The Last Candle

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.

Movie nights around my place happen whenever I damn well feel they should, another boon to being single, living alone, and cat-free. The evening’s choice picture varies often, thanks to Netflix and the rare Criterion sale, and the only usual interruption comes from the parking lot outside: An older man who lives in my apartment building owns an exceptionally noisy vehicle, and when he decides to make a trip to the grocery store, his beater car sounds like a cross between a motorboat and popping corn.

Last Sunday’s picture was the Allen Baron picture Blast of Silence, a little-known but confident NYC-based noir. Many shots in the film are simple but interesting side shots of the lead character walking down city streets, past many storefronts, parks, alleyways, and humble brick abodes, surrounded by the usual city of din of urban traffic, pedestrian chatter, and the occasional police or fire engine siren. If a fire engine siren had actually, say, sounded right outside my window, I probably would’ve paid it little mind, thinking it was part of the gritty film’s soundtrack.

Wait for it.

While ignoring a siren is one thing, a heavy fist pounding on your door is harder to ignore. The plot thickens further after opening the door and finding a police officer on the other side, especially when the police officer tells you the building is on fire.

I grabbed my phone and shoes and departed, following other residents who has also been alerted by the officer. Stepping outside the building to the exterior walkway, I see not one but two fire engines stationed in the parking lot, one with the hose crane extended towards the end of the building opposite where I live. Natural inclination and the circumstances moved me to follow the crane arm’s extension, leading my gaze to this scene:

A air-conditioner/heater closet used to be there. But it’s gone now.

So here’s the rough timeline of that Sunday night. About a half-hour after I begin watching Blast of Silence, an air-con, after attempting to combat a day of 95° and high humidity, decides to give up the ghost and go out in style. This exhausted air-con decides to set the building on fire as a parting shot, which also could bring the benefit of taking down other air conditioners in the complex and towing some friends along the ride to air-con heaven.

The heater closet goes up in flame, eventually catching the siding, too. Someone at the pool notices the building’s conflagration and in sequence calls 911, evacuates the building, and alerts the apartment complex’s maintenance staff. While all this is happening — while my apartment building is on fire — I am approximately forty-five minutes into my movie and enjoying it greatly.

Note that prior to starting the DVD I closed all my windows and blinds, barring away the outside world in a sad attempt to replicate the theater experience, but unwittingly also barring away a possible early warning that my living quarters were minutes away from going up in smoke and flame.

Five minutes later, the fire trucks arrive. The sirens mesh perfectly with the gritty NYC streets, and I am none the wiser. Approximately about the time the fire engine is extending a crane and hose to extinguish my flaming apartment building, the film’s Frankie Bono is moving in on his assassin target.

Another five minutes. Within my own little world, immersed in that personal screening, Frankie silently picks a fire axe from a grimy apartment wall with two gloved hands and steps quietly through a room’s open door, approaching an arms dealer, intent to murder. Outside of that bubble, roughly fifteen yards away from my sorry screening room, men and women in heavy fire-repellant suits are also wielding fire axes, not with intent to murder but to save the property and, possibly, lives of dozens of tenants.

The night ended well, as well as it could go: the heater closet’s outburst did not succeed at moving beyond its enclosure, besides a bit of the vinyl siding. The tenants in my half of the building were allowed to return to our domiciles after an hour, and the other half returned to their abodes the following evening, save the one tenant whose unit had housed the offending air conditioner.

As for Frankie Bono, his story wasn’t concluded until Monday evening.

(An additional note: only until after our building was evacuated did the hallway fire alarm, a harsh and deafening rattle that could wake the dead, go off. I guess the fact that the other half of the building could’ve potentially burnt to the ground was not cause enough to start the alarm.)

Tuesday evening was a game night, the ying to movie night’s yang, and now Wednesday evening brings another film: tonight I’ll be watching The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Considering the events of this past Sunday, while I don’t expect any far-future time-travelling adventures to appear at my door, I might leave a window cracked open just in case another air-con has had enough with this mortal heating coil.

Blast of Silence, a film by Allen Baron: Criterion summary and trailer.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, a film by Mamoru Hosoda: Wikipedia article, trailer at YouTube.

Just a week or so ago I finally, finally completed Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, a hulking, extravagant fifteen-hour television series. The short review: Brilliant, immersive, and bewildering. As for the long review (read: spiel), read on.

The first film adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz came into my home on June 6th, 2008. It was the 1931 version of Alfred Döblin’s classic modernist novel; the older film was included in its entirely as part of a Criterion release for Fassbinder’s 1980-released Berlin Alexanderplatz. Since the Fassbinder version was 14 episodes, clocking in at a total fifteen-and-a-half hours long, I decided to gradually wade into the concept by watching the much shorter 1931 adapation. The ‘31 adaptation was pretty good, more than enough to continue my interest.

About a month later, in late July or early August sometime, I picked up the full Berlin Alexander DVD set during a timely sale at Borders 01 just down the road. Shortly after the purchase I watched several of episodes and enjoyed myself but abandoned the series shortly after. Mid-summer was apparently not the time for Fassbinder’s swan song.

Skip ahead to mid-March, 2009: After several months of Netflix rentals and another grueling busy season at work, a witness would’ve found me in front of the television at 10 PM on a work night, watching the credit cards on the final episode flick in and out as a scene from episode twelve replayed itself in the background.

So what did I think of this monstrous, epic, immersive series of a rehabilitating German man in the mid 1920’s? A couple of things.

After watching director and writer Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun and now Berlin Alexanderplatz, I can say that I’m a fan of his work. While only two pictures out of a catalogue of 35 films (made in a fifteen year period!) is a very slim cross-section, his framing, straddling of a narrative between neo-realism and cynical fiction, and eccentric, fearless, brilliant writing and actors has thoroughly been compelling and enthralling. Watching a Fassbinder production can also be a little devastating: Fassbinder’s worldview is cold and excruciatingly cynical, but his presentation is unique and inarguably high art. Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths has a similar frigid feel, but the two films are as different as the auteurs’ nationalities.

Which brings me to personal reflection two about Berlin Alexanderplatz, one that will likely stick in my craw for months: The series is clearly making a finer and more important point than the general scene-to-scene play, but I’ll be damned if I know what that importance and significance is.

Uh oh.

The signs of the undertow are obvious enough in the series — frequent repetitions of dialogue and shots in varied scenarios, largely — as is the hand and tools of a master filmmaker. But while I enjoyed the series for its terrific narrative and technical achievements, I unmistakably feel like an itch still needs to be scratched, that I could’ve brought more out of the experience that just a good time.

But I didn’t. There are a few possibilities for this lacking.

First, and most unlikely: Maybe the film isn’t really trying to say anything beneath the surface level and is truly just a connective sequence of excellent story and characters. I find this unlikely because the film is so carefully and obviously composed — a film with less to say wouldn’t have spent so nearly long with the camera pushed into the details and long scenes that Fassbinder’s epic investigates.

Second, maybe my appreciation and understanding was disrupted by splitting the sequential watching of the episodes in half by a months-long gap. Did the first half of the series provide necessary themes and ideas that glued together the more subtle and aloof second half of the series? I doubt it — the narrative and plot progression per episode was fairly consistent, as far as I remember.

Or third, and finally, maybe Berlin Alexanderplatz is just plain over my head.

Should I have watched another film or read a book on mid-20’s Germany to bring the bigger picture into focus and context? Kurosawa films, or any film made in a particular period, are like that. Take the scene at the beginning of Ikiru, for example, where the harried mothers are escorted to the desks of government public service after public service, passed along from one desk to another until they end up at the original desk. This opening sequence is very fun even without questioning its composition for motives, but the sequence becomes a lot more poignant when the film’s audio commentary (supplied by Criterion, of course) notes that the dim efficacy and efficiency the United State’s post-World War II occupation and influence was on the mind of Kurosawa during Ikiru’s conception. Ah ha — experience comes into play. Fassbinder has undoubtably used the same personal experiences for his own films.

But Criterion’s Berlin Alexanderplatz offers no commentary or minor crutch to help me along to the keener insight, besides a nicely-bound book that includes several essays (which I’ll undoubtably read soon).

No, this one I’ll have to dig and parse through myself, and that will take repeated viewings, repeated viewings of a very long series. At the rate I watch movies — very slowly — I could easily read the original book a few times — reading also takes me a while — and possibly learn the necessary German for an untranslated edition.

In the end, the journey of watching Berlin Alexanderplatz was worthwhile in full, love and confusion and all. I do not feel my time following the series was wasted: I was able to derive a meaning from Fassbinder’s opus, even if I feel Fassbinder’s ultimate thesis remains locked behind the series’ unrelenting fifteen hours of film.

To anyone interested in the series, I’d recommend skipping the original 1931 film adaptation and launching right into the first two-hour episode of the Fassbinder production, which is both more interesting and beautifully done than the entirety of the 1931 version.

Of course, anyone watching the full series might end up like me, scratching his head and earnestly delving for more clues about the deeper meaning (if one exists). But if I can convince someone else to watch Berlin Alexanderplatz, that means I’ll have someone else to discuss with, possibly someone who could draw back the curtain on the series’ bizarre and cynical brilliance.

The Spirit of the Beehive, written and directed by Víctor Erice: very slow, and very much enjoyed.

How long does a film’s awfulness have to persist before offending the audience past the point of contempt and to the moment of abandon? For Roger Ebert, according to his latest online journal entry [note: Ebert's since added a second journal entry -- see the addendum after this entry's conclusion], the limit is eight minutes, or 92% of the total duration. (Ebert’s critque of Tru Loved, the eight-minuter, says all about his reasons for skipping the remainder of the film.) Or, if Ebert is reviewing Caligua, the threshold is crossed after two hours, or roughly 57% of the total film.

Clearly Ebert’s tolerance for low quality has clearly taken a severe plunge in recent years — well, when n = 2, at least.

Coincidentally, I was recently asked a similar question after modestly mentioning that my Netflix queue has grown over 340 movies. The question was: When I’m watching a movie at home, if and when do I decide that a film’s just not worth my time? When the film’s been sealed back in the dandy red Netflix envelope, was it after I watched the whole thing? Where’s the breaking point?

Heck, if Roger Ebert can’t settle on a definite demarcation, neither can I. But I don’t think either of us would bother.

When to exit the theater, either figuratively or literally, isn’t a static measure that crosses between all films — each show is judged accordingly, implicitly and unofficially, even on the basis that each film is, indeed, an entirely different experience. The medium is a constant, but bailing out on the Friday Night Film is a judgment of content, not the format.

Reading the comments and reactions to Ebert’s journal post reveals a fairly consistent opinion: one, that Ebert was right to walk out when he did, and two, walking out of films is rare but an acceptable reaction¹, and three, no rule or sudden instance exists that can extrapolate the quality of an entire film from a segment of the whole show.

I like the idea of drawing a distinct line in the sand, but in my limited experience, establishing such a border is basically impossible, or at least very improbable. My favorite suggestion in the comments for an arbitrary time limit was 11 minutes, the time needed to run through a standard 35mm 24fps film reel. That standard, especially now that cellulose film is on the way out, has a kind of romance to it. But like a lot of romance, that’s basically folly: 11 minutes in a Hitchcock isn’t the same as the first 11 minutes of a Fassbinder, or a Kurosawa, Spielberg, Chan-Wook, or Un chien andelou.

Or forget entirely about just 11 minutes: the entire first act might be a snoozer, uninteresting, contrived, disgusting, revolting, or limp, but unforeseen qualities could blossom in the second or third acts. Or the actors might perform throughout like high-school stage drama bombs, but the narrative, or the set design, or the editing, framing and composition, or many other captivating aspects of moving pictures could tilt the production’s quality towards good and worthwhile, even to excellence. Or the denoument could justify a boggling climax that occurred just minutes before the end. And so on.

Of course, the film could start badly, continue badly, and end badly. Or a movie could rocket out of the gate and perform a rousing start, but having squandered the cutting room’s treasure all in one sequence torture the audience with inanity and boredom for its remaining duration.

Such extremes are unusual, but I’ve definitely seen films that start well and end poorly, and vice versa. But even if a film fails in some major respect, most of my picks from the last few years have had enough or plenty of redeeming qualities, usually far more good than bad and easily enough to justify the time spent. Once in a while I find a film that is so good — or bad — that it alters the personal bar for all past and future films, and the only way to find those gems (or bombs) is to watch a lot of movies.

Looking back in my Netflix queue, only a few rejects are sprinkled throughout a hundred or so rentals (and counting!). I pushed eject on Peter Jackson’s King Kong after an hour. Fellini’s famous Amarcord was too aloof for my tastes, and it received the fast-forward treatment after 45 minutes. And then there’s Six-String Samurai, which I began fast-forwarding after an excruciating ten minutes, just to see if the rest of the movie was as bad (it was).

Director and writer M. Night Shyamalan’s filmography is an odd, varied bunch when it comes to lasting power. The Sixth Sense was a great film; Signs was good, but not great; and The Village was terrible. That’s a rough gradient from excellence to awfulness, and unfortunately for him and his audience, the trend has apparently continued downward in recent years. Having skipped through most of The Village, my last-viewed Shyamalan, the plan now before considering another one of his films is consult Wikipedia on the plot and see if the whole shebang floats. I did exactly that when The Happening came out last summer and saved nine bucks for a ticket.

How about films that began poorly and slowly but ratcheted up as they progressed? Das Boot immediately comes to mind: the first act, which ran about an hour and a half, felt like a slow (but compelling) three hours; the second act of another hour and a half felt like ten minutes. I distinctly remembering watching Das Boot during that second act, turning to look at the clock, and wondering, Geez, where the heck did that hour go?

Another example: Two weeks ago I watched my first Yasujiro Ozu film, Late Spring; what I thought to be a very slow fifteen minutes of family drama was in actuality more than an hour, confirmed only after I took a second opinion from the clock on the wall. Garrisoned by the film’s appeal, I completed Late Spring and very much enjoyed it.

Yet another group, one that is expanding all the time, is the classification of films that offer some familiarity, whether due to genre, director, editor or some other aspect. If the film is a Shyamalan, extreme incredulity would be enforced; if the film is a Kurosawa, I would devote the entire evening to it; and if the movie turned out to be a Six-String Samurai sequel, I’d probably burn it. But even Kurosawa films have low points, and Six-String Samurai did star a guitar-playing samurai (or would that be a ronin? Doesn’t have the same ring), which even I’d admit is pretty swank.

When it comes to finding the odds and evens, the intrepid film-lover just has to exercise a smidge of caution, a touch of discretion, watch a ton of movies, and keep the remote (or aisle) within arm’s reach.

The ethereal border that bridges the lands between “play” and “skip” isn’t a consistent standard by any means, but it obviously exists for Ebert, the commenters at his journal, and myself strictly on a per-film basis. Besides, the movie walk-out should be exercised as a rare and extreme measure: film-goers should want to like these movies and, given the movie’s goodwill, accordingly give the production the greatest benefit of the doubt. Nonetheless, the line of abandon exists, but the individual never notices he’s crossed the threshold until he’s over it — and then the departure time has arrived.

But if a thug punched a gun against the side of my head and demanded that the line be clearly drawn, I’d have to go with the 11-minute mark. At the very least, 11 minutes is nearly 37.5% longer than Ebert watched Tru Loved.

Just one scene from some of the more deliberate and best 97 minutes of my movie-watching career.

Addendum: While editing the above entry, Ebert has responded to his original Tru Loved review and consequent blog entry by extending the original review to cover the remainder of the movie and a second entry that’s a post-mortem and apology of sorts.

Harold rex interfectus est. Translation: Harold is pwned.

The Battle of Hastings took place on roughly this calendar day 942 years ago, and like all past Hastings days I celebrate another passing anniversary for my favorite historical battle by largely forgetting to recognize it. Many years ago, while I was still in college and when my interest in the battle was newly-kindled and burning brightly, I had plans to make an entire web site dedicated to the history and timeline of the battle. Today, I feel fully inclined to leave the details to Wikipedia.

Oh, I’ve made a couple sorry attempts at the supposed yearly “celebration,” although it’s more like an annual sheepish apology. The yearly entry on October 14th is also an implicitly desperate attempt to keep a grip on the one day in interesting history (unlike, say, what I had for lunch yesterday) that I could muster up enough collections of neuron-firings to prattle on about for more than a few minutes. Actually, when it comes to me reciting history, a conversation provided by me about any other topic besides the Battle of Hastings would last only seconds. I’m abysmally terrible at retaining historical facts.

2007 was the most successful attempt at acknowledging the battle: I actually posted some original material that year, a short summary that laid out the basic timeline of that October 14th. Of course, “successful” in this case means that I basically just showed up to the fight. If this wasn’t about a blog post and was instead about, say, fighting a crazed honey badger, a successful attempt would mean emerging from the fight with all or most of my appendages attached.

(My summary was actually bits diluted from an English 201 paper that was rejected by the professor for being too long. Fortunately I was permitted to rewrite the paper, and the original thirteen pages of 9pt-sized Times New Roman was abbreviated down to nine pages of 10pt text. For the record, and completely unrelated to the Hastings paper, that class was where I began to take writing seriously. Ah, what folly — I rid myself of that hard-nosed nonsense long ago.)

Fat lot my efforts in 2007 did — Wikipedia existed then as well, and I even linked to multiple articles after my geeky summary. I could have crunched the whole mess into just a few hyperlinks and spent the spare time musing over a beer. Why regurgitate the history myself when I can, via one link, pass the buck over to a massive regurgitating, self-correcting, self-vandalizing machine that’s working (roughly) towards the same result as I am? Not to say, of course, that I could out-regurgitate Wikipedia.

Besides, the history geeks at Wikipedia and I are getting our information from the same sources anyway.

More humorous is the 2007 post’s title: “Make Haste…for 2008.” Ah, well. At least the post titles year to year practically write themselves.

How about the year before that, 2006? Not-so-glorious deux-double-ought-six, in sharp relief to 2007, brought…well, nothing. I distinctly remember forgetting — that’s right, not the actual doing of something, but actually forgetting to do it — to signify the date that year. Not a bit of confetti, not a slice of Hastings-cake — nothing. Sad, really.

2005? My memory doesn’t go back that far, but my blog’s archives do! Or rather, the archives would have remembered something if I had posted on the 14th of October. But as for that October otherwise, I’m somewhat agog that a time in my life existed when I could churn out an entry 18 different times in a single month. (The total post count for 2008: 29 posts. I can only hope that my moving force since the golden year of 2005 shifted from quantity to quality, but I’ll avoid investigating that hypothesis and deter the inevitable disappointment.)

Now that I’m having a good time fast-roping down into my blog’s archives, let’s take a look back at the gobsmackingly-prolific month of October 2004, when I managed to crank out an astonishing amount of blogging — 23 posts! — in just 31 short days.

And hey, I did post something on the 14th — but the topic was politics. Even another no-show would’ve been much less depressing.

The archives don’t descend any further into the history of this blog past February 2004. The audience is spared further abuse. 2009, I’m sure, will bring another cry-and-moan session, along with yet another retrospective into to the sorry history of the world’s worst history fanboy.