The Last Candle

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.

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.

In recent months and years I’ve become an unabashed patron of Criterion and its Collection, “a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films.” In the United States, no distributor comes close to offering the quality and large breadth of releases provided by the American company. (Elsewhere, in the UK, Masters of Cinema Series of DVDs is very similar to the Criterion Collection.) In today’s world, a release by Criterion is very likely the best a movie fan or collector will ever get.

But let’s imagine a sad world, a lesser world — a world without Criterion. What’s a film snob to do? Watch fewer movies, probably. But we’d also have to put up with sub-standard, even offensive released of famous and classic movies.

Take this next release, for example, which is an honest-to-Abe DVD and VHS release of a real movie.

Yikes.

If you can get past the extremely gaudy color arrangement, the faked pin-up blonde, accentuated by the Cinema Sirens title and leopard-skin backdrop, and the misspelling of “psychological,” your eyes will eventually find the film’s title, Catherine Deneuve. In the upper left corner of the ugly yellow field is a single word to describe the film: “Repulsion.” Strange are the ways of the marketing department that chooses to describe the film’s obvious main character with such an ugly term, and also strange that the film’s creator, the well-known Roman Polanski, known for careful and somewhat austere productions, would create such a unsightly and tacky production.

Actually, wait. I’ve got that all wrong: The film isn’t called Catherine Deneuve: it’s Repulsion. Deneuve plays the lead. (Actress Yvonne Furneaux does play a supporting role, so the cover is not entirely misleading.)

Speaking of the lead, contrary to the implication of the Cinema Sirens art, Deneuve’s character doesn’t prance around in a pink spotted bathing suit, bad low-cut bob above her shoulders and a matching pink scarf in tow. Here’s an actual screengrab of Deneuvue’s character, Carol, from Repulsion:

That shot alone would have made a better cover for the film. After all, the expression on Carol’s face much better represents the film’s plot, tone, style and narrative: a stark, black and white psychological thriller about a young woman who is losing her grip on reality, told from the point of view of the woman, hallucinations and all. Pink bathing suit not included.

Clearly the Cinema Sirens release fails at advertising the actual content of the movie, let alone giving it respect. Fortunately, Criterion recently released Repulsion under their guidance. Here’s the art created for the new release:

Night and day. Scroll back up to the Cinema Sirens release and wonder how on earth these two covers can even represent the same movie.

On the other hand, the cover art is hardly indicative of the film’s actual presentation — the presentation of the film’s video and audio, as close to the crew’s intention (original or revised) as it can be, is most important of all. Sure, Cinema Sirens’ covers might be horribly off the mark, but who cares as long as the transfer is scratch-free? Is a world without Criterion a world with bad disc enclosures but otherwise fine film-watching?

No. Take Kurosawa’s Ran, for example, which has seen three different distributors in the last decade: Fox Lorber, Wellspring Media, who released it under a “Masterworks Edition” label, and finally Criterion.

Fox Lorber cropped the film from 1.85:1 to roughly 2.35:1, burned the subtitles onto the video itself, and provided a completely awful picture¹ (also see the one example of this edition at the UK’s DVD Times review²).

The Masterworks Edition also cropped the film, but blew it up to full-frame, cutting off the edges³, used a de-noising filter on the transfer, which blurred the picture and ruined details⁴, and punched out the colors and contrast. The Masterworks Edition is also known to having making spelling mistakes in the subtitles. (Some debate on the quality of the Masterworks Edition exists⁵. Although I haven’t seen the Masterworks Edition myself to account for its quality, these latter reviewers are in the much lesser minority of observers.)

Criterion finally provided fans with an excellent release of Ran in 2005, but in nothing less than a disaster, the company actually lost the rights earlier this year, even as a Blu-ray release was weeks away. Ran, widely considered one of the many masterpieces by the great Japanese auteur Kurosawa, might be subjected to yet another dismal release.

Most home releases are not as bad as the provided example, but they offer a look into the landscape of a cold, hard world without a respectable distributor. Some hope does exist, maybe: if Criterion did disappear, I do have some love for a VHS of John Woo’s Hard Boiled that was released by none other than Fox Lorber — or I did love it, until the tape was ruined by a VCR that was consequently sent to the garbage dump. A little respect towards great movies is not too much to ask.

Repulsion at Criterion. Trailer included.

The Masters of Cinema Series of DVDs, a side project of the Masters of Cinema.

Cinema Sirens on the web. Quite a collection.

Man, that last post o’ mine, an unrestrained appreciation for repetition and dynamics in music, was a bit of a track wreck prose-wise, as reasonable readers might agree. Actually, reasonable readers probably scrolled through the length of the entry and decided clicking through the audio clips distributed throughout the post was the best idea, which it was. If the saying “To become a master, you have to make 10,000 mistakes” is true, that last post was a mighty leap for me towards mastery.

I’m going to venture once more into the previous post’s subject, but only because I came up with a couple excellent and obvious examples of repetition in songs that weren’t included with the last deluge. Heck, one of these examples even comes from a song that was already sampled during the first post.

Both of these examples are notable for a very simple reason: they repeat something over and over and over again, increasing the intensity of the repetition, iterating up until the breaking point. To start, here’s the last 2:30 of weekly favorite Frost*’s Experiments in Mass Appeal, a swell bit of music:

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Listening to that full song over the past week reminded me of the tail end of Sufjan Stevens’ Star of Wonder, over three minutes of over-and-over-and-over-again, and is this:

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To close, if you haven’t figured out by now that I like repetition in my music, you’re probably better off.