A change of projector locale

I didn't originally think I would "take advantage" of my wife being out of town in any way, except maybe leaving some dishes unwashed for longer than I ordinarily would, or never making the bed.

Then I realized that our bedroom would make a perfect location for the new portable projector screen she got me for my birthday, and that shelf that runs along the length of our bed, above the pillows but under the windows, would be the perfect height to hold the projector.

And so it is that I set up the screen in front of our bureau, which she accesses more than I do, and that's where it's been since Friday evening, with a few more days expected since she's had to extend her trip. 

This is a picture from the first film I watched, After the Hunt, which I didn't particularly care for. I've subsequently watched Until Dawn, Yi Yi, First Blood, Rolling Thunder and Freakier Friday. Quite the mix of films there. 

It's fun, and unusual, for me to watch movies from bed. I usually take the living room, and my wife winds down her night in bed with her device, on nights we aren't watching something together. 

However, I have to admit it is not as comfortable as I might have thought. I need one of those pillows with the arms that used to be all over the place when I was growing up, so instead I'm kind of slumped over, scrunching up as many normal pillows as I can to try to recreate the same effect. Suffice it to say, I won't miss it when I have to take it down when my wife gets back on Wednesday, but it's been a fun novelty. Change is as good as a holiday, or so they say. 

Not a lot more to say today, just wanted to let you know I'm still here, and already feeling a bit snowed under -- though not in Australia, where today is the first day of summer -- by end-of-year obligations at work and with Christmas coming up.

The first 10 minutes of Raising Arizona on my new projector screen

It was my birthday yesterday, and given the fact that we've just returned from a long (and expensive) European sojourn, it's not surprising it was a pretty unremarkable birthday.

In fact, as if to underscore how intentionally mid I expected it to be, I actually made a dentist appointment for yesterday morning. While we were in Europe, I lost a filling the dentist had given me previous December, designed to prevent so much food from getting lodged in the space where a tooth had broken away. When that filling broke out, it returned me to where I'd been the year before, going through several toothpicks a day. I finally got around to making the appointment on Friday, and I hadn't realized that "Monday" was also my birthday until she repeated the date back to me. I had the opportunity to set the appointment for a different day, but I just shrugged and kept it.

Oh and let's not forget where I was on my last two birthdays. Two years ago, I was in Sydney on a surprise trip to celebrate my 50th. And last year I was in Singapore. So, a low-level birthday was several years in the making. 

But one remarkable thing did happen yesterday: I'm back in the projector game in our garage.

Yes that's right, my wife got me a new projector screen that can be assembled on collapsible poles, meaning not only can it provide a viewing surface in our garage, it can be taken on trips and the like if need be. (Road trips, I'm thinking. It wouldn't make sense to take my projector on the plane.)

Our garage has been through various incarnations of various junk pushed up against various walls, and it hasn't felt like the right space to watch anything for some time now. The wall that used to be clear for projecting -- clear, other than the grooves between the white-painted cinder blocks, which you stop noticing after about a minute -- but in the last year it has had other responsibilities. You can clear out a spot, but it's work, and then you have to find a spot for the stuff you've cleared out. The last time we used the projector in the garage, just about exactly six months ago, we oriented things entirely differently and hung a sheet from the ceiling, with the couch in the middle of the room instead of against the wall. That was meant just for that one weekend and was not sustainable. 

But with my birthday present, I may have entered into a new era of projecting frequency and versatility. 

Since the screen can go anywhere in the garage, that means I can set up anywhere, and even if it temporarily scrambles the direction of the furniture, it isn't such a difficult thing to put it back. It's not an insurmountable problem even on a random evening when I decide I want to watch a movie this way.

The more difficult problem is, I would say, the positioning of the projector. In order to get it the ideal distance from the screen, so the image is small enough to fit within the screen's parameters, you have to place it obtrusively in the middle of where everyone would like to sit. I'm pretty sure there's a solution for this, and now I just need to make it my business to find out what it is.

Anyway, the kids were -- or at least one kid was -- excited about it, as was the giver of the gift, as was the receiver of the gift, so we went to work assembling it quickly so we could all watch something brief together, and I could watch a proper movie myself, at least to give my birthday a bit better of a send-off. (Why it needed that better send-off: My older son's basketball team also lost their game by one point, blowing their lead with less than a minute remaining, and he didn't play well. Because of the need to get to that game on time, and because of the slow service at the Mexican restaurant, we had to rush out of my birthday dinner before our food could be delivered, and take it in takeaway containers. My son didn't end up eating his until after the game. Yep, it was one challenge after another.)

At first my wife was concerned about what she called the "Made in China" aspects of the projector screen. She had no problem acknowledging that this was not the most expensive one she could have bought, and I wouldn't have had it any other way, given the money we've already spent in the past two months. And it looked like there'd be some challenges reaching both poles with the velcro loops, without which we couldn't pull it taut.

But after we lay it on the ground and took a second run at setting everything up properly, it did come together quite nicely, and then I went to work positioning the projector for optimal viewing. 

And finally that meant getting to watch the first ten minutes of my favorite movie of all time, Raising Arizona.

You may recall from this post and this post that I have been watching Raising Arizona at approximately four-year intervals, accidentally for a while and then sort of purposefully the last time. My most recent viewing was only the start of last year, so that means it wouldn't have been due up again until early 2028. But it seems likely that timeline will be accelerated.

It started with the fact that my 11-year-old drew H.I. McDunnough on my birthday card. Seriously! Don't believe me? Here he is:

Don't you just love it?

By the way, the inclusion of the Flash has to do with the fact that my son is watching the Flash TV show and finds it vastly superior to what he's seen of the movie, which is basically just the way the Flash runs, which they make fun of online. It's something about his arm movements of holding out two fingers and sweeping away from his face downward. Anyway, it became an inside joke for us in Europe.

When the new projector screen came out a few minutes after this card, Raising Arizona was fully on the brain, and I thought the 11-minute pre-credits prologue would make a perfect amuse bouche to a full-length viewing, which the 11-year-old has been saying recently he would like to do. He'd have liked to do it yesterday, in fact, but we were getting started around 9:30, so it just wasn't practical.

The reactions were generous by my wife, who of course has seen the movie multiple times and also appreciates it (though not like I do), and the 11-year-old. The 15-year-old sat in stony silence, but I wouldn't have expected anything different. She laughed several times and the 11-year-old laughed a couple times too, though that could have been merely because of his overdeveloped sense of empathy. He knew I hadn't been having an awesome birthday, and if a few courtesy laughs at my favorite movie would help improve that, he was more than willing to give them. Good egg.

I suppose the test will be to see how quickly he requests a complete viewing. That'll tell me whether he really liked what he saw or was just being polite.

So my next Raising Arizona viewing may not, indeed, come until 2028, when I'm ready for it again. Or it may come this weekend.

And if it comes this weekend, I know I'll have a pretty great new projector setup on which to watch it. 

As for the movie I did actually watch, it was Opus, which I told you earlier this month I didn't want to watch on the plane because I'd been saving it for a more optimal viewing environment. In fact, given that I also watched the last 30 minutes of the Netflix movie Steve earlier that afternoon, I almost called this post "A birthday of naming Bloom County characters." Yes, Opus and Steve Dallas are both in the comic strip Bloom County, which I read obsessively around the age my younger son is now. Here they are:

I haven't yet fully processed my feelings on Opus, and I think I need to go back to the Wikipedia plot synopsis to review a couple details. But let's just say I went from liking it a lot to not liking it nearly as much, to not being sure if I actually liked it. I'll give this one some more thought.

But watching a whole movie on my new projector screen reminded me of great times past and previewed great times ahead, so that was nice.

Hey, we movie people, we like our screens, the bigger the better. 

I can now watch iTunes rentals on my projector - sort of*

You may recall that I met a weird outcome when I tried to watch an iTunes rental on my projector last year -- I wrote about it in this post.

Namely, there was something about the technology that kept movies played through iTunes from being visible when a projector was connected to that computer. Not all projectors, I think, just older ones -- or maybe cheaper ones. My projector was new at the end of 2020, but some projectors run in excess of $10,000 and mine was a mere fraction of that. It's much better than any projector I've owned previously, but apparently it does have its limitations.

Something has changed since September 2021, though, and now I can play them -- or maybe I misdiagnosed the problem in the first place. 

Now I can play them -- with an asterisk.

I made the discovery on Saturday night, when I had planned to use the projector in our garage to watch Kwaidan, the 1964 Japanese film by Masaki Kobayashi that presents four ghost stories over a three-hour running time. That's my draw in this month's Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. The projector was still set up from when my 12-year-old and I watched a Celtics game earlier that afternoon, and my wife was going out for dinner, so I knew I'd get an early enough start to fit in all three hours. (I ended up finishing at 2:45 a.m. after multiple long "naps," which ended up leading to significant narrative confusion -- I thought there were only three stories, so I was having a really difficult time figuring out how the second half of the third story related to its first half.)

I knew as a backup I could watch this on our normal TV through AppleTV. In fact, I expected that's what would happen, given my previous difficulties with iTunes rentals on this projector. Try as I might, I could not find Kwaidan streaming through another source, not even for rental on Amazon, which makes a good option in cases like this because it's under no such technical limitations with regard to my projector.

Since I'd be starting the 48-hour viewing window regardless, on one device or the other, it made for a unique opportunity to test the iTunes problem on my projector one more time. Lo and behold, this time the movie played -- though it was clear straight away there were still weird software issues going on. 

The biggest issue was that I could not go full screen. I'd play the movie and then try various maximize options, but it never got bigger than most of the screen, always leaving a blank space on the bottom, not to mention my taskbar. I just can't watch a movie with the taskbar visible at the bottom. Too distracting.

I also tried to move the window to fill the screen better, pulling out its corners to actually alter its dimensions, but here was where the weirdest thing happened. Any attempt to move or adjust the window led to duplicating it, so there was one window playing the movie behind the other window -- and not even at the same spot in the movie. There was like a five-second difference between the two. 

There was one point where I thought I had the window in only one iteration, and it filled most of the screen in a tolerable way. But then iTunes sensed something unstable about that situation and automatically contracted it back to the original dimensions that were its preferred means of presentation. 

The solution I finally landed on was to block out part of the projector.

That's right, I got a viewing scenario that iTunes was happy with that filled the entire top of the screen, leaving a big white patch at the bottom that was the default white background of the iTunes software. Then of course the taskbar was visible at the bottom because I could never do anything about that. So I found a carboard box in my garage that was just tall enough so that if I fussed with it, I got it to sit in front of the lens in such a way as to block out all the white and the taskbar at the bottom. 

This created a small part on the lower left side of the screen that was a bit blotchy and fuzzy, but it was a very minor inconvenience and I pressed on forward through the rest of the viewing this way.

The consequence of this arrangement, though, was that the cardboard box was reflecting the projector's light onto the back wall and off to the side where I was sitting. I couldn't do anything about the back wall, but it basically just meant that the room was not as fully dark as it usually was. I got used to it pretty quickly.

I wasn't going to get used to the part reflecting out of the side and directly into my eyes. So what I did was place a ping pong paddle so it was leaning against the edge of the box and the side of my projector, blocking out the most piercing of the light.

Not ideal, but it worked in a pinch.

Since I've got you, I thought I would share my review of Kwaidan in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, as I have been doing these past few months, especially since it also contains a short narrative of the confusion that resulted from not knowing the correct number of stories in the movie:

I had a funny experience watching [Redacted]'s #2, Kwaidan (1964), that stems entirely from getting it into my head that it was comprised of three horror stories over three hours rather than four. Yes, I'd actually asked Wade earlier in the month if I could watch the four stories over multiple nights, but sometime between then and now, my mind converted that to three. And then I found an occasion to watch the whole movie in one night, as is my preference.

I watched the first two stories, "The Black Hair" and "The Woman in the Snow," with great interest and affection. I loved the simplicity of the storytelling combined with a great visual design that blended real scenery with painted backdrops in a compelling way. The eye painted in the sky in "The Woman in the Snow" is chilling, and the titular black hair gave me a good indication of where later J-horror, such as The Grudge, was born. I was really digging this and it was really reminding me of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, which surely also took inspiration from Masaki Kobayashi's film.

But when "The Woman in the Snow" ended and the intermission came up, I got worried. How would "Hoichi the Earless," what I understood to be the final story, possibly run for the remaining more than 90 minutes? If you are going to combine a couple different stories like this, I vastly prefer they all be about the same length. Helps considerably with the pacing.

Of course at this point it was also getting late at night, meaning my head was not as clear and I was starting to have the occasional small head rolls. Suffice it to say that I missed the moment when "Hoichi the Earless" transitioned into "In a Cup of Tea," probably in part because I was a bit out of it but in part because I had no expectation that there was a fourth story coming. So then I really had a hard time figuring out how the second half of "Hoichi the Earless" related to the first half, especially since "In a Cup of Tea" also contains a story within a story, making things all the more confusing. I blamed it on bad storytelling and began mentally preparing a review talking about how much I liked the first two stories but that the third was interminable.

Of course, this morning when I looked on Wikipedia to try to get a sense of why the plot had taken such a weird turn in "Hoichi the Earless," I realized there were actually four stories. So I rewatched "In a Cup of Tea" and now I feel a lot better about the movie on the whole.

Without getting into the plots of the individual stories, I found each a mysterious delight in its own way. While I don't think any of the four stories really hit me solidly with its conclusion, I enjoyed the experience of watching immensely. Maybe it's a bit too Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Amazing Stories to expect each story to hit you with a big ironic twist at the end, and at least one of these stories does try to do that. I guess none of them stuck the landing in exactly the way I wanted them to, but it's a pretty minor complaint, and this was a really interesting watch -- and clearly a big influencer on future Japanese cinema. However, for me it pales in comparison to Kobayashi's Harakiri, which is my #139 (and was also found in this group -- thanks [Redacted]).

Here's how it entered my chart:

Kwaidan > Strike a Pose

Kwaidan > A Good Old Fashioned Orgy

Kwaidan < Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Kwaidan > Fantasia

Kwaidan > The Emperor's Club

Kwaidan < The Sea Beast

Kwaidan > Newlyweds

Kwaidan < Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Kwaidan < Topsy-Turvy

Kwaidan < Tomorrow Never Dies

Kwaidan < Gaslight

Kwaidan > The Terminator

891/6182 (86%)

Thanks [Redacted]! Despite some minor complaints and confusion, obviously I got a lot out of this.

The 11th hour change of my Father's Day movies

I watched four movies on Sunday, which was Australian Father's Day, but I had planned to watch a different four movies. 

Rather, I had planned to watch three different movies and a fourth that I did ultimately watch, but in a different format than I had planned to watch it.

I was all set to start with the 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which would seem like a totally random selection for this mini Father's Day marathon except that I'd finished reading the book just the day before. In fact, I had planned to write here about my expected Benedict Cumberbatch double feature, as I was also going to watch this year's The Courier. No, Cumberbatch is not in Mansfield Park, though at 23 years old in 1999 he would have been the appropriate age to play one of the Bertram children. Actually, what happened was that when I was reading Mansfield Park, I pictured Cumberbatch in my mind for the character of Edmund Bertram. (The character is actually played by Johnny Lee Miller.)

I was also going to do this month's edition of my blog series I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, that being Synecdoche, New York. 

The fourth movie was always going to be WarGames, and it still was -- actually the second movie, chronologically. This gets me into aforementioned format in which I had planned to watch it, which is really what I want to talk about today.

It turns out you can't watch iTunes movies through your projector. Not my projector, anyway.

I'm sure you are as surprised as I was. 

I kind of figured that as long as you had the projector hooked up to your computer, the projector would display whatever was on the computer screen. This is not the case. 

When I started Mansfield Park and could not see anything on screen, at first I attributed this to a very dim opening credits sequence. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon and the light was only imperfectly being blocked from getting in to our garage. Once the credits were over and the movie got into its unending succession of daytime scenes, I'd be fine. Or so I figured.

But I thought it was really curious that I could see absolutely nothing on screen, and when there was some daylight a minute later, the condition persisted.

Befuddled and more than a little bit annoyed, I googled it, and it appears that iTunes movies will not play on certain digital projectors. This flummoxed me. Certain older digital projectors, the article said. Mine is less than a year old but it is also not the most expensive version on the market (not by a long shot). Neither is it it the cheapest (not by a long shot). As hard as it was to believe that I had spent as much money on this projector as I had, in order for this to be one of its practical limitations, this was the only explanation that made any sense about why I couldn't see what I was expecting to see.

I can't even remember what the technical explanation for this was, and can't be bothered to google it again.

There was some lingering uncertainty about whether it might be just this one particular file having the issue, so just to be sure, I risked starting another. I say "risked" because once you start your rental, you are committing yourself to watching it within the next 48 hours if you don't want to let it expire. And since you paid for it, usually you don't. Through the Mansfield misstep, I'd already added a Monday night movie to my viewing schedule and I didn't want to add a second.

WarGames made the perfect sacrificial lamb.

My iTunes rental of WarGames represented what I believe is a personal first: Paying money to rent a movie that I already owned. Why would I do such a thing? Well I'll explain.

I had planned to have only my computer hooked up to the projector throughout the day, which also included five hours of baseball in the morning. Just seemed easier. I own WarGames on DVD, but it's an American DVD, meaning it requires a multi-regional DVD/BluRay player. Which we have, but it's the kind that's part of your home entertainment setup, not the kind that connects to a laptop. I do have such a USB DVD/BluRay player, but of course it is not region free. 

So even though we own WarGames, which I had already decided was my choice for a Father's Day family movie, I paid the $3.99 rental for the convenience of having it on iTunes. 

This of course also made it a good tester movie. Even if I started the 48-hour rental window, it didn't matter, because we own the movie anyway. 

Well, it didn't make a difference. The problem still existed.

Okay, time to call an audible. I did what I had previously considered such an inconvenience to do: brought my multi-regional DVD player out to the garage. Really, it was quite easy. Should have done it in the first place.

So three movies from my collection -- Wanderlust, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and This is Spinal Tap -- took the place of Mansfield Park, The Courier and Synecdoche, New York. It's just as well, as I had a half viewing of Star Trek IV about six years ago and it's nice to have made it all the way through this one. Plus I was surprised to note it had been more than eight years since my last Tap viewing -- quite a long time for a film in my top ten on Flickchart. Back then I watched it twice in two years, so I guess I still had a lingering impression that I'd seen it recently. (It had been only five years since my second viewing of Wanderlust. This was my third.)

Mansfield Park? It did get watched on Monday night. 

Disappointing. The book was much better. (Gee, what a surprise.) Having finished reading so recently, I was in a unique position to assess the changes they'd made in this adaptation, many of which had to do with tightening up a 470-page book. I get that you need to do that, but some of the choices really sacrificed the character depth, while certain characters that I thought were important had been excised entirely. Plus there were too many instances of taking something that might have been deep, deep subtext in Austen's book and turning it into text. I'd go into detail if I thought there were any chance you had read Mansfield Park, recently or ever.

Regarding the projector, it's really annoying to learn of these limitations, but I guess it's better to find out now than in a situation where it really matters: one of my Friday-to-Sunday marathons at a hotel, where I can't just pop over and get substitute DVDs from my collection. Last time I streamed most of the movies I watched, but what if the hotel WiFi is in the crapper? iTunes would have been my backup, and in that case, it would have been a poor backup indeed.

My last one of those was last November, and I usually do about one per year. I'd be due for another but the current lockdown is making that considerably less likely. 

So movies in my garage on Father's Day will have to do ... for now. 

Soul on the big screen

One of the movies it was most disappointing not to see on the big screen in 2020 was Pixar's Soul, which debuted on Disney+ at Christmas. (Without the $30 rental price they slapped on Mulan, though I would have gladly paid it.)

Unless, of course, you made your own big screen.

That's what we did on the night of January 1st, which was also the seventh birthday of my younger son, pictured here. (And no, I don't usually put up photos of my family or myself -- but since you can't see his face, I bent my rule in this case.)

Soul was the perfect way for my new projector to strut its stuff, in its third use since I bought it back in late October (fourth if you count a test run), and only the first time my kids were aware of its existence. Which made it an extra special great surprise for my son on his birthday, especially as he'd already been asking when we would watch Soul.

When you buy an expensive projector (mid-range expensive, not high-end expensive), you never really know what ROI you will get on it. Last night was the kind of ROI that goes well beyond dollars and cents.

Pictured above is the room where we've been staying since Monday at the Alzburg Resort in Mansfield, Victoria. We've been very lucky to be able to travel a bit this holiday season, if only locally, as COVID has been under control for more than two months now. As seems always to be the case with this virus, our luck has just run out, as there's been a (small) outbreak in Victoria just as of the past few days, whose parameters are not yet known. So who knows if we'd still have been able to make our trip if this outbreak happened a week ago.

But make it we did, as did my sister-in-law and mother-in-law. It's been a week of hiking and boating and swimming in the pool, and going in the hot tub, and playing tennis and shooting baskets on the normally coin-operated baseball game, and playing foosball, and playing ping pong, and barbecuing, and eating at an assortment of scrumptious restaurants. We've really had it all. I repeat, we are very lucky, though we can also credit one of the world's most stringent lockdowns back in July and August.

The movie last night was the cherry on top. (He says, as he eats the remainder of the yummy roadside cherries we bought for his final morning's breakfast.) After a birthday BBQ by the resort's pool, I hurried back to our room, where I rearranged the furniture, removed a painting from the wall and set up the projector. I also popped some microwave popcorn for the older one, who can't have family movie night without popcorn.

The big reveal was as impressive as I'd hoped, as the kids' grandmother might have been most impressed of all. As you might guess, the seven-year-old, who has not yet figured out tact or how to put things in perspective, had to mention that there was a hanger for the aforementioned painting screwed into the wall that represented a small flaw in our projection viewing area. It was a small flaw indeed, and, I assume, one we all began quickly to ignore.

The movie was loved by all, or at least I think it was. There was plenty of laughter, and some glistening on some adult cheeks as well. I'll find out over our final meal before we leave how much everyone really loved it, but I think the answer is "a lot." In any case, it was 9:20 when it ended so people scattered pretty quickly.

I of course loved it -- in about ten days you will find out exactly how much, which I myself am still mulling in my early days of having just watched it.

More than that I loved being able to see it BIG, to emphasize the beautiful animation and color of a film that was never meant to be watched on your TV. 

Fighting to preserve the sanctity of the big screen movie experience since 2020. 

A record-setting hotel projector weekend

By virtue of having checked in to my hotel (motel) two hours earlier than usual -- and then not watching any movie longer than 123 minutes, most between 90 and 100 -- I set a personal record in total movies watched over the span of time from Friday at noon to Sunday morning at 10 a.m.

That would be 14 movies in 46 hours. 

That's in fact two more than the most I'd managed before. 

Factor in maybe 12 hours of fitful, heartburn-affected sleep -- remember that I bring a whole bag of junk food with me -- and those 14 movies were really occurring in something like 34 waking hours. If you give each movie a two-hour time block, which factors in 15 minutes of enforced downtime between movies (and sometimes to let the projector cool), that leaves only about six hours that I did anything other than watch movies. 

Actually, I can't account for more than an hour or so outside the hotel, other than quick trips to the shops. That was my Saturday morning brunch, which was scrumptious. So maybe 2:15 would be a better block of time to allocate to each.

Now, 14 movies is a lot to write about in a recap post, if I'm intending to provide deep thoughts on what was my most recent (not my first) viewing of most of the films. Ten of the movies I watched were repeats, with only four new ones, and the last new one over by 11 a.m. on Saturday morning. 

So instead of really writing about the movies individually, I thought I'd give you a flat list, with a line break in between the day changes, and then make some general observations about the experience. The movies in bold were the first-time viewings.

Rock Star 
The Girl Next Door
Stop Making Sense
Loving Vincent
Frozen II
-----------
Possession
My Octopus Teacher
Married to the Mob
Music and Lyrics
The Virgin Suicides
Labyrinth
Tangled
------------
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Four Weddings and a Funeral

If I could I'd draw a line through both Possession and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, because they both straddled midnight, though at least Rocky Horror was finished before I went to bed on Saturday night. I was really fighting the confounding first half of Possession on Friday night, and ended up being overwhelmed by a desire to sleep just before the first really icky supernatural element was introduced to the movie, at which point it really took off for me. Unfortunately, that last hour was watched between 7:45 and 8:45 Saturday morning, when the film's terrific horror elements were blunted by the morning sun trying to peek through the curtains. This movie deserves an entire post to itself ... let's see how the week goes whether I give it one.

Without really meaning to, I divided the movies pretty equally between time periods. Six total decades were represented among the 14 movies, including one from 1970s, four from the 1980s, two from the 1990s, three from the 2000s, three from the 2010s and one from the 2020s. 

The distribution among streaming services also appeared premeditated, but I assure it was not. In fact, the six films I watched on the first day, if you count Possession as a Friday viewing, happened to be from six different individual sources: Rock Star (Netflix), The Girl Next Door (Amazon), Stop Making Sense (Kanopy), Loving Vincent (Stan), Frozen II (Disney+) and Possession (an mp4 given to me by a friend). Saturday's viewings proceeded along similar lines, though Kanopy sat this one out -- just as well as I'm down to my final two viewing credits this month. Those viewings went Netflix, Stan, Amazon, Stan, Netflix, Disney+ and a DVD from my own collection. 

Oh, and funnily enough, only 11 of the movies I watched were from the 142 I told you in Thursday's post that I'd curated. As I mentioned yesterday, Tangled was not planned, and came up organically during the weekend. For some reason, Stop Making Sense didn't get added to the list when I was going through my Kanopy choices, but it was on my mind anyway because I'm watching it for Audient Authentic this month. And then I didn't list any of the DVDs I brought on that list, of which Rocky Horror was one. 

Most of the films also had something in common with at least one other film. You notice these things when you watch 14 movies essentially back to back. Some of the common elements were intentional, inspirations from previous viewings, but most were not. 

For example:

- Timothy Olyphant appeared in both of the first two movies, Rock Star and The Girl Next Door. I was so glad to see Olyphant's face in the first of those, having forgotten he was in it, that I specifically chose to follow up with The Girl Next Door to keep the Olyphant vibe going. (That also helps clarify which movie called The Girl Next Door this was. No, I wouldn't already be rewatching the violent 2007 version I only just watched for the first time a few weeks ago.)

- David Byrne appeared in three movies, in a manner of speaking. "Once in a Lifetime" gets played in Rock Star. Two movies later I followed up with Stop Making Sense, already sort of planned out as a Friday late afternoon movie, and as this is a Talking Heads concert movie, obviously Byrne is all over it. The real surprise was seeing that he did the music for Married to the Mob, which brought up the other surprise ...

- ... I ended up actually watching two Jonathan Demme movies. Demme directed Stop Making Sense, but I didn't remember he had also directed Married to the Mob until I actually started watching it.

- I watched two Disney digitally animated films, though the watching of Frozen II sort of directly inspired the watching of Tangled, in that I told my friend I'd watched it and he asked if I'd seen the ten-year anniversary article on the AV Club, which I wrote about yesterday.

- Possession and My Octopus Teacher both have an octopus-like creature in them -- in Possession, a spawning human who has tentacle arms while he's still in his pupa stage, and in My Octopus Teacher, an actual octopus. (And yes, the first appearance of this creature in Possession was what I missed by falling asleep about three minutes too early.)

- Stop Making Sense and My Octopus Teacher are both documentaries. Interestingly, looking back across my Microsoft Word document that keeps track of my history of all these hotel marathons lo these past ten years, I had never watched a single other documentary. 

- Married to the Mob and Music and Lyrics (watched consecutively) both feature a water bed. (Hey, I didn't say these connections were all amazing.)

- Possession and Rocky Horror both feature the use of an electric kitchen saw, the type used to carve meet, both of which are used to carve human flesh. (Now that's a bit more interesting.)

- Hugh Grant appeared in both Music and Lyrics and Four Weddings and a Funeral. The first one was the accident here, as I had already been strongly considering FWAAF for my traditional Sunday morning spot of "Movie You Know So Well, You Can Pack Up the Room While Watching It."

- Rock Star and Music and Lyrics are both about the inner workings of the music industry.

- Frozen II, Labyrinth and Tangled are all stories set in a fantasy world featuring a castle.

- The Girl Next Door and The Virgin Suicides are both coming-of-age stories told from the nostalgic perspective of an older version of the characters looking back.

I think there may have been some some others in there, but I wasn't taking notes. 

The only movie that I didn't find to have some direct connection to another movie was Loving Vincent, but if you want you can say that it's an animated movie, like Tangled and Frozen II -- though the means of animation is infinitely harder and not very similar in appearance, so I didn't think it warranted its own bullet point. (Don't forget, this is the movie where every single frame of the film was hand-painted by one of a total of about 100 different artists.)

I haven't even mentioned that something threatened to derail my visit from the very start.

When I got the key from the woman at the desk and asked for the WiFi password, she told me the WiFi did not work very well in that room. No sooner had I started doing calculations in my head about how quickly I'd run through this month's allotment of data on my phone, than I discovered that the signal was nothing of the sort. It worked just fine, thank you, only once or twice buffering during the whole weekend. In fact, it seemed to be worse on my other devices, like the one laptop I was using to surf the web while the other was pretty much permanently attached to the projector. During The Virgin Suicides I did momentarily switch to my phone's data to work my way through some pixelated sections of the film, but by the next movie I watched I was back to the hotel WiFi, and never looked back after that.

As with any of these trips, you have your moments of crisis. The first few movies on Friday are always the best, because you still have the whole weekend ahead of you and -- if you've consistently followed my rule of thumb -- you have a couple good "afternoon movies" with a guilty pleasure vibe to welcome you into the experience. But over the course of the weekend, you do question your choices, and that happened to me on Saturday during the consecutive viewings of Music and Lyrics and The Virgin Suicides. I didn't like either movie as much as I remembered liking them, though to be honest, I've always been lukewarm on Sofia Coppola's first film. And there was a mild sense of panic about the time slipping away, and how I had essentially just wasted four hours on two movies that might have yielded their time to a handful of the 131 others that didn't get watched. At times like this you realize that even with watching 14 movies, you can't afford -- or, you don't feel like you can afford -- to make too many mistakes.

All told, though, it was as good an experience as it always is, one that fully cures me of that itch for at least another year, by the end of it. As much as the time starts "slipping away," I don't know that I could really watch another 14 movies in another 46 hours on top of those I'd already watched, so it's just as well when it all comes to an end. Ranking my three two-night trips to this hotel, dating back to 2017, I'd say this one wasn't as good as the first, but it was better than the second.

Oh, and my new projector? Just as much of a champion as I'd hoped it would be ... and as I paid for it to be. 

Speaking of those other 131 movies, I'll end with a short list of the movies that didn't quite make the cut -- the ones I most seriously considered watching in one of my available time slots, before opting for something different and then moving on from there. 

Beavis and Butt-head Do America
The Break-Up
Hot Rod
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Minority Report
Punch-Drunk Love
Road Trip
Rogue One
Sleepy Hollow
Speed Racer
A Time to Kill
Wayne's World

Which I guess just means I've got my starter list for next time.

I might watch 142 movies this weekend

Vance, you say. A weekend is somewhere between 48 and 80 hours, depending how much you are stretching it in either direction while staying within the parameters of Friday to Monday morning. That means the most number of movies you could watch in a weekend would be 40, maybe 55 if they were shorter, but in order to do that you would also have to stay awake the whole time.

Oh, I'm not going to watch 142 movies this weekend. I mean that there are 142 different movies I might watch. Important difference.

If you haven't already guessed from this setup, I'm making a solo trip to the hotel again.

It's a thing I do about every year. My wife does it too -- a different weekend, obviously -- but her trips do not involve a movie marathon projected on the hotel wall like mine do.

We each used to go just one night, but lately we have expanded that to two. So much nicer on your first day knowing you don't have to pack up and leave tomorrow. And on the first morning you wake up, you still have more than 24 hours left of your visit.

Mine have involved movie marathons ever since I first envisioned this when we lived back in Los Angeles. It's a product of our years as parents, when it was really useful to get a night away rather than waking up at all hours of the night when your baby was crying. Now, we continue to do it for fun. And, I suppose in COVID times, to get the type of isolation from your family that you might need more than usual. 

Most years I've done this, I've focused on DVDs, or occasionally iTunes rentals, as my primary source for getting my movies. I'd bring a dozen from my own collection and maybe another 20 gathered up from the library, knowing I'd get through half of them at most. It's nice having choice, and letting mood dictate what you watch next.

But COVID-19 has inevitably shifted how I think about such things. Not only are the libraries not yet open -- they are the last stragglers as we hit our 20th day without any new cases here in Victoria -- but my streaming subscriptions have exploded this year. 

I might still bring some DVDs from my collection -- one of the two computers I'm bringing still has a DVD player -- but the vast majority of what I will watch will come from Netflix, Amazon, Stan, AppleTV+, Disney+ or Kanopy. 

Hence, 142 movies.

That's right, I went through each of these services, as meticulously as I could handle before burning out, and dutifully recorded the names of all the movies I might consider watching this weekend. The majority of them are rewatches, as is consistent with how I've envisioned these hotel movie marathons in the past. In fact, 97 of them are movies I've already seen, though most of them not more than once or twice. I then whacked all the titles in a spreadsheet, including a second column that noted which streaming service on which to find them. I even printed it out for good measure.

The poster I've included here is one of the only ones I know I will definitely watch, and also one of the only ones that's not on a streaming service. Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 film Possession is extremely hard to find, so a friend actually gave me a digital copy of it. And I know there's something fucked up about it, though I don't know (or remember) what. So isolating myself in a hotel to watch it, rather than at home on a weeknight as my wife is regularly walking through, is the way to go.

The rest ... well, I'll have my list to consult, won't I?

I do worry that my current plan entails an excessive reliance on the hotel's WiFi. I do not recall that its availability or its speed has ever been an issue in the past, but if it is, I could be out of luck. That said, I do have 40 GBs of data per month on my phone, 36.8 of which is still available between now and the 10th of December. I can probably lean on that if I need to.

I may have buried the lede in my eagerness to tell you about all the movies I've curated. And that is: I also have a new projector.

The one I'd been using in the past, whose possible lack of reliability I wrote about in this post, had cost only $80 to procure, slightly used. For $80 it was an amazing deal, and did the trick. But the image was not really good enough to watch foreign language films -- the subtitles were too difficult to read -- and it came with the additional headache of requiring an adapter to an American plug. Yes, I bought it in Australia from a guy on Gumtree (the local equivalent of Craigslist), but the guy had acquired it in America. The adapter did the trick, but it was always just one more thing to worry about.

My new projector cost ... more. I'll just leave it at that. And I tested it out for the first time last night. It's fabulous.

So this could well be my best movie marathon yet. One further exciting detail is that they said I could check in "around lunchtime." In the past it was always a strict 2 p.m. check-in, at least as I recall. I suppose industry-wide desperation could play a role in their increased flexibility. I'm off work at 11:30, and my wife is dropping me off soon after that. 

In the meantime, I will not watch a movie tonight. My eyes need to rest up. 

One hundred forty-two movies don't watch themselves you know. 

Coincidences/observations from a birthday weekend with Kristen Wiig

Kristen Wiig was in the first movie I watched for my birthday weekend away at the hotel.

She was also in the last.

Plus two in the middle.

This was, indeed, a coincidence, the first of many I will point out in a bullet point format in this post, because I don't have the energy for much more than that. I had more than 20 physical DVDs with me, as well as four movies rented on iTunes, and then, for good measure, I ended up watching two streaming as well. I watched 12 movies between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning, and because of technical difficulties that I will briefly touch on, there were maybe ten others that I tried to watch but couldn't.

I say all this to say that with an attempt to watch as many as 22 different movies, the fact that Wiig was in four of them is, indeed, a coincidence and not something premeditated. I don't think she was in any movies that I had but didn't watch, but I could be wrong about that.

Anyway, the first Wiig movie and first of the marathon was Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, in which she plays Dewey's first wife, whom he marries when she's 12. She's played by Wiig even when she's 12, which is hilarious.

Three movies later it was mother! Did you remember she's in mother!? She's a press agent turned guerrilla warrior. Her character in that film kind of typifies what I think is brilliant about it.

That took us through Friday night. My second movie Saturday morning was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which she plays Ben Stiller's love interest.

Then I wrapped the weekend with The Skeleton Twins on Sunday morning, in which she plays the unstable twin sister to Bill Hader's gay would-be actor.

Wiig makes a good opportunity to segue into my first coincidence/observation:

• I watched two movies in which someone plays David Bowie's "Space Odyssey" on a guitar. The first was Wiig in Walter Mitty as seen in the poster above. The second was Seu Jorge in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I only watched because my first attempt to watch a Wes Anderson movie, a long overdue re-reckoning with The Royal Tenenbaums, succumbed to technical difficulties.

Maybe before I continue my bullet points I should quickly explain those difficulties.

My projector worked fine. My DVD app on my computer did not.

I feel like laptops should come with built-in ways to play DVDs, but they don't seem to anymore. When I got this laptop in 2015 I had to install an app to play DVDs, and that app was Power Media Player, which has worked fine since. Now, not so much. I think they finally want me to pay for this product, or upgrade it, which requires a login of some kind. But I didn't want to mess around with that, so instead, I suffered a severely compromised version of the app all weekend. Would upgrading it or getting a new app have been easier? Sure. But instead I did the tedious thing I'm about to describe in the next paragraph.

So the app will no longer autoplay movies from the start. It gets stuck on the status "Detecting Disk" and never gets off it, even once it has obviously detected the disk. I say "obviously" because the name of the disk came up in the folder list on the left side of the screen, and when you opened it in the folder, you could get access to the raw video files themselves -- chunks of the movie broken up in segments running anywhere from 19 to 21 minutes. I could usually get these files to play in the correct sequence, though it took me until about the third movie I'd watched this way before I realized I needed to change a setting for them to play automatically without having to manually launch each new video file. However, in some cases, I just couldn't figure out how to open the right video file for the start of the movie. Royal Tenenbaums was one such example. I had to bail. 

Oh, and then there were another couple DVDs that were just too scratched or in other ways incorrectly encoded for the computer to even properly recognize them. Anyway, a number of prospective movies were lost either through incorrect sequencing or an inability to be recognized by my geriatric laptop DVD player. 

And that completes the summary of my technical difficulties. 

Where was I?

• I saw two (consecutive) movies in which a washed up performer looks back on the mistakes he's made in his life, and also cannot smell. (Dewey Cox is stricken without the sense of smell after accidentally chopping his brother in half with a machete, and Riggan Thomson in Birdman can't smell the flowers at the end of the movie because he's blown his nose off in a botched suicide attempt.)
• I saw two consecutive movies in which a character draws an unhappy face on a mirror with lipstick. Jena Malone does that in The Neon Demon (my last movie Saturday night) and Hader does it right before his suicide attempt at the start of Skeleton Twins. 
• Speaking of which, it struck me as interesting that Hader stars in It Chapter Two -- spoilers for that about to come up, so watch out! In both Skeleton Twins and It he plays a character who's gay and who uses humor to deflect pain, and It 2 also begins with a suicide attempt in a bathtub -- though it's not successful in Skeleton Twins, and it's not Hader's character in It. 
• I saw two consecutive movies in which characters are trying to use clues to find a person who doesn't necessarily want to be found, those being Margot in Paper Towns and the Life photographer Sean O'Connell in Walter Mitty. 
• This could be the weirdest one: In both Birdman and Skeleton Twins, characters compare their own success or lack thereof to that of George Clooney. Riggan confesses his fear that Clooney would be the one on the front page of the newspaper if the plane they had both been flying in had crashed. Then there's the great exchange in Twins where Maggie says, in trying to comfort the unsuccessful Milo, "No one's a famous actor." Milo counters with the example of George Clooney, and Maggie says "Okay, I guess George Clooney is one exception."
• There was a weird prediction of the future in Paper Towns. Justice Smith appears as one of two best friends of the main character played by Nat Wolff. There's a scene in this movie where the three of them sing the Pokemon theme song before going into a scary situation, believing it will make them less scared. Four years after this movie Smith would play the lead in Pokemon: Detective Pikachu.
• It was funny to see a young John Amos and a pre-Jesus Christ Superstar Ted Neeley in Vanishing Point, Richard C. Safarian's 1971 car chase movie that supposedly inspired Quentin Tarantino in Death Proof. That they're in the movie is not funny so much as the fact that neither of them appears in the credits, which is especially strange in the case of Amos, as he appears in a half-dozen different scenes and even has a couple lines of dialogue.
• On this, my third viewing of mother!, I saw the environmental metaphor more than the biblical metaphor. I love a movie that keeps shifting in meaning every time you watch it.

This has been a bit discombobulated but here's the whole lineup, in order:

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Wonder Woman

mother!

Paper Towns

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Heartbeeps

Vanishing Point

The Breadwinner

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

The Neon Demon

The Skeleton Twins

However, I would have watched these if I could get the DVDs to play or if they were still on the streaming services I swear I'd seen them on recently:

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

Paris, Texas

The Royal Tenenbaums

First Reformed

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Melancholia

The Blackcoat's Daughter

Those of you who have not stopped reading already, you can do so now. 

Schrodinger's movie projector

I’m having another one of my patented “go to a hotel and watch a marathon of movies projected on the wall” weekends this weekend, to celebrate my 46^th birthday. (If you think there's a better way for a 46-year-old man to spend his time and money, well, keep it to yourself.)

At least I think I am. See, I haven’t actually tested the projector yet.

It is, therefore, kind of like Schrodinger’s movie projector. Until I test it, I won’t have any idea whether that projector is alive or dead.

If you want a full explanation of Schrodinger’s Cat, the thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger, you can go here. In simple terms, though, it involves a cat in a box who may or may not have died as a result of the fact that a radioactive substance may or may not have decayed enough to poison the cat. Until you open the box, you don’t know whether the cat is alive or dead, so in theoretical terms, the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously.

My projector is like that.

But I can’t quite bring myself to look in the box. And without the projector, I might cancel the hotel stay. And if I don’t do that at least 48 hours before check-in time, I will be charged for the first night.

But I can’t quite bring myself to learn that the projector is dead. I’d rather exist in Schrodinger’s state of not knowing for as long as possible. For me, for now, the projector is both alive and dead.

If you’re wondering why I should suspect that my projector might be dead, well, I’ve been down this road before. I was going away for one of these weekends back in 2015, just one night that time, and didn’t discover until the morning I was ready to leave that the projector just wouldn’t power on. It was a cheap projector, purchased by my wife online from a Chinese company, and it did in fact work quite well for a number of months. But then it just gave up the ghost. Whether it was inferior electronics or poor storage practices that causes its untimely demise, I don’t know. As it had one of those cases that is basically impossible to open, I never made any inroads to figuring it out, nor learned whether it was within my capabilities to fix it. It just didn’t work, and since it was too late to cancel, I just went to the hotel anyway and watched movies on my laptop on the bed.

Flash forward two years, and I scheduled another one of these weekends for my birthday in 2017. And so I went about acquiring a projector, this time using Gumtree, which is the local equivalent of Craigslist. I paid a similarly cheap price for it (about $80) and met a very nice guy outside of Flinders Street train station to transact the deal. Only when I got home did I discover that it was a North American projector, meaning it was not compatible with the local power outlets. However, the guy said that if I just used an adapter, it should work fine. And it did.

But as it turns out, I don’t have very regular uses for a cheap projector that’s better suited for projecting movies on the walls of hotel rooms than for any kind of home entertainment use. It’s been two years and I have yet to use it again. If I get another use out of it, at least that’ll lower its effective cost from a one-time $80/per rental to a two-time $40/per rental.

But will I? A lot can happen to a dormant piece of electronic equipment in two years, even stored inside its original box on a dry shelf rather than in some dark and dank corner.

It would be easy enough to test it, and I will. Sometime before Wednesday afternoon, anyway.

But even if it’s a better brand than the original projector we had – and there’s no guaranteeing it is – it has that extra complicating factor of requiring the adapter to work in Australia. This may make me resemble an old person more than I’d like to admit, but I have a mild paranoia that any piece of equipment designed to work in one country might blow itself out with another country’s currents running through it. I’ve got a mild paranoia that I myself might cause the radioactive atom to decay, prompting the glass to shatter and the poison to fill the box, just by testing it to see if it works.

Which gives this something in common with another physics principle other than Schrodinger’s Cat: the Observer Effect, which states that an observer will have a measurable effect on a scientific phenomenon just through the act of observing it.

So I want to live in that dream of the projector not being broken just a little bit longer. If only because if it is broken, I will then have to admit to myself that I might cancel this weekend away, and therefore admit to my wife that I only care about going away for a weekend to myself if I have a projector that will project movies on the wall.

I don’t know which scientific principle states that if you observe your own obsessiveness too closely, it makes it real.

Image quality vs. movie quality

Hey, there's something I haven't told you!

I am now the proud owner of a projector!

It was a gift from my wife for Christmas. It didn't arrive in time for Christmas, because it was purchased from one of those discount websites of questionable legitimacy, but it was here by early January. (The place she purchased it is not meant to be a slight against my wife. Simply put, paying only $80 for a projector is the only way we could really justify the purchase.)

It's cute as hell. Wanna see?

It weighs about as much as a quarter and will be easily transportable. And unlike the projector I used to borrow from work, it's actually compatible with my computer (I had to use my work laptop with that one). It runs via an HDMI cable.

Win-win-win-win-win, right?

Well, there's a small catch: The display is not perfect. The images are pixelated, you see. Not heavily pixelated, but enough so that even the least discerning eyes can clearly see it. Especially if there's written text on the screen.

As soon as I noted this, I felt myself deflate a little bit, and wondered how much utility it would really have for me. I mean, film is a visual medium. If you're not seeing the full beauty of the images on screen, why even watch the movie?

Well, a week and three projector viewings later, I can tell you how much utility it will have for me: lots.

I just have to choose the right movies, is all.

The three movies I've watched so far have each conformed to a different notion of what will make sense to watch on my projector:

1. Movies Whose Visuals Look Like Crap Anyway. I debuted the projector with a pretty dubious choice, the 1987 Troma feature that's famous for how terrible it is: Surf Nazis Must Die. I got a late start last Saturday night, so I wanted something under 90 minutes and Surf Nazis fit the bill. Not only was it the first movie I watched with the new projector, it was the first movie I watched after finishing up my 2014 ranking season. Doubly dubious.

Conclusion: It looked as good as it needed to. And watching it on a screen like this, I kind of felt like I was seeing it as it was meant to be seen, projected on the wall of someone's backyard at some party in the late 1970s. Even though it didn't get released until ten years after the late 1970s.

2. Movies I Am Expecting to Be Bad. Surf Nazis fits the bill here as well, but the distinction I'm drawing in this category is that the movie might be good visually, just not up to snuff storywise. So to test this viewing circumstance I watched Jason Reitman's Labor Day on Wednesday night. The movie had been panned, and rightly so, as it turns out -- though I would generously call it a noble failure.

Conclusion: I don't see how my appreciation of this movie would have been drastically altered by viewing it on a TV or even on the big screen. Its flaws are clear. It does have moments when it transcends those flaws, and I felt I could appreciate those moments just fine on the projector.

3. Movies I Have Already Seen. And in most cases this also means "movies I love," since I don't re-watch movies all that regularly unless I love them (and on the rare occasion when I'm trying to give them a second chance, though in that case I might want to avoid the projector). This is where the movie I saw last night, Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan, comes into play. I'd say this was my fourth time seeing the movie, but the first in over a decade.

Conclusion: I had my skeptical moments about A Simple Plan at first, worrying in the first 15 minutes that it had not aged well (and was clumsier in some of the direction than I originally thought). But once the story gets going, I'd say I was as involved with it as I was on any of my prior viewings, and if I liked the movie less overall than I had previously, it was just a shade less. This may just mean that if it's a really good movie, it doesn't matter exactly how good the visuals look -- it's the acting and the story that really count.

Scenarios still to test:

1. Foreign Language Movies. These figure to suffer the most, as reading the text on the screen will be the only way to understand what's going on. Maybe I will test this with a foreign movie I've already seen ... or just with the first few minutes of a movie I haven't seen, after which I will quit if it's just not working out.

2. Movies With Conspicuously Beautiful Visuals. Here again I can test with a movie I know and love, maybe Richard Linklater's Waking Life. Waking Life is the movie that looked most impressive to me on the projector I used back in the U.S., and I own it so I can do this test any old time.

Overall conclusion: None of these viewings was radically impacted by watching it on a screen with tiny pixelations. Maybe the size of the screen and the pixelations cancel each out, but I have a feeling that the size of the screen actually trumps the pixelations, because each of these viewings felt special and memorable to me.

I am eagerly awaiting my next one .,. and just a bit giddy about this new era I've found myself in.

Double feature candidates aplenty

I had a pretty good weekend as far as bringing movies home from the library. I told you on Saturday that we were watching movies on the projector in our garage, and I mentioned that Jaws was up first. It turned out we watched the other two movies I brought home as well, which I believe marks the first time ever that my wife and I have watched all three movies I plucked from the library shelves in one visit. (I've watched all three myself, but I don't think she's ever watched all of them with me.) Since you get a maximum of three movies for only two days (three on the weekends), it makes such a success rate pretty unlikely.

We got an earlier start on Saturday than we had on Friday, so even with running over two hours, The Matrix finished up by a little after 10. There was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to tack another movie on and make it a double feature. But which movie?

It wasn't quite so simple, but it looked like I was going to subconsciously choose a thematically appropriate double feature, whether I liked it or not.

Before I start, I should tell you that I rarely plan double features where the movies will be good companions for each other. People have called me a cinematic omnivore, and I think that's true to some extent. This means that I am not usually gravitating toward the same kinds of movies, which also means that the best movie to appear as the second half of a double feature is usually the movie I feel the most pressing urge to see.

The one factor that does influence my decision is whether there is anything about the circumstances that dictates one choice over the other. So the projector was the influencing factor in this case. The theory when watching a movie on the projector is that you want it to be visually impressive in some way. That was a guiding influence in my choosing Jaws and The Matrix, though not necessarily 21 Jump Street, which we watched on Sunday night to cap our weekend. 

Having already seen all three of the movies I checked out of the library at least once, I was eager to crack the seal on something new to follow up The Matrix. I don't mean that literally. There would be no cracking of seals on unseen DVDs, because there are only a few movies I own that I've never seen, and that means I acquired them in some unusual way (as a present or a gag gift) and did not expect them to be projector-worthy.

So I scanned our Netflix instant queue for a visually dynamic film that I hadn't seen that was short enough for me to have a reasonable chance of consuming before sleep overtook me. The title that jumped out was David Cronenberg's Existenz, which I have been trying to prioritize for years. I may have subconsciously had The Matrix on the brain when I chose it, but I don't think so, in part because I was scouting choices earlier in the day, before we'd popped The Matrix in.

Existenz sure would have been a natural partner for The Matrix. Although I haven't seen it, I know that it has to do with a virtual reality form of gaming, in which people are connected via a port inserted into their spinal column. Not only does this speak to The Matrix's traveling between two worlds, one real and one imaginary, but Existenz also shares the physiological logistics of making the connection.

I say "would have been" because Existenz was defeated by two technological realities with which it couldn't grapple. My computer reported that a plug-in needed to be updated in order to play Netflix (it's my new work computer, so it hasn't done this job previously), and after 10 o'clock at night, I just didn't want to bother with that. Then there was the fact that the wifi signal just wasn't at maximum strength in our garage. Although it had worked fine for email on another night, I noticed it struggling along at just two bars out of five.

Having lost the possibility of a new movie, I turned to our DVD shelves in our living room, and quickly came away with two sound choices -- both of them also inadvertent double feature pairings for The Matrix.

The first was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which may just be my all-time favorite film adaptation of a video game. This 2001 film, which is in the anime tradition but uses a far more advanced animation style (as you can probably tell from the poster), should have been a technological marvel and a real hit. But for some reason, it just wasn't. Even if people didn't like the story, although I don't know why they wouldn't have, this was perhaps the most effective CG recreation of human beings that had been seen yet at the movies, and that should have counted for something.

Anyway, the setting is a post-apocalyptic earth that is ruled by phantoms, which are diaphanous alien creatures who can kill by mere physical contact with human beings. Their physiognomy is often squid-like or otherwise aquatic, making them reminiscent of the robot sentinels that come searching for the Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix. Not to mention that the "real world" in both movies is a torched wasteland, where a small pocket of human resistance living in a thus-far impermeable "final city" try to stave off the extinction of the species.

I tried to watch Final Fantasy as my third movie of the night, actually, but I made it only 20 minutes, the last five of which were spent more asleep than awake. It lost out to the eventual winner of this double feature sweepstakes simply because I didn't want to watch it quite as much.

That eventual winner was Tarsem Singh's The Cell, the movie I would have been least conscious of having a connection to The Matrix before I started, but may have had the most significant similarities when all was said and done.

Both movies feature characters who use a specific procedure to consciously leave their real world and enter a fantasy world where rules don't apply -- a fantasy world they can manipulate, but one that will eat them up if they're not careful. In both movies there's a lot of talk about how if you die in the fantasy world, you die in reality, because your mind can't separate the two. (Each movie has a specific line about this. In The Matrix, it's "The body cannot live without the mind." In The Cell, it's "It's like that old wives' tale, if you die in your dream you die in your real life.")

Both movies feature the hero "going back in" when it will very likely result in his/her death, while people sitting at the controls stand by in shock, either physically unable to prevent the hero or reluctantly agreeing not to. Both movies also conclude with a race against time -- in one case, to prevent a victim from drowning in an underground cell, and in the other, to prevent sentinels from killing all the human resistors we have come to know.

As discussed, any one of these would have been a great match for The Matrix, but I'm glad The Cell ended up winning out. I wouldn't say it enthralled me quite as much this time as when I wrote about it in 2010, but each viewing further reminds me that this is an underappreciated classic involving a singular vision by its director.

Now I'm just licking my lips for my next opportunity to borrow the projector.

Projecting again, posting about it again

So is this impressive collection of films a shelf at the local video store? With that many films lined up so impressively and so neatly, it could only be, right?

Nope. That's just what I brought with me to the hotel on Friday night.

Yep, I made another trip to a dumpy hotel near my work, armed with clothes, snacks, a laptop and a projector. Oh, and lots of movies. Twenty-one physical DVD cases, one of which contained three separate DVDs. So that's 23 movies total.

You may recall that I first did this last fall, the day after my birthday. It was designed as a birthday present, to get a night off from parenting at a hotel. My wife had done such things previously, and I followed suit. Projecting movies on the wall was my own personal innovation, my idea how to get the most out of time that I could spend exactly as I wanted.

Well, since my wife went out of town for three nights for her own birthday a couple weeks back, she insisted that I take another one of these nights for myself. Initially I was not all that pumped for it, because this would be my third time borrowing the projector from work, and I was already feeling sheepish about the prospect of asking my boss. In fact, I even devised various plans to steal it (he probably wouldn't notice), or rent or even buy my own (some people were selling them really cheaply on craigslist). Ultimately I just asked him again, and again he had no problem loaning it out to me.

That's when I started getting excited.

My goal this time was to watch six movies, which would be a one-movie improvement on my previous total. Having done this once already, I figured to lose less time to the logistics of making it work. For example, this time I didn't have to go to the store to buy a box of pushpins, so I could put a sheet up on the wall to cover the patterned wallpaper. But I did forget to bring the power strip I brought last time, so I watched my first movie with the laptop running on batteries. After that finished, I headed back to the office just after the last person left for the day, and corrected that situation. Time lost: 13 minutes.

And yep, I did get in those six movies - just barely.

I didn't want to write a massive post about my experiences watching these movies, but then as I was watching them, ideas of things to write about came up for each movie. So it will in fact be a sort of massive post, but it'll be broken up by subheadings, so you can pick through it that way if it makes it easier for you.

Laurie Holden's twin sister

My first movie up was Ron Underwood's Tremors, which made its way to the top of my Netflix queue without a specific plan for me to watch it. This seemed as good a time as any. When the sunlight is still coming in the hotel window (I checked in just before 3 p.m.), it's nice to have a movie that has lots of exterior shots. Otherwise it's difficult to see anything.

One of the first things I noticed was that Laurie Holden, of X-Files and Walking Dead fame, was in it. But this struck me as very strange. The movie is 22 years old, which would mean that Holden is now in her mid-40s -- at the very youngest. And the woman in this movie didn't seem to be only in her early 20s, in part because she is playing a seismologist doing research on plate tectonics.

So I took a break from the movie to satisfy my curiosity on the internet, and in fact, the woman in the movie is Finn Carter, who I saw last fall in How I Got Into College. I didn't mistake her for Holden then. But here, look at them side by side and tell me what you think:



Uncanny, right?

Well, maybe it would seem more so if I'd been able to find better pictures to use as my examples ...

(For the record, Holden is 39 and Carter is 51.)

That strange subplot with the Japanese guy

When I got back with the power strip, I excitedly put on Fargo. The movie is one of my top ten films of all time, but I have not seen it in at least five years. This needed to be remedied.

As I was watching it, I was marveling over the perfection of the script. It's such a tight script. Except ...

... there's an otherwise totally unnecessary subplot about a former classmate of Marge Gunderson's who is trying to romantically woo her, despite the fact that she's married and seven months pregnant.

I got to wondering what the purpose of this subplot is. It never dovetails into the main plot. I was talking about it with my wife later on, and we determined that the primary function of the subplot is to show that even in a contented marriage on the verge of motherhood, Marge has doubts about her place in the world. After all, she dresses up nicely to meet her former classmate while out of town in the big city, and even chooses a fancy restaurant for their meeting -- before eventually seeing how weird the guy has become and realizing how good she has it back at home with Norm. I guess the doubting of contented marriage is a theme in this movie, as Jerry Lundegaard is also shaking up a seemingly stable family life through the choices he makes.

Still, Fargo could easily exist without the Mike Yanagita subplot. Especially if you go by the basic screenwriting guideline that every scene in a movie should move the story forward in some identifiable way.

So why did the Coens include it? Especially when the movie otherwise exists as a master class in screenwriting?

My ultimate conclusion: It was a deliberate imperfection introduced to showcase how brilliant the rest of the script was. I admit that this is something of a stretch, and basically accuses the Coens of patting themselves on the back. (But let's be honest, it wouldn't be the first or last time they had patted themselves on the back.) But it got me thinking about how Muslims are supposedly known for leaving deliberate imperfections in their work, because only Allah is capable of perfection. Not that the Coens are Muslims, but that there's something about an imperfection that tends to accentuate how great everything else is.

And since Fargo is perfect as it is, I would definitely miss Mike Yanagita if he weren't there.

The unintended benefits of Heath Ledger's death

At around 8 o'clock I started what I guess you would call the main course. Anyway, I'll call it the main course because my pizza arrived about 20 minutes in.

The most famous thing about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is, of course, the fact that Heath Ledger was working on it when he died. Since he had not completed all his scenes, Terry Gilliam pulled the unorthodox trick of recruiting three other actors -- Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell -- to complete the parts Ledger had not completed.

To me, this sounded like a doomed decision that would just add confusion to what was probably already a very confusing movie, it being from the mind of Gilliam.

Then I saw the movie.

It was amazing to me how cleanly Gilliam incorporated these other actors. If Ledger had to die while making this movie, it seems he chose an opportune time to do it. He seems to have filmed all of his real-world scenes before dying, leaving those within the fantasy word of the imaginarium unfilmed. It's in this fantasy world where those other actors take over, and it makes perfect sense in terms of the logic of that fantasy world. And it's not at all confusing.

In fact, I think I liked the movie better with these other three taking on the roles they did than if Ledger had done those roles himself.

You can't make an assessment like that in a vacuum, of course. We'll never see the movie as it would have been if Ledger hadn't died. But the work Ledger did contribute to this film is not some of his best. Which may have something to do with his physical condition in the weeks before he died -- I mean, he was taking all those medications that resulted in the cocktail that killed him for a reason. It's just like when I was watching Brad Renfro's last movie, The Informers, last weekend, and he seemed to be physically struggling to complete his scenes.

And so it was that Depp, Law and Farrell injected a much-needed playfulness into both this film and the character.

Anyway, the film does not entirely work on all levels, but it does enough right to have been well worth the watch.

Cybill Shepherd as [some character you don't know]

My second viewing of Taxi Driver, which began at about 10:45, was long overdue. I saw the movie for the first time probably in the mid 1990s, and not again since. It was also the one movie of the 23 that I knew I would watch, because my boss loaned it to me. In fact, as if I'd needed to lubricate my request to borrow the projector, I told my boss about my plan to watch Taxi Driver so as to snare him in a wave of enthusiasm. (It's one of his favorite films.) I'd actually been intending to pick it up at the library, but he brought in his copy on Friday to loan to me. That meant I was committed to watching it, even if I felt like passing on it at the 11th hour. (And it literally was almost the 11th hour when I started the nearly two hour movie.)

My main and only comment on Taxi Driver, beyond the fact that I really like but don't love the movie, has little to do with Taxi Driver itself, but a phenomenon that occurred to me while watching its opening credits.

Namely, that movies used to -- and some still do -- give the name of the character such-and-such actor is playing in the opening credits.

Taxi Driver did this twice. It says "Peter Boyle as Wizard" and "Cybill Shepherd as Betsy."

While I have a certain affection for this convention because it has a long history in cinema, I did wonder what it really gains you to know the name of the character an actor is playing. You don't know the names of any of the characters at this point, so knowing which actor plays which character is of limited value. These credits are basically asking you to store that name as information in your short-term memory, and then when the character appears on screen, you can say "Oh, that character is played by Cybill Shepherd."

But in a way, isn't that kind of "breaking the spell"? Don't you just want to concentrate on the character as a character, not as an actress playing that character? That's what the closing credits are for.

I think it's slightly different if it's a character that you might know before the movie even starts. Like, if Santa Claus were a character in Taxi Driver (which would be a pretty weird version of the movie), you might say "And Harvey Keitel as Santa Claus." But who is this "Betsy," anyway? Why is she singled out from the other characters?

The beauty of Derek Smalls

This is Spinal Tap is another of my all-time favorites, and another film I hadn't seen in at least five years. In fact, I can't even remember when I bought the DVD, and the packaging was still on it. (It was one of those DVDs that's taped shut along three edges, and the tape rips off in chunks. It took about five minutes for me to free the disc.) Anyway, since I know it so well, it made a perfect accompaniment to my morning coffee. The light streaming past the closed curtains wouldn't matter, because I didn't technically need to see everything that was happening.

This post is getting long, so I don't need to go on at length about This is Spinal Tap. You probably already know everything a person could say about it. But a couple quick comments nonetheless:

- I consciously noticed for the first time that Anjelica Huston is in this movie. She plays the woman who designed the 18-inch Stonehenge model. But what I found really interesting about her appearance is that her name appears twice in the closing credits, spelled two different ways. The first time they spell her first name wrong (Angelica), and the second time they spell it with the J. Funny.

- I love the "lukewarm water" that is Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer). I love how even-keeled this guy is. He's always using logic to interpret every situation in the most optimistic possible way, and nothing can really throw him. On this viewing, I especially appreciated the fact that he smokes a pipe. That seems to make him all the more wise. It also makes the scene where he goes through airport security with an aluminum foil-wrapped cucumber in his pants all the more funny, because you get the prankster side of the character there as well.

Watching Raising Arizona as a father

My personal favorite among the classics I rewatched is Raising Arizona, the final movie of the visit, which I finished just 15 minutes before checking out. I have it ranked as my third favorite movie of all time on Flickchart, yet I hadn't watched it since June of 2007.

I know this movie like the back of my hand, which made for a good movie to watch as I was cleaning up the room and dealing with a stronger quality of light coming through the window. What I'd never done previously, though, was watch it as a father.

And I found myself getting emotional several times.

Some of that was just the emotion I've owned up to feeling when I love a movie so much that it touches me on a deeper level. Like, when the opening credits finally kick in at something like the 11-minute mark, with the movie's classic theme song, I think I had a bit more than just the chills I'm getting even know as I write about it.

But the ending, always sentimental and poignant, really got me this time. HI and Ed having to return the baby. Nathan Arizona realizing that it was them who took Nathan Jr. Ed explaining that they can't have one of their own. Nathan describing how lost he would be if Florence left him -- "I do love her so." And finally, HI's dream where you see him from behind, an old man at a future family reunion, and a grown woman comes to touch him on his cheek, speaking to him a single, loving word:

"Dad."

Yep. Waterworks.