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.
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