The Last Candle

At some point while sifting through my 500-item Netflix queue, I began to see parallels and similarities among multiple films, motifs and connections and pairings. Some of these films were directly connected in groups of twos or threes, not just by being sequels and prequels but by theme, original story and strong influence. The idea gave birth to the ongoing Double Feature project, in which I watch groups of matched pictures within a short duration. The hope is I will also jot down a few thoughts about the pictures here.

Tarkovsky’s Solaris, released in 1972, and Soderbergh’s Solaris from 2002 was the first pair to trigger the idea for the Double Feature project. I haven’t seen Tarkovsky’s original, which was closely based on Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel of the same name, but I have watched Soderbergh’s more recent take, and, well, to put it optimistically, I’m willing to give it another chance.

So the Solaris-Solaris pairing is obvious for the project, but Solaris is psychological drama, deep-cuts territory, and I wanted to kick off the project with something a little more…thrilling. So the first double feature became the 2002 Hong Kong-made Infernal Affairs and 2006’s American-made The Departed.

Infernal business. Who's the cop killer now?

The Departed is roughly based on Infernal Affairs, and the two are similar by way of an excellent story, with the former more or less lifting the latter’s narrative threads, much in the same away A Fistful of Dollars found itself via Yojimbo. Both movies are classic crime films, the Hong Kong triads or Boston mafia versus the local police. That would be satisfying enough as many similar pictures have demonstrated, but the interesting bits begin when each faction puts a covert operative in the other’s camp. Both moles are deep into the act and fully gain the trust of their respective employer, but throughout the act each player ultimately is covertly performing for the benefit of their true masters.

A simple narrative, but thoroughly compelling, like all simple-but-well-made narratives. Coming from its simplicity is the result that nearly at all times both sides of the battle have a forecast of the other side’s moves. The cops know where the criminals are congregating. The criminals know the cops are coming. The cops will be outside your door in thirty seconds. The deal goes down next week, location unknown. Information passes from mole to superior, who then disseminates the tips to his respective team as he sees fit. Actions progress very quickly, and each faction is constantly on edge, on the move.

Early in the film, after a drug deal and bust goes poorly for both sides, thanks to the quick and constant transfer of information between the hidden operatives, the two sides have a non-violent but uneasy confrontation. They both know the a leak exists in their own foundation and vow to plug the hole. Whoever solves the mystery wins the war and ruins the opposition, and may the best mole win.

While Infernal Affairs and The Departed share this story, they utilize and develop it very differently. Just take a look at the running times: Infernal Affairs runs at about one and a half hours while The Departed pushes three hours. Same story, different plot.

Infernal Affairs’ strength is its plot itself, or put more accurately, the ability of strong, motivated characters to forward the plot. Unlike The Departed, it is a true thriller, rarely pausing for an aside or a prolonged sequence. The motion and sweep of the criminals and cops are captured clearly and simple to follow, yet the fluctuating machinations of each side shifting to combat the other are always, well, thrilling. The rapid movement is clearly at the will of a cast of great characters, not a script behind the scenes.

Things aren't any better in Boston.

The Departed is more concentrated on delivering a setting, a persona of a very particular part of America. Infernal Affairs has its seedy Hong Kong undergrowth, full of dim alleys and run-down apartments and neon lights, but The Departed’s Boston has apparent depth. As directed by Martin Scorsese, The Departed exists in a very distinct environment, one that permeates every facet of the production, from the theatrical aspects like the soundtrack and shot location to the accent-rich performances, so completely that it surely exists in the real world.

Scorsese doesn’t dive into the nitty-gritty of the political street-by-street or geographical landscapes, but he provides a place where his characters live. In return, those characters give the film vibrancy: this New England vision is elevated by a bevy of punchy performances. Jack Nicholson chews the scenery relentlessly, but after a couple scenes wth him, I wouldn’t want it any other way. Long dialogue scenes are common, and while they don’t always advance the plot, they advance our understanding and history with the characters, a hugely effective gain.

The Departed’s boosted character portraits explain for the most part why the movie runs for about an hour longer than its similarly-storied sibling. Scorsese’s movie is simply more interested in the who, rather than who doing what. Both methods work terrifically for their own purposes: Infernal Affairs would feel too long if it pushed past two hours or more, and The Departed’s performances would seem truncated if its runtime was edited down.

I really liked both of these films. Each production was terrific in its own: Infernal Affairs as an action thriller, and The Departed as a modern period piece. And I did like one of these movies more than the other, but, hey, that doesn’t matter when I could sit down any day of the week and watch them both, one right after the other, and have a really good time.

Eichwald, northern Germany, where not even cabbages are safe.

Claiming that Austrian film writer and director Michael Haneke makes films about bad people is close to the mark, but not completely correct. More precisely, Mr. Haneke makes films about the badness of people. Or replace “badness” with evilness, amorality or immorality, or, if you want to be cynical about it, natural behavior, and the claim is still apt. In fewer words, Haneke sets out to expose his audience and himself.

But Haneke’s films are indeed about bad people too. Take 2002’s The Piano Teacher: the titular teacher seeks pleasure by torturing her students. Or Caché, Haneke’s 2005 film, in which a French couple is tormented by surveillance tapes delivered to their house, recordings showing the husband and wife at all activities of their day and night within their own home. And most recently comes 2009’s The White Ribbon, where a rural German town is slowly devastated by an unknown assailant (or assailants) from within itself.

So far I’ve seen only one of Haneke’s movies, The White Ribbon. The White Ribbon is about a beautiful town filled with ugly people, a contrast of perception versus grim humanity, a theme Haneke evidently doggedly pursues in all of his recent productions. If The White Ribbon is indicative of the quality of Haneke’s direction and writing, his pursuits are successful.

The White Ribbon is presented with a keen, insightful direction and a rich, provocative cinematography, painted in larger-than-life black and white. Many scenes stretch across the full grayscale spectrum, often within the same frame, pushing pitch blacks up against pure whites. But The White Ribbon’s hue-less spectrum is not kin to other black and white films: the black and white in this movie just looks…off, almost imperceptibly so. If frames of The White Ribbon are compared to, say, Seven Samurai and Casablanca, the latter two films would be in group A and The White Ribbon would be in group B. The White Ribbon is, of course, a black and white movie, but it just looks different.

Of course, a technical reason exists for the visual dissonance: According to American Cinematographer, the film was captured originally in full color and converted to black and white in post-production. So there you go.

Needless to say, converting color film to a final black-and-white product is not the same as shooting with black and white film (and The White Ribbon is film, not video). On the film-focused podcast Filmspotting, during a review of the film in episode #288, the hosts related an account that color film was used under contractual obligation to show a color version on local television.

If that hearsay is true, we international viewers are lucky for multiple reasons: Not only do we get to see Haneke’s intended vision, but we are not forced to experience this beautiful, full-frame film, off-kilter grays or no, within the confines of a TV box. And the off-kilter visual design heavily supplements the tone of the film and the off-kilter, crazy town.

The turmoil begins in the very first scene, very first shot of the film. After stark white opening titles against a soundless black screen and a 25-second-plus fade from matte black, the horrific and dehabilitating crimes befall the citizens of Eichwald. The town doctor is first to be stricken: A thin but strong wire extended across his daily horse-riding path trips his steed, throwing the doctor to the ground, breaking his collarbone and thrusting the broken shards up into his neck. He is sent to a nearby town’s hospital to recover for many weeks. The tripwire disappears overnight; the perpetrator is not apprehended, because there are no witnesses and no clues.

Subsequent accidents — the citizens wonder if they are attacks, so awful and pointed are the consequences — make no apparent preference towards who is assailed and who is spared. Both young and old are plagued, including a retarded boy. And compared to what happens to other beasts during the town’s rash of malice, the horse in the opening shot should be thanking his lucky stars.

Suspects are many, but no evidence is known, only accusations and rumors. If evidence exists, it is unknown, hidden, or covered up. The town slowly spirals downward as World War I flares up in other parts of the nearby world.

The slow-burning but high-heat events are captured by Haneke’s confident eye. Simplicity is paramount: The White Ribbon is absent of dramatic pans or crane shots, quick-cut montages, Mamet-esque dialogue or action set pieces. A tracking dolly is used only once or twice, in one instance tracking a squad of torch-bearers tramping through a forest, bright-white flames against dimly-lit tree trunks and astride the absolute dark night. The only music comes from the setting itself, like a live flute-piano duet or a children’s choir at church. Any filmmaking machinery is invisible.

Most shots capture the players head-on, perpendicular to the action. Characters speak at the camera, and nearly always directly approach or recede from it. The performances are often shot close, capturing small-talk, prayers and arguments equally. And Haneke is not afraid to linger on horror: For the most shocking moments in The White Ribbon — and at least two of them are captured — have I mentioned this film is rated “R”? — the director pushes the camera in deep and shoots for many long seconds. Shock cuts that jumped away from the scenes of despair would’ve been easier to take.

All of this adds up to a terrific but penetrating experience. There is no urgency to the depiction of Eichwald’s citizens, and no answers to the crimes. But I think Haneke made two major choices that make his film thoroughly compelling.

First, Haneke’s movie is not about the crimes themselves, as anxiously the audience (and the town’s citizens) may want the mysteries solved. The White Ribbon is about the people that commit them, or may have committed them, and those who are caught up in the destruction. The question becomes not who would injure the doctor, maim a child, or commit arson, but why. Is the malice taught, implicitly or explicitly? Or is it inherited? Or, worst of all, is the behavior natural, instinctual, normally repressed but pushed to the surface in a town that is afraid to restrain itself? The characters, not the crimes, are the focus and the action.

Second, and supplementing the first point, Haneke relates his message by showing us, not telling us. Telling a story is an effective method with the right material and intention, as film theorist and critic David Bordwell argues in his his “Tell, don’t show” essay, using Ingmar Bergman’s Persona as an example. (Persona has a lot of talking, mostly retelling sordid stories. Check it out.) But the method of show-not-tell works here because the momentum and anxiety is built by reaction to the crimes, the potential of susceptibility and the fever-pitch paranoia, and the narrative is kept current. Instead of hearing about a slow, progressive collapse, we witness it.

Haneke’s portrayal of this collapsing, ruinous German town may leave the viewer sobered and disturbed, but that’s the intent. The show aims to depict a darkness of humanity, and its effective long-lasting impression is indicative of success. As for the other films in Haneke’s catalog, I can’t wait to see what else he says about ourselves, terrible as it may be.

The heat is on.

Additional reading:

• Michael Haneke at Wikipedia
• American Cinematographer article on The White Ribbon
• Official site for The White Ribbon
• Official trailer for The White Ribbon at Apple Trailers
• IMDB page for The White Ribbon (“Das weisse Band”)

The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s 100th birthday would have been today, and in honor of one my favorite artists I’m sitting down to a movie or two this evening, newly released on Blu-ray.

Surprisingly, various international Google portals paid tribute to the famous director with a Google doodle. The UK, Australia, Italy and Japan front pages all presented the following black-and-white charcoal-drawn resemblance for the duration of March 23:

Google doodle for Kurosawa's centenary.

(For shame, Google US, for not showing the doodle.)

Criterion’s excellent Current blog has run a 100th birthday contest since March 2nd (the March 1st giveaway took place on Twitter and Facebook) up to today, giving away a Kurosawa-themed DVD, box set or other gift every day. To be eligible for a gift, contestants must simply respond to a short, subjective question about Kurosawa films or even the man himself.

I haven’t entered many of the daily contests, mostly because I already own nearly all the prizes they’ve given away (i.e. DVDs), but I’ve really enjoyed the responses to the questions. The test for day 4 of the daily contests, “Write a Hollywood-style tagline for your favorite Kurosawa movie.,” is a favorite, with responses from deadly serious to wordplay groaners (like “Why walk when you can RAN?” by Jovani Remior). Day 5 brought a mirthful caption contest, and Day 12 brought out commenters’ wishes for Kurosawa adaptations.

But my personal favorite contest took place on Day 8, when the question was, “Among filmmakers working today, who can best be described as the heir to Kurosawa’s legacy, and why?”

That day’s questions provoked much fewer responses than other, simpler questions, but the old quality versus quality adage applies here. Day 8’s responses all commented not only about Kurosawa’s legacy and mastery but also about a second (usually) great filmmaker, presenting specific arguments to link the two together. The many acknowledgments and personal experiences of skill, artistry and utmost respects paid for the multitude of filmmakers are fascinating and spread across a broad spectrum of terrific artists and artisans.

I have my own personal opinion about who most resembles Kurosawa, but alas, like the other contests I didn’t submit to this one either, so my answer goes unheard. Maybe I’ll enter it for Kurosawa’s 125th birthday celebration. But for the 100th birthday celebration, I’m perfectly happy to sit down with a Blu-ray copy of Yojimbo.

One of the new radios in the Portal update. Broadcasts may contain SSTV data or LOLs.

In the summer of 2004, an ARG called I Love Bees (or ILB), a series of promotional stunts for the upcoming release of the game Halo 2, invigorated a time that was otherwise a working summer spent in my college city of Mount Pleasant, Michigan. Heck, I wasn’t even a big Halo fan at the time, but the ILB game, which combined a digital world with our sensory one, captured my attention completely for several days. I wrote an essay about my excitement for the surreal events, events where hidden messages were found buried in distorted JPEG images and pay phones across the nation in both urban and rural locations rang out as the game’s awakening AI stretched “axons” across the continent. Naturally I concluded that fond recognition by saying I very much looked forward to the next ARG that captured my imagination.

That ARG arrived two days ago, and this time the events surround the puzzle-adventure game Portal. My interest began when I was browsing through the feeds in my RSS reader and found that an update was released for Portal. Hardly unusual, even for a two-plus-year-old game, but the patch notes for this update piqued my curiosity.

Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations

Needless to say, this kind of “compliance” is not your typical bug fix or extra feature, notwithstanding the beautiful freedom allowed to the PC platform (compared to the locked-down purgatory occupied by the popular consoles[^1]). I went to my usual Internet gaming haunts and found that various fan communities had already accomplished most of the gruntwork with the new update, revealing the update as actually the advent of a new ARG, one to rival 2004’s I Love Bees.

A Steam post on the official Steam forums summarizes the week’s excitement very well, but own my excitement continues below.

Portal players who began a new game booted up the game after the update was applied, they (including me) discovered that a series of radios, exactly 26 in all, had been added to the many “test chambers” — puzzles, divided among many rooms — and that they would broadcast morse code or what was seemingly static. And the radios now make terrible noises when tossed through a “fizzler,” signaling a newfound significance in the setting.

All information for the new ARG thus far has come from those radios. The morse code contained genuine messages, although the quality of the new information ranged from mysterious (“Interior transmission active”) to comedic (“Beep beep beep beep lol”). But the real meat has come from the static, which turned out to not be static at all but data. Intrepid gamer investigators extracted the data, and someone had the knowledge to guess the audio recordings were “broadcast” using slow-scan television, a picture transmission method utilized by ham radio operators. Someone ran the audio through a decoder of sorts, and images like the below came out the other end of the black box.

One of the pictures decoded from Portal's new radio transmissions. Crazy!

Twenty-two of these images were decoded, and further numbers and letters were extracted from the new information. And here’s where the game bled out into the real world: Some of the numbers and letters, after being further decoded, ended up being a regular, single telephone number, location in Seattle, WA.

Voice calls resulted in no success, but eventually someone called using a different, bygone technology: a dial-up modem. A BBS picked up on the other end, which of course requested login credentials. After discovering the credentials (the method how they were discovered escapes me), modern Portal fans, using video cards holding 1000 times the primary memory of a entire desktop computer back when BBS’s were common, logged into the system and retrieved another set of vital clues, presented this time in a very appropriate format: ASCII art.

Like ILB preceded a sequel to Halo, Portal’s ARG is seemingly approaching a sequel to itself. I find it incredibly cool that the developer Valve used Portal, which has basically been unmodified for over two years, as a vector to continue its universe. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen: that’s what press releases, magazine advertisements (okay, maybe not so much these days) and previews are used for. But here we have not only the game influencing real-life events, but a game seemingly modifying itself (within the fiction, of course), which goes hand-in-hand with the main antagonist of the Portal universe, a saucy artificial intelligence who declared itself at the end of the original game (after a fair bit of combat) to be “still alive.” And so it seems.

Of course this gives me an excellent excuse to play through Portal again, collecting radios and enjoying once again, for the fourth or fifth time, what is arguably one of the best games of the past decade and definitely one of my all-time favorites.

Oh, and hey — looks like Portal was updated again today, this time adding a “valuable asset retrieval.” Seems like this fiction is picking up momentum, and I am all too happy about it.

[^1]: Neither the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions of Portal will receive the update, due to the pressures and gauntlet of Sony and Microsoft’s certification processes for updates. Microsoft also likes to require Valve to charge for all updates, even if the updates are free on the PC. Quel domage.

As part of a burgeoning Blu-ray collection, 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.