Skip to main content

New top story from Time: What If a Robot Was Your Perfect Match? I’m Your Man Explores an AI Love Affair

https://ift.tt/3kEVt6G

The pulse of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, about a man so in love with an illusion he can’t see the reality before him, thrums inside every person who’s obsessed with movies, but the Pygmalion dreams it’s drawn from are universal. In its subterranean way, Vertigo speaks to anyone who has tried to sculpt a relationship into something it can never be. I’m Your Man, a smart, tender, melancholy comedy from German director Maria Schrader, is like an AI Vertigo: If you could create your perfect android partner, intimately tailored to your desires, your intelligence, your tastes, would you do it? And if so, would this meticulously programmed individual ever be capable of curing the universal human affliction of loneliness?
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

It would be easy to make a terrible movie from that idea, but Schrader has made a marvelous one. Alma (Maren Eggert, who won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for this performance) is a Berlin academic who has reluctantly accepted an assignment no one else will take, because everyone else in her orbit is happily paired off. She has agreed to test-drive a humanoid robot designed to her exact specifications. The two will live together for three weeks, after which she’ll deliver her assessment: Are these robots sophisticated enough to become citizens of the real world—to get passports and drivers’ licenses, like everyday people—but also, perhaps more important, can they make suitable romantic companions for perennially single people?

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Alma’s robot, Tom (Dan Stevens), is supposedly exactly her type—he loves Rilke, though who doesn’t?—yet she resists his charms from the minute she’s introduced to him by the manufacturer’s rep (played, with metallic terseness, by the wonderful German actor Sandra Hüller). It doesn’t help that Tom malfunctions on the dance floor of the club where they’ve just met. After he’s repaired, she escorts him, with his single bachelor’s rolling suitcase in hand, to her flat, a mess of books and papers and other detritus of academic life.

The next morning—Tom doesn’t need to sleep, though he pretends to—Alma awakens to a fully tidied apartment. Tom has helpfully arranged the books on her shelves by color, exactly the way she doesn’t want them. He’s wearing a James Bond bathrobe, and he’s made some pancakes for breakfast. Later, because his robot brain is convinced she works too hard, he draws a rose-petal-strewn bath for her, holding a champagne flute aloft like a knowledge-engineered bon vivant. Alma, so cerebral and skeptical she’s practically made those qualities her religion, balks. (Her academic specialty is Sumerian cuneiform, and she’s on the verge of a major breakthrough.) Tom, his eyes shiny with programmed wisdom—it’s an “I know yourself better than you know yourself” look if ever there were one—informs her that “93 percent of German women dream of this.” She bursts his robot bubble, to the degree that’s possible, by stating flatly that she’s part of the other 7 percent.

You can guess what eventually happens in I’m Your Man—but you probably can’t guess exactly what happens, and how Alma, so happy-lonely in her own habits, comes to realize not that she’s missing a man in her life, but that the key to living is to remain open to surprise, always. That’s a fine needle to thread, but Schrader does it beautifully. (The script is by Schrader and Schomburg, based on a short story by Emma Braslavsky.) In-the-know people are already hip to Stevens as an international treasure: he’s a Shakespearean-literate actor with a gift for ridiculously out-there comedy—he was dazzling as the flamboyant Russian pop czar Alexander Lemtov in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. As Tom, Stevens has a scrubbed, robotty elegance. “I brush my teeth and clean my body,” he informs Alma. But he’s been programmed well, a little too well for Alma’s liking, and the duo’s conversations—and the spaces between the words—come to have an intensity that rattles her. In one breathtaking scene, as the two take a nature break in the countryside, Alma awakens from a small nap to see Tom standing in a clearing, surrounded by curiously unperturbed bucks; their does soon follow, enveloping him as if he were one of their own. The deer startle when they spot Alma, and Tom explains that they have no fear of him because he doesn’t smell like a human. And yet, in this moment, he seems more a part of nature than most humans—as if the dreams programmed into him have as much life as any we humans dream ourselves.

As Alma, Eggert captures an elusive something about happily single women: She’s in the position of being able to find out what happens when you can have exactly what you want—if, in fact, you know what you want, which is unlikely. I’m Your Man is funny in such a gentle way that you may not realize how piercing it is until after the credits have rolled. Loneliness is a shape that can’t always be filled, on command, by another human. Sometimes it takes a robot, but also a sense of self—and that, for all of us, is a state that’s constantly, frustratingly, gloriously in flux.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

L Taraval Improvement Project Update

L Taraval Improvement Project Update By Sevilla Mann Roundtable at the Community Parklet Shares Project Updates  This past week, the SFMTA hosted a media roundtable discussing updates about the L Taraval Improvement Project at the community parklet located in front of the The Rolling Out Café  on Taraval St.   Segment B construction began in February 2022 and is scheduled to be completed Fall 2024. Sewer and water infrastructure work is currently taking place. Future work includes track work, overhead line work, the construction of new boarding islands and streetscape improvements.    On hand to answer questions and provide updates was District Four Supervisor Gordon Mar, SFMTA Board Director Sharon Lai and Director of Transportation Jefferey Tumlin.   The Roundtable  Supervisor Mar opened the discussion by highlighting the many benefits that the local community will receive with the planned infrastructure upgrades along the corridor. These benefits include:   Replacing sew

FOX NEWS: Cincinnati zoo renames sloth habitat after late 1-year-old who loved sloths The sloth habitat at Ohio's Cincinnati Zoo will be named after a toddler who recently passed away.

Cincinnati zoo renames sloth habitat after late 1-year-old who loved sloths The sloth habitat at Ohio's Cincinnati Zoo will be named after a toddler who recently passed away. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3DLAshi

IPL 2020 | KKR, SRH search for first win to get off the mark https://ift.tt/333a9nc

Having suffered defeats in their opening games, the Kolkata Knight Riders and Sunrisers Hyderabad will lock horns on Saturday at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi. While Kolkata faced a tough 49-run loss to defending champions Mumbai Indians, the Sunrisers suffered a monumental batting collapse against Royal Challengers Bangalore, losing the game by 10 runs.

FOX NEWS: Decadent double chocolate mint cookies for National Chocolate Day National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28th calls for a serious dose of chocolate.

Decadent double chocolate mint cookies for National Chocolate Day National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28th calls for a serious dose of chocolate. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3nEJxSB

Muni’s Equity Toolkit Helps Essential Employees Get to Work

Muni’s Equity Toolkit Helps Essential Employees Get to Work By Mariana Maguire The latest data from SFMTA’s new  Equity Toolkit  shows that Muni service changes are helping people in neighborhoods identified by our  Muni Service Equity Strategy  access more jobs and support the city’s recovery.   In winter 2020, we launched the  SFMTA Equity Toolkit  to understand how service decisions are affecting neighborhoods where there is likely a high prevalence of essential workers who rely predominantly on Muni to get to their essential jobs. Our goal is to make better service decisions based on the trends and impacts we see in the Equity Toolkit.   Recently, the greatest increases in access to jobs via Muni have been in Hunters Point and Western Addition. The Hunters Point neighborhood saw the largest gains from the addition of the  15 Bayview-Hunters Point Express , as demonstrated in the table below. Thanks to the return of key Muni lines and increased frequencies on connector routes, I

Powered Scooters Charge City’s Transportation Recovery

Powered Scooters Charge City’s Transportation Recovery By Jason Hyde The SFMTA is releasing its next round of Powered Scooter Share permits on July 1. Scooters remain a sustainable mode of travel and a complement to Muni and public transit service as the city recovers from the pandemic and San Franciscans begin to travel more. The SFMTA’s Powered Scooter Share Program is essential in ensuring that shared scooter operations support the city’s economic recovery in a safe, sustainable, and equitable way.  The SFMTA received four submittals for the permit program and will issue permits to two operators : Spin and Lime. Permits will be in effect for a one-year term, with the option to extend for another year at the discretion of the SFMTA based on compliance with various program metrics. While the new permit program does not set a limit on the number of scooters each operator may deploy, it does limit the overall citywide fleet size at 10,000. Starting at a base of 2,000 scooters per

New top story from Time: 3 Killed in Northern California as Wildfires Force Thousands to Evacuate

https://ift.tt/34at2Uy (SAN FRANCISCO) — Northern California’s wine country was on fire again Monday as strong winds fanned flames in the already scorched region, destroying homes and prompting orders for nearly 70,000 people to evacuated. Meanwhile, three people died in a separate fire further north in the state. In Sonoma County, residents of the Oakmont Gardens senior living facility in Santa Rosa boarded brightly lit city buses in the darkness overnight, some wearing bathrobes and using walkers. They wore masks to protect against the coronavirus as orange flames marked the dark sky. The fire threat forced Adventist Health St. Helena hospital to suspend care and transfer all patients elsewhere. The fires that began Sunday in the famed Napa-Sonoma wine country about 45 miles (72 kilometers) north of San Francisco came as the region nears the third anniversary of deadly wildfires that erupted in 2017, including one that killed 22 people. Just a month ago, many of those

Traffic Collisions have Decreased on San Francisco’s Slow Streets

Traffic Collisions have Decreased on San Francisco’s Slow Streets By Julia Malmo   As a whole, Slow Streets are safer than they were before being designated Slow Streets  Streets that are part of the SFMTA’s  Slow Streets Program have become measurably safer since the program began in 2020, with the number of traffic crashes falling by almost half. On average, these corridors have seen a 48% drop in collisions following their designation as Slow Streets, compared with a 14% drop in collisions citywide over the same period. Slow Streets also are more welcoming for people who walk, bike and roll. Fewer than 1,000 vehicles per day use all but four of the current Slow Streets (20th Street, Minnesota Street, Noe Street, and Page Street).  The goal of the program is to create safe, shared streets that are comfortable and enjoyable for people of all ages and abilities, using any mode of transportation. We now can see how it’s doing in a new evaluation report . When the SFMTA Board appr

New top story from Time: How History Is Repeating Itself for Haitian Migrants Trying to Enter the U.S.

https://ift.tt/3upRk9U In the past 11 years alone, Haitians have suffered natural disasters, rising gang violence, outbreaks of cholera and COVID-19, and political instability, including the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse . The crises left many in the hemisphere’s poorest nation feeling they had no option but to leave—despite the difficulties they face in fleeing to other countries. In late September, Americans were confronted with the reality of those difficulties too. An estimated 15,000 people arrived in Del Rio, Texas, during the month, below a bridge connecting the city to Mexico’s Ciudad Acuña. A majority were Haitian nationals, migrants and asylum seekers who ended up living in tents or under tarps, in conditions similar to those in other camps that have formed along the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Read more: Caught Between U.S. Policies and Instability at Home, Haitian Migrants in Tijuana Are in a State of L

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J कोरोना सकंट में TV सीरियल की शूटिंग शूरू, मास्क लगाकर पहुंचे स्टार्स- निया, पार्थ से लेकर रश्मि-PICS

कोरोना वायरस के चलते जारी लॉकडाउन में टीवी व फिल्मों की शूटिंग बंद थी। कोरोना के खतरे को देखते हुए तमाम सीरियल की शूटिंग रोक दी गई तो वहीं फिल्मों को रिलीज अटक गई। एंटरटेंमेंट इंडस्ट्री को कोरोना के चलते करोड़ों from टेलीविजन की खबरें | Television News in Hindi | TV Serials Update in Hindi – FilmiBeat Hindi http:/hindi.filmibeat.com/television/tv-shooting-starts-kasauti-zindagi-kay-naagin-nia-sharma-parth-samthaan-rashmi-desai-pics-090604.html?utm_source=/rss/filmibeat-hindi-television-fb.xml&utm_medium=23.11.231.156&utm_campaign=client-rss