The Last Candle

As part of a burgeoning Blu-ray colleciton, I recently picked up a copy of The Matrix 10th Anniversary Edition. More importantly, I had a chance to watch it again for the first time in close to ten years. The movie still feels contemporary and plays really well, but I came up with a few observations.

I suppose this post had to come sooner or later, so I might as well get it out of the way now.

• The phone used by Mr. Anderson/Neo, Morpheus and other characters throughout the film, a modified Nokia 8110 with a snap-out keypad cover, was cool in ‘98 but looks old and clunky compared to today’s standards. Films featuring frequent use of then-modern technology are always at the mercy of time and the always-advancing electronics industry — 2001 and Blade Runner are exceptions, probably because those settings are so all-encompassing, well-realized and persuasive — but the frequent usage of phones in The Matrix is prominent enough to make the Nokia 8110’s presence the most jarring. And like any other film with computers of any sort, the fake rendered on-screen interfaces are clunky and ridiculous.

• Apparently I’ve become of fan of wider shots, because the constant close shooting of head-body eventually began to annoy me. Still, I like how the sharp lighting frames and highlights the geometry and curvature of characters’ faces during the frequent close shots.

• Not surprisingly, the dialogue is weak to passable in this film (although the delivery itself is good), but compared to the trademark dojo and corridor action set pieces, few dramatic scenes are memorable. I still like Fishburne’s first scene very much.

• Larry Fishburne and Marcus Chong as Morpheus and Tank, respectively, give my favorite performances. Fishburne because he has a gravitas that successfully delivers the many vague explicative scenes without rendering the plot as obvious nonsense or complete confusion, and Chong because, besides playing a very friendly character, gives a little heat and humanity to a film that is otherwise strict and very solemn. Also good is dinner scene between Agent Smith and Cypher/Mr. Reagan — warm and a rare bit of humor.

• Morpheus and Neo’s short scene in the “Desert of the Real” takes place on what is too-obviously a set. A high school production could possibly mock it up completely, save the lush lion-head leather chairs.

• This movie is edited very briskly and has an almost linear narrative. For example, within about fifteen minutes, Neo is bugged by Agent Smith in the interrogation room, has the bug removed by Trinity, meets Morpheus, is released from the Matrix and is brought on board the Nebuchadnezzar, all in series. There are very few “pillow shots” and only one cross-cutting sequence towards the end. Not that this is a bad thing: In this film, the “how” and “what” is much better captured and depicted than the “why” and “where.”

• The famed corridor shootout scene still looks great, but I wish it had more of a conscious sense of space and progress, both how Neo and Trinity traverse the corridor and how many military combatants remain throughout the attack. I’m not suggesting that the film explicitly call out how many enemies were defeated, like Kambei marking off defeated bandits on a piece of parchment in Seven Samurai, a classic example of Kurosawa’s love for explication and progress. But the action in the corridor begins and ends too quickly, with each brief encounter either a medium shot of moving in slow motion or a close shot of a military grunt being killed with little continuity between each encounter.

• As for the Blu-ray package itself, the 10th Anniversary Edition comes in not a keep case but a nice cardboard, book-like case. The liner notes are annoyingly attached to the inside cover, but I prefer this release’s package to the typical ugly baby blue plastic Blu-ray cases. After picking up so many multi-disc high-quality Criterion release, high-quality packages are a big draw for me.

• This 10th Anniv. version features a terrific commentary and scene-by-scene analysis by a group of film critics. Also included is a cast commentary, but I recall the original DVD release’s cast commentary being surprisingly dull, so I’m not in any hurry to check it out.

I don’t plan on buying copies of the series’ second and third films, but The Matrix is still welcome to my Blu-ray library as a great action-fantasy film, though oddly balanced next my copies of Kagemusha, Chungking Express and Pierrot le Fou.

Edits: Modified the paragraph about framing and the conclusion.

Busy season is tough enough without my daily tools going pear-shaped on me:

Really now? My grievance that elicited this opaque error: copying a smallish bitmap into a document. And what am I supposed to do after saving? Close the document and never edit it again?

In contrast, my other big Microsoft tool, Visual Studio, is amazingly robust and usable for hours and hours, and I really enjoy working with it. But, man, Word is not a pretty thing most of the time.

In the later half of the 90’s I took part in this burgeoning so-called World Wide Web by creating and managing a fan site for the vehicular combat video game series Twisted Metal. The site was stored at Geocities, the inarguable hosting giant of the time, and stayed put on a stretch of land in the TimesSquare/Arcade district for over ten years.

But last Monday, parent company Yahoo! swept an arm across the ‘Cities property and cleared a thousand crude communities from the face of the Internet, including my site, that first easily-forgotten foray of mine into web development. But for reasons of nostalgia and a touch of masochism, I grabbed a copy of my ol’ site from Yahoo!’s clutches before the couple rusty Geocities servers were isolated from the niche market of web surfers who still pined for the days of when the web was simple, static, and almost completely ugly.

For my part during dawn on the Web, visitors to my simple, static and ugly Twisted Metal-focused portal were greeted by the following splash page entrance:

Welcome to Twisted Metal. You will enjoy this.

Splash pages as an entrance to a web site are frowned upon these days, although artist portfolios and upscale furniture stores usually can get by without anyone complaining. But back in the late 90’s, the splash page was a throw-down introduction and on the cutting edge of site presentation. Match a splash page with a few blink and marquee tags — also on the cutting edge of web development at the time — and your site counter was almost guaranteed to click through at least twenty hits a day. That’s juice.

The site provided screenshots, news, clever commentary, and, of course, cheat codes, as well as insider tips announcing that foreign fascists had infiltrated our domestic game studios:

'Have a drink. Enjoy. Be refreshed.'

When the site was abandoned in early 1999, shortly before before I struck out in the world to make a mint on the stock market or develop a new type of biodegradable shopping bag or something similarly important, the site focused on the recent release of Twisted Metal 3. But ever the careful webmaster, I didn’t let the previous games in the series fall out of the public view and continued to praise their contribution to the now-popular exploding cars and vehicular manslaughter genre. Even when compared to site documents that focused on more recent titles, the Twisted Metal 2-focused pages delivered the same forceful, intense aesthetic design and high quality content expected of the site:

Too Twisted, too Metal Two.

That title graphic is rad: blood-weeping bullet holes, a lens flare blaring out from a skull’s barren eye socket (yes, that is a big stupid skull in the image’s background), and a prominent application of the blue-and-gold “chrome” paint gradient. I actually was pretty proud of the work at the time, but looking at it again, the chrome is a touch gratuitous. Maybe.

I’d like to think my Twisted Metal site accrued a hundred-thousand hits and served the audience of the fine vehicular combat series for many happy years. Of course, I’ll never know about those hits since my free counter died years ago — overflow because of exceptionally high numbers perhaps? — but the site is now part of my archives, to be enjoyed whenever I please. Maybe I’ll even pop one of the old games in my original PlayStation and relive those simpler times.

On second thought, looking back at those screenshots, I’ll keep those memories and the games at arm’s length.

Nonetheless, over ten years later, I am here.

I don’t expect a lot out of power metal, but I love it: fleet-fingered technical proficiency, the requisite guitar-keyboard dueling, soaring high-register vocals, swords-and-sorcery concepts, juvenile lyrics, and enough hooks and melodies for a half-dozen pop songs. Power metal is not interesting, but it is completely awesome.

Once in a while a power metal band grows a brain and changes the time signature for a few bars, dumps the keyboard for a glockenspiel, drops the frenetic double-bass drumming or guitar solos for long atmospheric bridges and 10-minute compositions, or cans the unicorn fantasies to delve into concepts about society, politics or theories of existentialism. This is called going prog, and the change is generally a beautiful thing.

But sometimes the change doesn’t work out so well. Take the following two clips from a band I’ve followed and enjoyed for nearly ten years, Sonata Arctica. Sonata Arctica’s second album, Silence (2001), contained a song called Wolf & Raven that has not only been a personal favorite since then but is an excellent example of the genre as a whole.

So I was excited to find recently that a 2008 re-release of Silence featured a “remake” of Wolf & Raven. Excellent. Going into the song, I expected them to have tightened up the sound, punched up the concept through orchestral and more complex arrangements, and expanded the song while keeping the same frenetic energy of the original track.

See for yourself — here’s a clip of the Wolf & Raven remake. I’m playing the 2008 version first because it’s, well, the underwhelming of the two versions. Both versions use the same lyrics stanzas to make the difference more clear, although the change couldn’t be more obvious as-is.

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Melodic and swooning, which is 50% of the power metal world. But this low-tempo ballad is also unusually pompous and forsakes none of the standard drumming, guitar or keyboard melodies of any kind, as if the remake was just a resume for Tony Kakko, the band’s lead singer, songwriter and part-time keyboardist. It has no lift, no energy.

The “remake” part could have been been “demo” and that would’ve made a lot more sense, especially after exhibiting this next clip of the 2001 original. Turn your speakers up (or down, if you’re not so much into the metal thing).

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Now that’s what I call power metal: fast, fiery, and totally ridiculous. The 2008 remake is has little power and certainly isn’t metal, so I don’t know what it is. Dramatic, definitely. Foppish, maybe. But it isn’t metal, although it’s still not bad. At least the band kept the high-register vocals and orchestral arrangements.

Sonata Arctica released a new album just a couple weeks ago, with Flag in the Ground being the new single. I’ve given it some playtime: solid album, but a new Porcupine Tree album was released a week prior to Arctica’s The Days of Grays. And the Tree cannot be out-progged.

Noby Noby Boy is better seen and not explained, so I’ll just say that the following recording is entirely my doing. Enjoy. No prizes to anyone who watches the entire show.

Hmm. Maybe Noby Noby Boy is best just played and not even recorded.