and off

I had to find something special for the last film, and the ship on a bottle caught my eye.  While there were several possibilities, I decided on Atlantik-Ale, just because I thought it went well with the end of the festival, like a ship sailing off.

Plz ignore my laundry

Look at the lovely ship instead.  It has a ship on it.  Shipception!

Not especially aromatic or brightly colored, but it is a happy yellow, like a fizzy lemonade.  It's very heady, with the foam white and fluffy.  The is some herbal essence in the flavor, something tingly and bitter like thyme maybe.  The combination of hops is said to produce grapefruit, citrus and melon flavors.  It's very subtle, but tasty, a calm and understated sensation.  The citrus and grapefruit I can see, but the melon isn't quite manifesting for my tastebuds.  It's just as well, since I'm not a fan of melon anyway.  It's something one might associate with ocean breezes, something fresh and clean, not cloying or heavy.  At the same time, the interesting combination of flavors that just peek up when drunk invoke some kind of exciting voyage, a round-the-world odyssey.

Supplier: La Birratorium
Price:€2.75

The last film I saw, and one of the last shown at the festival, was Who Am I - Kein System ist sicher/ Who Am I - No System is Safe.  I thought it was going to be a serious critique of internet security and privacy, but it was a regular old action/suspense movie.  Not that I didn't enjoy it, it just wasn't what I expected.  The main character is a computer geek who becomes a hacker and makes friends with three other hackers.  They mostly play pranks, some dangerous like leaving a video to be shown at a neo-Nazi meeting that shows Hitler being, er, overly loved by several dogs.  But, they long for recognition and respect from other hackers, which leads the main character to steal top secret information when they infiltrate the German intelligence agency's headquarters, instead of just sticking to the prank of having all the printers in the building print out a clown face as the original plan was.  He passes the information off to a hacker the group admires, which leads to a murder.  The group then realizes they will probably be targeted next and they try to unmask the "master" hacker before they get killed or arrested, although the main character does get caught.  In fact, most of the movie is his version of the events as told to an investigator who has just been removed from the case.  Now, some SPOILERS.



At first, it looks like a Fight Club or Identity kind of ending with multiple personalities being revealed.  The other three hackers are just facets of the main character's personality that he can't quite bring himself to recognize.  The investigator tells him his illness makes him ineligible for witness protection, but he has other options.  One of them, apparently, is the pity of a police investigator who lets him take off by himself with a new birth certificate.  Then she drops him off by a highway to disappear into the real world.



But then, we see him on a ship to Denmark - with the rest of the group!  The whole multiple personalities thing had been a fake from the beginning, calculated to let the others get away.  The investigator may have in fact discovered the trickery, albeit after the fact, but won't say anything because she cracked the case and is now getting the glory.  Even the love interest is going away with them to Copenhagen.

All in all, it was an entertaining movie.  Although the twists were a bit contrived and the last one felt a little forced, there's still and element of "it's just a movie, relax" and the enjoyment of a happy ending with the "good" guys getting away with putting thieves and murderers behind bars, even if they use illegal means to do it.  One thing that stood out for me in this movie was the use of English.  All the internet interactions are carried out in English, which is understandable, but even in real life the characters toss out words and phrases completely naturally.  It's just the words that they use.  Even to swear: everything gets a strenuous, "Fuck!" from a programming misstep to a nail through the hand.  It's not something just in the movie either, I remember hearing young Germans use that particular expletive in real life when accidents happened.  Expressions and concrete words are not uncommon loans, but swears?  Strong Language has a couple of posts on the phenomenon of multilingual swearing and the sort of bleed from a more powerful language into another, but the incorporation of a foreign word for such a basic thing as an expression of deep, visceral anger and pain is something to take notice of, in my opinion.