My kingdom for three devices

I wrote yesterday about how I had luxuriously switched between three different devices during the course of viewing one movie, each of which satisfactorily delivered me Dolemite Is My Name, picking up where the other left off in a perfect handoff of responsibility.

That luxury was punished the next day by a viewing experience that was as arduous as that one was easy.

I don’t know if it was the one device that could play this movie, or could play it without additional downloading and setup, that was at fault, or my lame internet, or unspecified gremlins at an unspecified part of the process, but I nearly had to give up on watching Zhang Yimou’s Shadow. Which would have been a permanent abandonment as the rental period was about to expire.

It wasn’t the movie I had intended to watch last night in the first place. I was going to go out to the theater to see Ford v. Ferrari, a movie a friend of mine told me I shouldn’t just brush off as a bland late-year prestige picture. But while on iTunes I noticed that my rental of Shadow was going to expire in 22 hours. And though I paid only 99 cents for it, I don’t like to let a purchase of any price go to waste, if I can help it. Besides, Zhang is a splendid visual stylist who has made some movies over the years that I really cherish, most notably Hero.

The first problem came before I even knew there would be a delivery issue, and turned out not to be a “problem” at all, but it set things off on the wrong foot. As I said in the previous paragraph, Zhang is known for his visual flourishes and particularly his use of color, so when the movie started with a bunch of shades of gray and only a few pallid hints of red and green, I thought I had a display issue. See, the video card on my PC is going, but only on particular apps. Sometimes when I play videos from my own camera in the video app, they display only certain colors, and I’ve also seen that happen when watching movies on Kanopy (though not on Netflix, even using the same browser – must have to do with how the site chooses the local video app). Hints of red and green and yellow are what typically come through when this occurs. There was no point in even watching a Zhang movie if the color was going to be washed out.

Except the washed out color was part of the film’s color palette, I finally discovered by googling. I’m not sure if I agree with that decision, but once I knew it was intentional, at least I knew I wasn’t watching a compromised version of his vision.

Oh no, the compromise was coming elsewhere.

Simply put, this movie would not play for more than three minutes at a time without dropping out. And I don’t mean pausing for 30 seconds, then catching up. I mean dropping out entirely, so I had to exit the video and enter it again. At which point it would start up again sometimes within ten seconds, sometimes in a minute or two, and sometimes not at all, meaning I had to exit out of it and go back in a second (or third) time.

There were reboots of the iTunes. There were reboots of the computer. There was running the movie off the better internet on my phone, even if it was dragging down my monthly data allotment, and then switching back to the normal internet when I decided it was not making a big enough difference.

These shenanigans occupied me from around 9 p.m. to nearly 1 a.m. when I finally finished the 115-minute movie.

Now, I’ve said my computer is old, and my version of iTunes is also old, and my internet also sucks, so I’m sure all of these things were contributing. But the problem surely would not have been nearly as profound if I had been able to download the movie in the first place. You’re not supposed to have to do that with iTunes movies anymore – you can just stream them. But I did do that with some movies on iTunes on my recent trip, not knowing if I would watch them at a time when I had a live internet connection. They played great, so I know it’s not my computer or iTunes alone that was at fault. But from the time I discovered I had only 22 hours remaining on the rental, most of which would be spend sleeping and at work, it was already too late to download the movie. Movies take a good three to five hours to download with my lame internet, so if you’re going to do that, it has to be premeditated.

That said, the internet alone was not at fault. The phenomenon occurred almost equally when I was connected through WiFi and when I was using my phone as a hotspot. Plus, Netflix and other streaming services work fine when I regularly use them on the computer – including with the previous day’s viewing of Dolemite.

So what the hell was happening?

I don’t know. But the end result was that I didn’t get to watch it on the big screen of my TV through an HDMI cable, as I usually do with iTunes rentals, because there was just too much constant maintenance of the viewing for me to be getting up and down all that time. (I was on a beanbag on the floor, my preferred viewing spot, which is a step more difficult than the couch in terms of the effort required to get up.) So I watched this supposedly sumptuous visual experience on my laptop screen, sometimes waiting long enough to see if the movie would unpause on its own that I actually fell asleep, to be jerked awake by the sound of the resumption, or more likely, to sleep for ten minutes before realizing it still hadn’t resumed. Oh, and then there was the one time when the movie lost its place and started again from the beginning, so I had to sift through and remember where I was.

What’s a boy to do?

Upgrades to my laptop, to iTunes and to the internet would all be helpful. The superior NBN – Nationwide Broadband Network – is coming to my neighborhood in just a couple months, and in fact, the infrastructure work is going on right outside my house. And my laptop is just six months from the age my last laptop was when I had to replace it.

But I’m starting to wonder if the real ticket would be Apple TV, something I had a little exposure to while were staying at Air BnB’s in the US on our last family trip. Presumably the integration of several of these elements into one application would at least allow them to talk to each other and limit the chance of rogue defections. Then you’ve got the convenience of taking the HDMI cable out of the equation. That said, I’m not sure if it would be as easy to stay connected to my U.S. iTunes account, which I absolutely rely on, especially at the end of the year to catch movies that have been released in the U.S. but maybe not in Australia yet.

So how did my impression of Shadow suffer from all this?

I’m giving it a 3.5/5, but maybe it could have been higher. There seem to have been some imperfect storytelling decisions near the beginning that left me somewhat adrift in the plot, but it’s impossible to tell at this point whether I would have been oriented better had I not been suffering through a constant string of disruptions. I think one of the problems is that there’s a character in the film who’s supposed to be a doppelganger for another character – a “shadow,” in the parlance of the title – but I really didn’t think they looked very similar, so I wasn’t sure if I understood their relationship correctly.

Visually, though, there’s some great stuff here, even in monochrome (the use of which is another nod to the title, I think). Zhang makes regular use of this weapon that’s basically an umbrella made of detachable swords, which can be “flung” at an opponent. (Not sure the logistics of when to fling them and when to keep them in their normal umbrella configuration, though maybe there’s some kind of trigger in the handle.) Not only were these excellent additions to the wuxia fights of a typical Zhang movie, but they were also used in a cool invasion scene in which the invaders protect themselves from archers by kind of cocooning themselves inside the umbrella and sliding through the city streets. It makes more sense visually than me describing it here.

Seeing it on the big screen would have probably been the best, but considering that I’d never even heard of it until it popped up as the 99 cent rental on iTunes, that was probably never going to happen.