The Last Candle

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.

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.

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.

Until about two hours ago, this entry’s title was going to be “The Fall of the Michigan Theater.” While that old title was fair hyperbole, this entry’s title is not. Clearly something has changed for the better. Let me happily explain.

The Michigan Theater is one of few favorite Ann Arbor institutions (others: the downtown library, the Arbor Brewing Company), but at the end of May the theater’s programming took two missteps that for my own potential entertainment appeared to be disastrous stumbles.

The first misstep was to begin showing Pixar’s beautiful new film Up in ugly “Disney 3D,” four times a day. Future “3D” movies are sure to follow.

The theater just received a new 4K projector for the 3D films, thanks to local donations. While I haven’t seen the film yet, or any Disney 3D film for that matter, I wonder why they don’t use the new hardware to show digital film without the perceptively less clean and bright colors produced by the 3D projection and added the irritation wearing cheap polarizers. Perhaps the answer is because 3D is modern, “cool” and cutting-edge, even though the technology provides inferior clarity and more distractions and despite this technology. The new projector will hopefully be a boon to the theater’s coffers, but it’s a strange, possibly damaging move for the art-house theater.

Stumble number two was more like diving off face-first into a ravine, plunging down into a garden of spiked rocks: the severe reduction of the Summer Classic Film Series. I’ve looked forward to each series every year, pledging to see the full run of shows, although I’ve never found the time — or inclination, more honestly — to catch every week’s screening. Still, I’ve only missed two or three shows out of the batch of more than a dozen since I began keeping track in 2007; sometimes I would catch both the Sunday and Tuesday screenings, if the film is really something special, as I did when I caught both shows of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin with an essential live organ accompaniment. The Series has become a regular, three-month-long escape and is the closest thing I have to a summer vacation.

So imagine my disappointment when the theater’s web site and snail-mail delivered schedule advertised only three shows for the Summer Classic Film Series. The site schedule appeared first, and I thought it was a mistake; but when the paper schedule arrived, it was the second source — two vectors pointing towards the same conclusion. This was a catastrophe. Summer was going to end after a single month of shows.

But today, with the week’s email newsletter of shows, came salvation.

Rumors and speculation of the demise of the Summer Classic Film Series’ past glory were greatly exaggerated and misinformed, because a schedule of the full, fifteen-film series has gone live on the theater’s site, and it is a hell of a run. The three films advertised prematurely — The Seven Year Itch, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — are still in the lineup as the first three films, but after those classics (and terrific films they are), the series goes to eleven.

Bullitt. The annual Marx Brothers show, The Cocoanuts. Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which is the first classic French New Wave the theater has shown since at least 2006. The Searchers, the annual western. The Godfather, for crying out loud, which isn’t even the biggest film of the lot: Citizen Kane is. Holy wow. But wait — there’s more!

Needless to say, after viewing that schedule the irritation of Up and Disney 3D rolled off and out of my consciousness like water off a duck’s back. You kids can take your cheap polarized glasses: I’ll take my summer classics.

Most of the live concerts I catch require at minimum 40-minute trip into Detroit. The destination (and there are a few, all similar) is a dimly lit concrete and brick venue, enveloped in smoke, cheap beer on tap and staffed and stuffed by metalheads wearing clothes several shades darker than my own (most of my shirts are blue, not black). The evening is spent staring up at a band as another high-tempo, high-volume anthem blasts the audience backwards from the dual 10-feet amp stacks. Good times, really.

Want to see a metal show in the Detroit? Boy, you’ll get all that I described above, and possibly more — visit Harpo’s, for example, and you can order a hot dog at the Coney Island next door, speaking your order through a thin vent embedded in the bullet-resistant plastic that separates the customers from the cooks. (See also the web site for Harpo’s, which actually is an indicative measure of the venue: stupidly straight-forward, ugly, and black.) But while I gladly go through the grungy movements necessary to see my favorite rock and prog bands, after last night’s Chick Corea and John McLaughlin jazz show at the lovely Hill Auditorium — smokeless, seated, and fashions in a variety of hues and shades — I wonder why I just don’t buy a good pair of closed-ear headphones and get my high-volume rock-and-roll intake that way, leaving more money and time for the jazz and blues.

Corea, McLaughlin and McBride jam in the Five Peace Band. Photo by PiroTek.

Besides a change of genre, an uptick in occurrences would also be welcome. The number of live concerts I see per year is fairly low, once every two months or so. A small blip appeared in May 2007, when I visited three different venues within 31 days for three great Porcupine Tree shows, but since then the frequency has been relatively linear — and the magnitude low.

This year has been better for live concerts, so far: The magnificent Kodo drummers cranked out an amazing set as I watched from the upper-far balcony on February 13th, and then last night was the Corea/McLaughlin show. And then this Wednesday, eccentric and vibrant singer-songwriter Andrew Bird will be jamming and whistling along at the Michigan Theater, and I’ll be there to see him. That’s two great shows in the space of a few days — if only the regular concert schedule around Ann Arbor was that great more often.

And there’s the thing: the schedule in this massively-cultural university city is probably quite good, but I haven’t pay enough attention to know, and according to an exchange last Friday I haven’t even been to the good venues in town. During that Friday conversation, a co-worker who spends significantly more time and effort investing herself in the pursuit of jazz, and who essentially opened me to the genre through artists like Béla Fleck, took me aback when she stated that the Hill Auditorium was not very good. I thought everybody liked the Hill’s acoustics. I do. But my co-worker prefers Rackham Auditorium, which is just around the corner from the Hill and is a smaller, more intimate venue, and the Power Center, also nearby on the campus.

After my colleague stated her preferences, the obvious and initial reaction was, How can you not like the Hill’s sound? Everybody likes the Hill!

But then I realized I’ve never been to either Rackham or the Power Center. What if those other joints do sound better than the lovely Hill? I’ve been missing out, no doubt about that. I haven’t even bothered to take the first step.

But Corea and McLaughlin played the Hill this last Saturday night, good sound or mediocre sound. Despite our differences about the Hill’s acoustic, the show itself was fantastic — over three hours of mind-blowin’ mastery, improv and contemporary jazz atmosphere was enjoyed by a near-full house. My friend and I had better seats for this concert than I had for the Kodo show, this time being on the lower mezzanine, house-left. We had a good view of the stage and the full Five Peace Band, watching rapt for the duration of the show while the fleet-fingered Corea and his perfect-poised cohort McLaughlin teamed up with alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, virtuoso bassist Christian McBride (who played both electric and upright bass, the latter both fingerpicked and bowed), and the eight-armed Brian Blade on drums (”Sharp as a knife,” as McLaughlin introduced him in a classically cool demeanor that made the obvious simile more than welcome). The crew played a serious but lofty set, the highlight being the second half of the show, which featured a 30+ minute arrangement by Chick Corea (Hymn to Andromeda) that ran a gamut of colors and feelings. Absolutely brilliant, all of it.

But I’ll be damned if the show acoustics didn’t sound all that great.

The first part of the set was almost muddy, a descriptor of the Hill I wouldn’t have imagined using prior to Saturday’s show. The instruments were not homogenized early on; Chick Corea was most sensitive to the difference in instrument volumes, turning around on his piano bench to look at the sound booth, pointing and motioning to the floor, silently exclaiming to turn it down. When his order wasn’t carried out to his satisfaction, Chick stood up from his bench, walked over and visited the sound booth in person, undoubtably delivering a few exact words. Turn it down.

The sound was better after that.

But now that the Hill has suffered a minor (and easily reparable) blow to its otherwise stellar reputation, and now that I’ve walked into a minor streak of local and excellent concerts, I’m wondering else is playing in this fabulous city and whether I can keep the pace.

To do so, I’d need to delve more deeply into the local circuit. The University Musical Society’s Winter 2009 season is coming to a close, but the Michigan Theater will continue to host shows throughout the summer. And then there’s the various live clubs — Goodnite Gracie’s, or the Firefly Club, the latter especially looking like an excellent outlet for regular jazz and blues. My co-worker also mentioned that one of her friends hosts live jazz performances with internationally-known musicians in his own house, which would be a completely new and crazy experience altogether.

Or I could just walk down to the Blind Pig, Ann Arbor’s closet thing to a club dive for rock and roll. After all, why visit a city 40 minutes away for smoke and chains when I could walk down the street, take a left turn and a few steps to get the same experience?