I've never seen this film and I don't know of it, but as soon as I started watching this clip I knew instinctively who will have played Anna. Liv Ullmann. And I was right!
Somewhere in the darkness The gambler he broke even. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/kenny-rogers-dead-obituary-200706/
Albert Uderzo died, aged 92. He was one of the original co-creators of the French comic series "Astérix". Shown below in his illustration style for the comics (Uderzo's face is the one on the well-rounded fellow, Obélix, in the back. The face on Astérix, in the front, is the one of co-creator René Goscinny, who already died in 1977.) It's ironic that one of their (translated) jokes was trending on Twitter yesterday. In their third animated movie, the heroes Astérix and Obélix have to perform twelve tasks. One of it is the retrieval of (in the German version) "Passierschein A38" from "the house that makes nutters" (a state office). Variations of that "Passierschein A38" were tweeted in response to Berlin police requiring citizens to show ID (which you are not required to carry) in light of the Corona curfew, but since "Passierschein A38" was translated differently in all the language versions of the movie, no one outside of Germany got the joke.
Japanese comedian Shimura Ken (Ken Shimura) has died of coronavirus. Most of you probably don't know him, but this dude was everywhere for decades. Japanese "stars" are usually pretty disposable, not so with him. His first showbiz experience was with a band named The Drifters. They opened for the Beatles in 1966. One of my favorite bits (with English subs):
Mr. Bean is a good comparison to a lot of his work. Look for "Pan and James" on youtube, he was the mastermind of that series as well.
It's funny how comedy routines work... no pun intended. Improv, sitcom, sketch... when he finally found his own headphones I thought, "Oh shit, he's going to plug them into her phone jack!" Sure enough... rim shot.
My favorite is when he shouts out "sumimasen" to attract the flight attendant's attention. That's perfectly polite behavior in a Japanese pub (izakaya).
Haha. I missed the cultural angle on that one. Otherwise, humor tends to be fairly democratic. I mean, a pie in the face is a pie in the face, right?
Wait, you're NOT supposed to do that? ... I thought it was funny how the woman stops pronouncing the "u" in "desu" as she gets progressively more and more annoyed.
As far as I understand, the "u" is slurred very often*. It's there to smooth out the words (if you try it), but also slows down pronunciation. Hence, I believe it's a sign of formality and politeness to pronounce the "u" clearly. It gets lost when you get angry, sloppy, annoyed, etc. or want to insult somebody. *It is NEVER pronounced as clearly as an English- or German-speaker would pronounce it upon reading the transcription without knowing anything else. It's not a 'full' syllable.
Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore from goldfinger) dead at 94 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/06/honor-blackman-james-bond-pussy-galore-avengers-dies-aged-94
The "u" is normlly not pronounced. "Desu" is normally pronounced "dess" (unless followed by something else, such as "ne"). Saying "desu" is a feminine affectation - but it's something I do sometimes, as I sometimes speak Japanese like a girl.
Ohhhhh... You're right, I've always only heard it on female speakers... Thing is, many modern books always put it in there, which makes me stumble reading. Like so many people, my first experience was James Clavell's "Shogun". Saw the show first, then read the book. WTF? What's the "u" doing there? They never said it on the show... In particular, as I learned later and already said, it's not really a full syllable, but more of a variation on how you pronounce the preceding consonant.
It's in there because the letter in Japanese is "su" す , which is fully pronounced if it appears in the middle of a word, such as "sumimasen" すみません. It's correct to pronounce the "su" in "desu", but no one does it.
