Entry tags:
movies
Last weekend we went to the neighborhood indie movie theater (very few people in the theater, all masked, and all required to show proof of vaccination before entering) and saw Tango Shalom, in which a guy from the Brooklyn Hasidic community gets a message from God (maybe) that he should enter a tango contest to raise money, both for his own financial struggles and those of the tango teacher. Except that, as an observant orthodox Jew (and a rabbi, no less), he can't touch a woman who isn't his wife, and eye contact is frowned on too, which makes the tango difficult. He has a crisis of faith and conscience, seeking out the advice of his own chief rabbi, a Catholic priest, a Moslem leader of some sort, and a Hindu or Sikh leader of some sort, while trying to avoid ritual shaming by the Jewish Taliban in his own community. It's funny and heartwarming, but I kept getting a sense of shallowness. All the communities involved are depicted respectfully and sympathetically, and I'm not familiar enough with any of them to point to things the film-makers got wrong, but it felt like something I might have written if I set out to depict the Hasidic, Catholic, Moslem, and Hindu communities respectfully and sympathetically based on what I happen to already know about them.
Yesterday we went to an indie theater in Manhattan (same security protocols) and saw I'm Your Man, aka "Ich bin dein Mensch" (it's entirely in German), in which a female anthropologist is charged with writing an ethics review of a new product, a robot tailored to her personal preferences in men and charged with learning to make her happy. (You can think of it as a gender-flipped Her, I guess, except that the robot in question is physically present. And of course it's one more take on the Turing Test. What is man, that thou art mindful of him?) The robot, Tom, is to live with her in her apartment for three weeks, during which whatever happens happens. She rebuffs a lot of his (sometimes artless and over-eager) attempts to make her happy, because she's not in the market for a boyfriend, and even if she were, the last thing she wants is to be "made happy" by an algorithm. It's funny and heartwarming, and thought-provoking, and the acting by both of the leads, Maren Eggert (whom I wasn't familiar with) and Dan Stevens (whom you probably last saw as Matthew Crawley in "Downton Abbey"), is Oscar-baiting superb. Find it, see it, discuss it.
I'm reminded of one of Asimov's robot stories in which the question was explicitly raised: what's the difference between a really good human butler and a really well-programmed robot operating according to the Three Laws? What experiment could you conduct that would distinguish the two?
When I first got involved with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere, I had a lot of things to learn: I wanted to learn who she was as a girlfriend, and who I was as a boyfriend (since I'd never played that role before), and how this "sex" thing I'd heard so much about worked in practice, and whether I was (or could learn to be) any good at boyfriendcraft.... And I definitely considered it part of my job description to build a detailed mental model of her in order to make her happy. So the movie raises the obvious question: what's the difference between a robot programmed to learn to make you happy, and the perfect boyfriend?
Yesterday we went to an indie theater in Manhattan (same security protocols) and saw I'm Your Man, aka "Ich bin dein Mensch" (it's entirely in German), in which a female anthropologist is charged with writing an ethics review of a new product, a robot tailored to her personal preferences in men and charged with learning to make her happy. (You can think of it as a gender-flipped Her, I guess, except that the robot in question is physically present. And of course it's one more take on the Turing Test. What is man, that thou art mindful of him?) The robot, Tom, is to live with her in her apartment for three weeks, during which whatever happens happens. She rebuffs a lot of his (sometimes artless and over-eager) attempts to make her happy, because she's not in the market for a boyfriend, and even if she were, the last thing she wants is to be "made happy" by an algorithm. It's funny and heartwarming, and thought-provoking, and the acting by both of the leads, Maren Eggert (whom I wasn't familiar with) and Dan Stevens (whom you probably last saw as Matthew Crawley in "Downton Abbey"), is Oscar-baiting superb. Find it, see it, discuss it.
I'm reminded of one of Asimov's robot stories in which the question was explicitly raised: what's the difference between a really good human butler and a really well-programmed robot operating according to the Three Laws? What experiment could you conduct that would distinguish the two?
When I first got involved with
shalmestere, I had a lot of things to learn: I wanted to learn who she was as a girlfriend, and who I was as a boyfriend (since I'd never played that role before), and how this "sex" thing I'd heard so much about worked in practice, and whether I was (or could learn to be) any good at boyfriendcraft.... And I definitely considered it part of my job description to build a detailed mental model of her in order to make her happy. So the movie raises the obvious question: what's the difference between a robot programmed to learn to make you happy, and the perfect boyfriend?