Thursday, June 3, 2021

Lockdown DVD Fest: The Secret of Roan Inish

On Night #3 of my Lockdown DVD Fest, "lockdown" became "self-isolation."

The difference? In the former, you can leave your house to go grocery shopping, for exercise, to go to the doctor's, or for essential work.

In the latter, you can't leave your house at all.

Don't worry, we're all fine in my family -- or think we are, at least. But on Wednesday night, we received a text from the department of health saying that we had been identified as close contacts of a positive COVID-19 case. That means we have to self-isolate for the next 14 days.

It didn't come as a huge surprise, given the announcement we'd received via email the day before: our kids' primary school would be closed until further notice due to a positive COVID-19 case. It was basically closed anyway because the kids are in remote learning this week, but now not even the children of essential workers or others with special exemptions are allowed to go there. The school has to be deep-cleaned before it can re-open.

We knew our local mall had been identified as a hotspot, so it's not a surprise someone in our neighborhood might have been exposed. Turns out, it was someone in my 10-year-old's fifth grade class -- or at least, in fifth grade. We learned that the families of all fifth graders, not to mention the families of all preps, received this same text from the department of health. Sounds like one family with a kid in both year levels. 

It's a big school. That's a lot of families. It really suggests that this statewide lockdown is not going to end in the near future (it's already been formally extended a week). For us, it's definitely not going to end for another 14 days.

I should say, there is exactly one reason we can leave the house: to go get our own COVID tests. Which we will do later today. Though we have reason to be optimistic there, as my wife was feeling unwell on Monday and went to get herself tested without even knowing about any of this. She was negative. 

All this means I can just keep doing this DVD Fest. I still have a good ten DVDs from the library I haven't watched, including a couple that would be repeat viewings. 

I had planned to stop after four nights initially, and shift into my more regular streaming viewing on the weekend. Then when I learned there was a good chance of extending the lockdown, I thought I'd incorporate the weeknights next week as well. Now ... well, I think I'll just keep going until I watch all the DVDs. 

I mean, there's no penalty for returning a DVD to the library unwatched, of course. That's so absurd that I probably didn't even need to write the previous sentence. 

But I was thinking that there has probably never been a time since I've been in Australia that I've watched all the DVDs I borrowed from the library in one visit. They let you take out up to 50 DVDs at one time, and I've sometimes taken more than 20. So it might be a fun little exercise.

Actually, I just realized the exception to that: last year. I had a half-dozen DVDs out from the library when the pandemic started, and their due date was basically stretched out to infinity as a result of the libraries being closed. So I did work through all of those eventually, before finally returning them in November or something.

But a large number of DVDs in a relatively short amount of time? Haven't done that yet. As far as I know these are still due back on June 15th, though of course I can renew them online, and of course that'll still be too soon for me to return them in person.

So for now, let's just keep on going.

And on Wednesday night I watched The Secret of Roan Inish, the John Sayles film from 1994. 

This is a movie I've heard praised on a number of occasions, and have been meaning to see for years. But I have to say, I got off to a bit of a bad start with it. I was at first distracted by what I thought of as some really murky cinematography, which came as a particular surprise since I'd seen the name Haskell Wexler in the opening credits. There's a lot of mood-setting mist/fog in this film, and though it does set the mood, it also reduces the crispness of the images -- at least compared to something like Days of Heaven, which may be Wexler's crowning achievement. Actually I see that he was not considered to be the lead cinematographer on that film, but rather an "additional cinematographer." In any case, my expectations were for something different.

That distraction led me to become a bit disoriented in the plot when I was not paying close enough attention to absorb all the dialogue, with its heavy Irish accents and its slightly antiquated turns of phrase (the film is set in 1946).

Oh, and then there was something else to distract me: A reminder of the shortcomings of the medium itself.

That's right, in the film's first ten minutes, I had two minor technical glitches, neither of which would have happened with streaming.

One was an issue that's unique to my DVD player, which has otherwise been a stalwart piece of equipment in the eight years that we've owned it. There's a funny quirk this DVD player has, every once in a great while, where if you pause the movie, the screen goes black. And when you unpause it, you can still hear the audio, but you can't see the picture. The only way to fix the issue is to restart the DVD player, which fixes it 100% of the time. However, you lose about a minute in the whole process, since you need to wait until you see the "No signal" sign on the screen before you can restart the player.

Then there was an occurrence of the defect that can affect any DVD, which is that it's scratched. At about the 9:50 mark of the movie, the image got stuck and would not unstick itself. The only way for me to fix it was to forward it about 30 seconds. Who knows if I missed anything really crucial in those 30 seconds. Fortunately, the issue did not recur. (I was thinking how it would make a funny component of this series if the only way to finish a viewing I started on DVD was to find it on streaming, but that hasn't been the case -- yet anyway.)

As I am already running pretty long here, I won't expend a lot of words on my feelings on the rest of the movie. I will say that after a slow start it did pick up for me, so that ultimately it landed as a solid 3.5 stars. Still, I think this is a five-star movie for some people. Who knows if it could have been for me under other circumstances. 

I think my favorite element of this bit of magical realism was the animal training. Seals factor heavily into this film's folklore, as the characters have selkies in their family. I have never seen such personality in a bunch of seals, looking at the characters with an eternal wisdom in their eyes, popping their heads out of the water in a sort of amusing syncopation, and undulating along the land to get back to the water. I could probably watch those seals ducking and darting out of the mist and water for a full 90 minutes themselves.

Before we go: Could I have watched The Secret of Roan Inish on streaming?

For the first time in this series, the answer is yes. In fact, it's not only yes, it's two times yes.

I could have watched the movie on either Amazon or Kanopy. And if I'd done so, I wouldn't have missed those glitched out 30 seconds. (Maybe the cinematography would have even looked better, who knows.)

So I guess, if you are keeping a running total for this series, DVD's lead has been trimmed to 2-1. 

Okay, night #4 is Thursday night, which is Weekend Adjacent Night, so I'll go for something -- well, I can't say more escapist, because The Secret of Roan Inish is pretty escapist. Something "easier" than the movies so far in this series, anyway. 

No comments: