I didn’t check whether they adjusted all their prices to be perfect multiples of 5 cents and only have the rounding issue remaining for special items (photo prints in my case) that are individually priced. Or whether they just kept their old prices and started rounding (off). I’m wondering to which extent this makes things easier and quicker for them.

It’s also another hint that software in those checkout terminals must be able to cope with all sorts of crazy ideas. And I could easily imagine that this could be considered a bit of a bookkeeping nightmare as well.

Quite a powerful and energetic gig that was rather short. Possibly due to the short length of their songs. Compared to last summer’s Nintendocoriade I’d range them between Les Trucs and Gtuk. Less interesting than the former and not quite as outlandish as the latter.

And they were selling pretty cool 8cm CDs [MacBook suckers, try to read these!] which turn out to be spray painted. With average song lengths of less than two minutes, even the tiny CD comes with ten titles and room to spare…

The piece is based on a 2009 book by Juli Zeh on a dystopia featuring a health-focued regime in the mid 21st century. Its subjects have to live healthy and prove their health in regular screenings. They are punished for transgressions like cigarettes or missing their screening. In the piece Mia Holl, a successful scientist, starts missing her screenings because her brother killed himself. He did so in prison after being convicted for raping and killing a girl. A deed, which Mia is sure he didn’t commit. The judge at first understands Mia’s situation and is willing to let her ‘get away’ with a small fine. But her lawyers recommends fighting it on the grounds of her difficult situation. By doing that she triggers the rage of the system whose ‘method’ she is seen to criticise. As such regimes go, you won’t get away with doubting or criticising their ‘methods’, so Mia is in for trouble and ends up finding herself in prison. It turns out her lawyer is quite keen on working against the system and she seemed a good opportunity to do so, while she is rational and agrees with his points.

The way they put the piece on stage was rather cool with plain and efficient decorations as well as light. The future high-tech aspect was given by a screen projecting the ‘facts’ about the people on stage and in court. This was done very neatly by projecting from behind.

Mia’s home was at the very front of the stage. And it was filled with a centimetre or so of water, thus distinguishing it from the rest of the stage and making people wet when going there (in most situations visitors actually put on those little plastic bag shoes people wear in operating theatres when visiting Mia’s place). Special kudos go to the main actress who did a great job in putting her role on stage.

Whatever Works

In my eternal, yet-not-completed quest of watching all Woody Allen films, I couldn’t skip his latest: Whatever Works [IMDB]. It stars Seinfeld mastermind Larry David in a totally Woody Allen-esque role as weirdo physicist genius Boris who also enjoys commenting to the viewer on what’s going on in the film.

Melody, a naïve young girl who just ran away from the American south and is unfamiliar with Boris’ clever and ironic way of communicating runs into Boris, ends up living at his place and marrying him. This shouldn’t work but, strangely, it does. Whatever works… Melody’s puritan mother arrives soon after and ends up living as an artist with two guys and finally her father also arrives, and soon falls for a guy. I.e. the film’s motto »Whatever Works« is taken very seriously, and gives us a fun bit of entertainment which is too obviously un-subtle in many places.

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

She, a Chinese

She, a chinese [IMDB] by Guo Xiaolu portrays a chinese girl, Li Mei, who grows up in the Chinese countryside. Rather than being keen on a life there, she dreams of living in the city and leaving the country for the West. And she lives up to those dreams by actually moving there. First to a nearby city where she fails to work in a clothing factory, starts working in a ‘massage’ parlour and then to London where her work is horrible until she gets to know old widower Mr Hunt who eventually marries her, greatly simplifying her life in the UK that way. But she can’t stand that he still loves his deceased wife and starts making out with a fast food worker who treats her badly instead.

It’s an impressive film. Particularly because it keeps tearing you back and forth between thinking that Li Mei is lucky in how things are working out for her and unlucky for the same reasons as she never reaches the better life she had dreamt of. Likewise you keep thinking that she’s relying on her luck a bit too much and voluntarily exposes herself to additional risks all the time. She tolerates the consequence of that without complaints, but she doesn’t seem overly happy with her life either.

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

Metropolis

Without doubt the big cinematic event of the season was the presentation of the newly restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [IMDB, Wikipedia] which is pretty close to the 1927 original thanks to the ‘lost’ scenes that were found in Argentinia two years ago. The film was presented at the Berlinale film festival this month and accompanied by a whole orchestra. Even better, the whole show was broadcast live on arte, creating the ultra-rare occasion for a bunch of us to sit together and watch TV [eek!].

What can I say, the film is great. And the missing scenes helped it make a lot more sense – although I suspect that all the documentary material I read about it helped as well. The difference in quality between the proper ‘original’ and the copy of an original which was in use for decades and from which the missing scenes are supplied now is also baffling.

Even though Metropolis may have been a box-office flop back in the days and even though it’s inconveniently long, it’s still very much worth seeing because it’s amazingly modern and – one suspects – its picture of the modern world influenced many, if not most, other films made since then.

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

Food, Inc.

Food, Inc. [IMDB] is a ‘documentary’ about the corporatisation of the food supply in the United States. In a way it summarises what is already written in recent books on the same topic, particularly Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma whose authors also appear in the film. Things are taken beyond the facts by a mother who lost her son due to e. coli in food.

The film does contain some interesting facts on how food is made today and how these methods are hidden from the people who pay for them. It also tries to highlight how poorly politics work in this area where big business meets the basic needs of the people and how this leads to unhealthy food, horrible living conditions for the animals involved, ecological problems and even social problems due to all the manual work having been relegated to the easily exploited poor. A brief detour also discusses how it’s creepy but to a certain extent helpful that big business is getting on the ‘organic’ bandwagon.

As the facts alone are depressing and condemning enough, I thought it was pretty superfluous to try to catch the viewer with the emotional bits as well. But I suppose that’s for the American market.

I wonder how the German food industry fares in comparison. On the one hand I suspect it’s just not as huge and corporate as it’s American equivalent (but trying to get there) and there should be more regulation, less GM stuff and so on. On the other hand, Germans are the people who’ll eat any kind of shit as long as it’s dirt-cheap, so perhaps that gives us a little head-start here…

See also: We feed the world, Unser täglich Brot.

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

The piece’s focus is the role of men in our current society, touching how the four protagonists deal with that in their lives, jobs and families and how it differs from the plans they may have had in their youths. In part it succeeded showing a certain anxiety they live with.

That said, the ‘musical’ part of the piece was a bit weird. With less singing and more talking and making an effort to present the characters at the beginning and jumping from pop song to pop song at the end with very little for the characters to do or discuss. However, it was a nice touch that the music for a good bunch of the pieces they sang to was performed live on stage.

Their support band Lawrence Arabia went down rather well with my friends even though they sounded like choir kids from time to time.

I think the audience was a bit un-enthusiastic throughout and when Das Pop started playing it also seemed a bit too big for the band to be able to create that specific atmosphere. Yet – battling the technical difficulties of countless defective cables and plugs – they tried and delivered a show that was much more intense and direct than their latest (eponymous, hence almost impossible to find on the web) album led us to suspect/fear. Good stuff.

Now, if only my crappy camera could have made a non-shaky version of this photo:

It might have been great, even showing off the singer’s weirdly 1980s style shoes. Perhaps one of the countless people taking photos in the room managed to catch that. While I love photos I found the amount and annoyingness of photo people at this gig astounding. It also seemed that the more ‘professional’ ones (i.e. the ones with the proper cameras) cared mainly about how they pose while standing in front of the stage and taking photos. Weird.

For a while now, sites at which I tried to shop wanted to bully me into the MasterCard® SecureCode™ system. I don’t know much about banking, but as far as I can tell the situation is as follows: By and large credit cards are an anti-social way of paying for goods because some credit card company gets to keep a few per cent of the price for a service that may have been worth that kind of money in the 1960s or 1970s but which should be much cheaper today: assuring the person selling something to me that they’ll receive their money without forcing me to carry it around in cash. In particular, the system is based on the credit card company paying the money for you and you having to pay them back, hence the ‘credit’ in the name. Somehow retailers are not supposed (which probably means ‘forbidden by some legal junk’) to surcharge those fees to the person wanting to use a credit card and instead raise their prices for all customers to cover those charges. Yikes.

If you’re in a country which is technically reasonably advanced it’s feasible these days to just skip the whole credit crap and use a debit card which means that swiping the card should just cause a money transfer from your existing money to the retailer’s account. Much lower risks and, hopefully (well, just look at PayPal for a royal FAIL of that hope), lower fees. That seems like a reasonable thing to do when cash isn’t convenient enough.

One rather curious fact about credit cards is that you can use them without any sort of authentication. Go to a railway ticket vending machine, insert the card, pay for the ticket, done. Go to a store, swipe the card, scribble on the sheet of paper they hand you for ‘signing’ and you bought something. Type the card number and that extremely secret other three digit number from the back of the card into a website and you can order the most interesting goods! This system just seems idiotic and begs to be abused. Which it apparently is.

So far, credit card companies pay for most of that damage. It even seems that they have become quite good at doing statistic analyses of payments and knowing where numbers are likely to be stolen and how they will be used. Two of my friends received calls from their credit card company after returning from their holidays asking whether they just bought a kitchen (say) in Japan. Of course they didn’t and the credit card people suspected that. Yet, the damage caused by this has to be paid with our money at the end of the day, so perhaps simply having a less idiotic system would be helpful.

Of course ‘less idiotic’ is a concept that is alien to the banking sector. It seems that for what they call ‘better security’ they now want to force us to sign up for a ‘secret code’ of our own choice to ‘authenticate’ payments for online orders. It’s a code you can pick yourself, so it’s likely to be easy to remember or just the same as all your other codes. Perhaps convenient for you but also risky, particularly as the conditions read as if it’s your responsibility to keep that code secret. It sounds like the banks want to ‘improve’ their broken system by shifting the risk of its bad design to the users.

To add insult to injury, the SecureCode™ system looks particularly fishy. Not only do the terms and conditions state that data are processed in a data protection rogue state (U.S.A) rather than locally, it also seems to inject iframes into the payment web pages of the web sites you are using which connect to that SecureCode™ system. If I’m not mistaken, the concept of using frames on payment pages was developed by scammers. As modern browsers may warn about frames pointing to other servers inside an encrypted page, it seems that the query is redirected over the hosting server.

For example when trying to buy something at thalia.de, they ruin their user experience (and the chance of me actually clicking the ‘pay’ button) by injecting a frame from the URL: https://ssl.thalia.de/shop/buch_startseite_thalia/cciframe/?ACSURL=https%3A%2F%2Fsecure5.arcot.com%2Facs… which looks pretty much like their server is just forwarding the request to https://secure5.arcot.com/acspage/cap? with parameters RID, PaReq and TermURL. I have no idea about hacking websites, but why shouldn’t enterprising hackers consider this an interesting thing to fuck with? It looks like an invitation to fool around a bit.

And why do retailers agree to this? It makes interaction with their sites worse and removes a crucial part of it from their control (frames! unexpected scroll bars! language and looks they cannot control!), thus creating a massive potential for failure in completing the transaction.

I won’t deny that getting authentication right is hard. Making it safe and convenient may even be impossible. But it seems that they’re not even trying to fail at any of the real challenges but they simply put on some show which may save them extra money. That’s probably what you learn in MBA 101, but it doesn’t humour me as a customer.

Once again great music in a lovely atmosphere. And it was quite crowded once more, with the latecomers having to make do by sitting on the stairs.

Soul Kitchen

I enjoyed Fatih Akin’s films in the past, particularly the dramatic Gegen die Wand and from the reviews I knew that his latest œuvre, Soul Kitchen [IMDB, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Website], isn’t quite as great for it has a somewhat non-dramatic story. Yet, I absolutely had to see the film after staying with friends in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg last December and passing the house used as the restaurant in the film in December.

The film centres around two Greek brothers, Zinos and Illias, the former of which runs the poorly going restaurant ‘Soul Kitchen’ which caters to the mediocre tastes of the locals while his brother is in prison. Zinos girlfriend moves to China for her job and Zinos can’t decide whether to give up his restaurant to go with her. With his restaurant becoming better and more popular thanks to a new – and slightly crazy – chef, he decides to stay for the time being and when he finally hands the restaurant to his gambling addicted brother and gets on the plane to China, his girlfriend has found another guy and his brother gambled away the restaurant to a gentrification-loving investor before he returns.

And yet, a new beginning comes along and things may just work out. — A bit cheesy perhaps, but we’ll enjoy the scenery. Be sure to also enjoy the nice graphical closing credits!

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

Cowboy Bebop

A few years back, I enjoyed watching some episodes of the Cowboy Bebop TV series which Dan gave me. A fun science fiction series about freelancing bounty hunters, a.k.a. Cowboys, the coolest of whom is Cowboy Bebop. I tried to indulge in the feature film made of this as well: Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven’s Door [IDMB] , but – despite a great opening and all cool one would expect – I found it lacking. It seemed like they didn’t manage to span the action throughout a full movie’s length. I’m wondering whether the films they made later on (2005) or in the future (2011) will be better. IMDB comments don’t suggest so.

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

Objectified

I finally saw Objectified [IMDB, Website], Gary Hustwit’s design-focused follow-up to Helvetica. I was definitely looking forward to this film, but I also suspected it couldn’t live up to the standards set by Helvetica, a film which treated a very specialised topic – typography – at the example of a typeface that manages to be at the same time one of the most remarkable and most humble ones. It managed to show countless examples, serve as an eye-opener and give a voice to a bunch of widely varying opinions on the typeface.

The topic of design is much broader, people have a bit of an idea what it could be about, and hence Objectified lacks the specific focus of Helvetica, the film. While following the same show-object-show-interview-related-to-that-object scheme used in Helvetica, I couldn’t help thinking that, on average, the ‘object designers’ interviewed in the film were more on the wanker side than their typographer / ‘graphic designer’ counterparts in Helvetica. They seemed to have a much harder time stating opinions and presenting coherent arguments for them. Just as many of them seem to have difficulties talking without waving their arms around all the time.

A big issue for designers is (should be?) that their services are mostly used to support the business of selling stuff. A look around our world suggests that ugly unusable crap is the design that the market-intelligence favours. It sells. Like hell. And it litters our environment ecologically, visually and in all other conceivable ways. The film tries to touch that topic in a few places but unfortunately most of the interviewees fail to grasp the topic or go for some kind of lip-commitment to it before quickly returning to more ‘interesting’ subjects. A shame really.

The interviews with the IDEO guys on the birth of software design were particularly interesting and, surprisingly (?) Dieter Rams [Wikipedia, London Design Museum] didn’t fail to impress [Disclaimer: author grew up in a household with great respect for him and Braun’s design]. Should the voice of such an ‘old’ designer be the most outstanding one in a film like Objectified? Particularly if what he’s saying hasn’t changed too much over the past fifty years?

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

A Serious Man

This year’s film by the Coen brothers is A Serious Man [IMDB] which unfolds the breaking life of physics professor Larry Gopnik. He has problems, he is religious, his wife is leaving him for an older acquaintance, nobody seems to care too much about the leaving but people do feel sorry for him because of the guy she’s leaving him for; a student tries to bribe him, there’s the risk of him losing his job, but he starts an affair with his neighbour. His son is ‘looking forward’ to his religious initiation while developing a healthy drug habit, and yet, the ritual brings the family back together.

While beautifully depressing, I’m not sure the film’s story is my cup of tea. However, as usual, the film looks great and the Coen brothers attempt to capture the style of an era long passed in the film. Both in terms of the visuals and the fears and hopes people may have had.

And if you’re a bit of a physics geek, you’ll have to watch the film for this split-second that’s also available in the trailer (from looking at the trailer, I’d say the 1920 resolution looks a bit like a waste of pixels):

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