, quite nonobvious. But here we go:

He has a huge back-catalogue to draw from and played two bunches of songs just with his electric guitar. I thought the playing and singing was rather good and the lyrics are brilliant as well. But what made the show was that the guy is a bit of an entertainer who seems to enjoy interrupting his singing mid-line and reflecting a bit about his texts, feeling sorry for himself or commenting the state of the world. All this without being forcefully funny - actually he made fun of that as well - and just presenting it as a narrative in little interludes now and then and teaching us that Bionade is bad (I knew that before but the reason ‘with the huge amount of sugar, there’s really no excuse for the poor taste’ sounds somewhat witty at least), that spelt cookies and too little television make children of academics unhappy, expressing his happiness about not being minister of the interior for he’d need to re-educate everybody then and so on…

As the German lacrosse championships took place Göttingen this weekend and the ladies’ team of ‘my’ club played there, I had the opportunity to have a closer look there along with a few hundred other spectators. The first impression to get was that the sport is very sexist. There are completely different rules and equipment for the guys and girls with nobody knowing the details of the others’ rules. The bottom line seems to be that the guys wear loads of padding and helmets and try to beat each other up as much as they can get away with while the girls don’t even have helmets and thus have to play ‘nice’ with the game being interrupted at all potentially dangerous times. For some very strange bit of legalese the Heidelberg team couldn’t even play with their usual player numbers (many of which are up in the 80s and 90s) while in the guy’s games people could play with those numbers.

Because I designed the club’s new shirts I had a look around at what the other teams were wearing. The vast majority of lacrosse shirts seems rather boring with a typical American college jumper style typefaces and two crossed lacrosse bats - or a single horizontal one - on the front and the name of the team joining them. Many small variations of that were seen and only the Bielefeld team seemed to have a nice execution with a lot of love for detail (and reasonably good printing) of that design idea.

Quite amusingly, my design now also decorates bedcovers they gave as a thank you to some of their leaving team members.

The King is Alive

I won’t manage to watch all Dogme ‘95 films - the last time I looked at their by now dysfunctional web site, their number had grown beyond 60 - but I did manage to add #4, The King is Alive to my list of watched Dogme films. And while not outstanding it was still rather good and grabbing my attention throughout.

The film starts on a comfortable South American bus. Quite literally, it’s going nowhere. The driver is clueless, he is going South by compass and the compass is jammed. They end up in the middle of nowhere without food or the chance of anybody passing by soon. So one of them - apparently an experienced outdoor person - instructs everybody how to survive in the abandoned village they stranded at and starts walking for help.

The group of holidaymakers has difficulties dealing with the lack of comforts and service at first - and likewise at taking the danger of their situation seriously, but soon they get into a rhythm and to pass time one of the travellers reproduces the script of King Lear so they can perform it as a play. This gives plenty of opportunities to learn more about the people in the group, see them interact and struggle with one another as we know it from Dogme films. A more subdued drama than in some of the other Dogme films, but drama nonetheless.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Supertex

Supertex is a 2003 German film playing in Amsterdam based on what apparently was a popular novel. It looks like a well made German TV film more than something created for cinema.

In the film the family owning the ‘Supertex’ cheap clothing company plays the main role. Their father built the business, is proud of it and has his sons joining him at the company. At the same time he doesn’t let them do any real work or take and decisions there. While one of the brothers, Boy, can happily live with that unsurprising life, the other, Max, one starts feeling unappreciated and decides to leave the company.

Add some family drama (discovering their father has a maitresse, his girlfriend having personal problems and thinking that going to Isreal helps them) for confusion, the father eventually dies, leaving everybody in a tumble. People have difficulties coping with the situation and eventually Boy decides to leave the company while on a business trip to Casablanca which he cannot handle (he opens a portaloo business later on - not kidding!) while Max is quick to return to the family and the company to keep things running.

Stereotypical TV film, not just from the looks.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

99 Euro Films

The wonders of digital filmmaking! In 2001 people decided to let young filmmakers take a cheap camera and make a film for 99 Euros (possibly as an introduction to the Euro era?). The result is this collection of 12 short films. Northern German guys sitting on a car drinking Jever, a guy letting other people punch him with boxing gloves for a small fee, elderly German tourists complaining about shouts in a foreign hotel, and so on. The films are so short that they only need a single idea - and a dedication to putting them on tape for 99 Euros. Not world shattering but quite cool.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Primer

Primer is a fundamentally geeky films about some engineering types discovering a strange device with the quasi magic power of time travel. They can’t make too much sense for it but go for a trip anyway a few times, eventually changing little things here and there.

While the film may be clever because of the way it plays with things happening parallel, I ended up finding it a bit pointless. The film looking like a modern day TV series with wrong colours all over the place didn’t help either. It reinforced my idea that they started with a clever idea and then had to pull all sorts of ‘clever’ tricks to make it into a film because they didn’t have a good story.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Blood Brothers

Blood Brothers - a.k.a. Jiang Wu is a Hong Kongese gangster film, taking you along the story of the ‘blood brothers’ Hung and Left Hand who worked their way to the top of the local mafia down from the very bottom as clueless youths. By now Hung has a family and starts thinking ‘responsible’, while Left Hand suggests he should remain more relentless when people don’t do as they’re told. Not least because of the relentless attitudes people want to see them die, and they do. Ironically in a situation not unlike a crime from their own youths.

Nice and clean film of parallel storytelling.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The Saddest Music in the World

The Saddest Music in the World tries hard to defy description. When asked what it is about one could say that it’s about the 1930s depression along with prohibition, alcohol business and public entertainment (possibly giving a slight hat-tip to They Shoot Horses Don’t They? which at least I was reminded of epoque and public-contest wise). One could equally well say that it’s about a drunken doctor who amputated the wrong leg of his girlfriend while his son was watching - cue drama and hate there - and worked from then on to create replacement legs made of glass and filled with beer (beer legs - better than a beer belly!) which are wonderful but soon destroyed by the music of a depressed cello player. Or one could say that it’s about two brothers one of which claims to be Serbian, plays cello and carries the heart of his deceases son conserved in his own tears with him at all times, while the other works on broadway shows and dies at the piano with a piece of glass from his lover’s broken legs in his stomach (all that it a burning show-arena, naturally). Finally one could just point to the title and say that it’s about a contest to find the saddest music in the world (strangely a worldwide contest taking place in the U.S. in which ‘Africa’ competes as a single nation and yet Serbia is a full contestant.)

None of these descriptions would be wrong, but it takes all of them to get an idea about the film. And by the time you try to turn that into a consistent description, people are likely to consider you insane because that’s what it sounds like. However, it still makes quite a cool film on screen. Add an arty-farty look (mostly) in fake black-and-white with a hint of that early 20th century poor focusing and uneven exposure and it’s even interesting to look at.

Choice quotes: I’m not an American - I’m a nymphomaniac. • Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Other

Despite liking Tim Burton and Johnny Depp I had never seen Edward Scissorhands, that has been corrected. Nice film, even though it’s a bit too kitschy for my taste. Religulous [Google Video] is one of those modern mockumentaries taking the piss at religions. That sounds like a fun idea at first, but it’s quite simply boring and non-entertaining because obviously nothing interesting can happen in such a film.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

With all the hype about Wolfram Alpha (we’ll just skip the bewilderment about whether greek letters or vertical bars are required to write about it) and the global wave of non-enthusiasm I considered this a perfect opportunity to add mine. Of course the question ‘sunflowers in a litre of sunflower’ oil seems tailor-made for their ‘scientific’ approach. And as the question is not computationally trivial, it’s also a request you’ll expect their engine to FAIL. No disappointment there - my expectations were met. The site recognises all of the search terms in the request but still isn’t sure what to do with my input.

Amusingly a straightforward Google search leads to a well hidden note in the German wikipedia entry for sunflower (rather than the separate entry for sunflower oil discussed above), claiming that the number I looked for is 60. I’ll leave figuring out whether that number is correct for another day. As ad brochures have already copied the wikipedia information, I’m sure people will be able to find proper, printed sources on that topic soon.

In German we use „AH HELLO“ as the standard double quotation marks. And consequently ‚AH HELLO‘ are used as standard single quotation marks. I shall limit the following discussion to the latter case.

Here, the opening quotation mark may look like a comma, but it is actually representing Unicode Codepoint U+201A with the nice and descriptive name single low-9 quotation mark which describes its form rather well. If you go through your fonts you will observe a bunch of different behaviours in this situation:

• in most of them it will look just like the comma,
• in some fonts this glyph is missing and thus replaced by that of a fallback font - leading to ugliness,
• in a few fonts the glyph looks just like the comma but the spacing is adjusted for the purpose (e.g. Helvetica),
• in a few fonts the glyph seems downright broken or ill-designed (e.g. Marker Felt where it looks like a straight bottom quotation mark to match the ‘dumb’ quotation mark as if a person who manages to use those glyphs would use ‘dumb’ quotation marks),
• in yet other fonts attention to detail shines through. E.g. the Neudeutsch Fraktur font from the Fraktur Mon Amour CD uses a slightly different glyph for the quotation mark than it uses for the comma. Not all that surprisingly, Zapfino ships with similar goodness and you will start spotting it in other fonts like Trajan or even as a subtle size variation in Verdana once you start looking.

This suggests that most of the time things will work just fine. But that it is really important for font creators or font system programmers to make sure that the comma glyph is used in most cases. In addition, results will likely look better if spacing is taken into account, but that is rarely done. A completely separate glyph seems to be even less common. It appears unnecessary for most ‘standard’ typefaces, but can be a nice touch if it is a small size variation or - for a peculiar typeface - a completely different design.

The Unicode lover feels compelled to add that apparently this character started off in Unicode 1.0 with the name low single comma quotation mark, which was less descriptive and suggested a relation to the comma which should probably be regarded as a happy coincidence happening in some typefaces.

But let us move on to the closing quote where the real problem lies. That quote will be more familiar to non-German readers as it is U+2018, a.k.a. left single quotation mark. Strangely its name suggests that it is a ‘left’ quotation mark, a problem which a description à la ‘single high-6 quotation mark’ similar to that of the quotation mark discussed above could have avoided. Yet, this is the character everybody uses for the German closing quotation mark (and there does not seem to be a viable alternative), so it seems that one has to assume that the Unicode name is potentially misleading or at least ambiguous about the glyphs purpose.

If one assumed that the glyph for U+2018 is only used for left quotation marks, then one might - although I will argue in a moment that one still should not - consider the glyphs provided by fonts like Tahoma or Verdana as correct:

With these examples in place, I am tempted to say that these already look wrong. It may not be immediately visible in 12px, but it certainly is at this size: The glyphs of the English opening and closing quotes are usually related by (something close to) a 180° rotation. In these fonts, however, they are related by a reflection. Rotations and reflections are inherently different operations on the plane as reflections change orientation like a mirror does while rotations do not. More pictorially speaking: Usual English quotation marks have the shapes of the digits 6 and 9, which up to a rotation is the same shape. In particular the ‘pointy’ end of the opening quotation mark points upwards while that of the closing quotation mark points downwards. From that point of view, one should consider the quotation marks in Tahoma and Verdana to be incorrect (wrong, buggy).

Once you start typing in German, there is not even need for a discussion about rotation versus reflection. You simply have a look at the result and notice that it looks wrong. You may have already spotted this in the first set of examples above, but here it comes again:

I guess I should turn this into a Mac OS X bug report as Apple ship these fonts with their system and according to Font Book they claim to support German text. But seeing that they are originally Microsoft’s and at least Verdana is one of the most frequently used fonts on the web because it is quite readable on screen and present on most computers, one wonders how many billions of wrong quotation marks are read every day because of this.

Many of those will not be noticeable because most writing on the web takes place in 12px font sizes, by writers who do not know about proper quotation marks to begin with and who are not using software that automatically does the conversion for them – even though such scripts are widely available to plug into most software systems. With the typical web reader probably matching those levels of competence, ‘everybody’ seems pretty much happy with that (the 1970s called and they want the abominable quality of their typewriter texts back…) Still, this seems like a sad state of affairs to me.

The problem could even be considered tragic as it effectively removes one (if not two) otherwise OK fonts from the already small list of web safe fonts if your site could contain proper quotation marks (rather than no quotation marks, ‘dumb’ quotation marks or guillemets). Because of this being an even more visible problem in German, it seems pretty much impossible to use these fonts on sites written in German (supposing that proper punctuation is to be used and people will not settle for ‘dumb’ or English quotation marks).

Of course my inner cynicist deems the chance of such a problem being solved to be pretty close to zero. This bug is so widely spread and quite likely you will find people who will object vocally to it being removed. Seeing that the typefaces are owned by Microsoft (a.k.a. the ‘let’s litter the world with Arial because we cannot afford licensing Helvetica’ company) and made by Monotype (a.k.a. the ‘let’s suck up to Microsoft’s money and create a shitty copy of Helvetica instead of telling them to just buy the proper one next door’ company) it doesn’t even seem likely they’ll give the slightest shit about such problems. And as usual Apple will feel that they didn’t create the problem (they just decided to license and ship it...), so hooray everything is perfect:

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