Catsup

Since I last posted (before today), I have watched 18 movies. Some of the movies, like Duel (1971), I rewatched as part of making my mix blu-ray (maybe that should be called MixRay?). Others were watched to fulfill my self-imposed obligation to watch as many of the Oscar nominees as I can. Still others were vacation movies, watched after days of playing in slushy snow in the sunshine.

Let’s see…

The Oscars are Sunday. I have watched live since the late 80s. Usually with a small group; this year that’s not really possible yet. Most of my film friends hate the Oscars, or are indifferent. The industry, though, is part of my fascination, it’s an area of study for me. Meaning Hollywood—I don’t know a lot about other film industries. I know a lot about Hollywood, though, so I truly enjoy the annual pageant of self-importance.

I have seen five of the eight picture nominees, having recently watched Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7. The former is one of my favorite 2020 films, now; the latter, as expected, is a bit of a cartoon. Nomadland and Sound are my favorites overall. I think Mank could still win. I liked that inside baseball movie; it’s my baseball, after all. But I hope it doesn’t win picture. I particularly want to see Minari.

This is the most diverse list of nominees, and the indieist, I have ever seen. There are notable oversights. First Cow, I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Small Axe, for example, and Never Rarely Sometimes Always, while we’re talking indie. But I can’t complain about most of the nominees and haven’t seen the rest. Films made by women and people of color abound. Movies pretty off Hollywood’s radar under “normal” circumstances.

I watched Hot Fuzz with friends outside using my new projector. Cold night, Hot Fuzz. Hilarious movie, great group watch. The projector is a Viewsonic X10-4KE, which has a couple of interesting advantages as an outdoor movie projector. First, it has built-in sound that is actually decent. It has built-in Harman Kardon speakers—which is an utterly meaningless sentence, since anybody can slap their brand on any pile of garbage they want—which turn out to be quite serviceable for a small group. I would say two to three rows of viewers, max, nice for two-three families on a movie night, say.

The second advantage is that this projector does not have a “bulb” but rather a kind of LED array. This kind of light source has a much longer life than a bulb, in theory, and runs cool. It ought to be replaceable, although I’d guess it’d be likely to cost almost as much as the whole unit. Maybe not. I’m not looking it up. I’ve lost enough time in my life dealing with planned obsolescence while the Amazon burns, when I just want to be able to use my stove or microwave, to care whether I’m accurately representing the costs associated with the LED thingy. Point is, this feature is, IMO, significantly better than a bulb.

This projector, which has a conveniently short throw (it can be fairly close to the screen), needs close to full darkness before it will really work best. It’s not super bright. Once night falls, however, the picture it produces is terrific. In the dark, it’s bright, high resolution, clean with good colors and deep blacks. It got a lot of compliments from the dudes. It’s expensive, though, around $1000. (On the other hand, how much would you pay for a new TV?)

By the way, I am using a 120” screen from Amazon; the linked option goes up easily in about 6-8 minutes, even without help. The screen can be used for front or rear projection and allows for an impressively big but still manageable ad-hoc mini-theater. It assembles using poles similar to tent poles; the poles go through loops on the screen.

Now a bit of bad news. Your mileage may vary, but getting the projector to take an input was hugely frustrating. I had good HDMI cables, and tried several new ones, but I could not get picture AND sound transmitted to the projector from two different Sony blu-ray players; just picture. There was no solution to this problem; after a generous back and forth with Viewsonic tech support I was advised to contact Sony. I suspect that the problem had something to do with the jagoff HDCP copy protection cock-blocking, in spite of the fact I was using players I owned to play discs I owned to a projector I owned. The Sonys, while only a few years old, used the earlier incarnation of HDCP, HDCP 2.0, and an LG 4K player I owned used the newer version, HDCP 2.2. Again, these are just content-protection codes—for 4K discs, so no one can copy them. Naturally, not only do these “protections” fail, historically almost immediately in the product cycle, by getting cracked, but they break other things—like backward compatibility. Only the LG player would work with this projector.

It was also supposed to accept input from, for example, external hard drives. I have not yet been able to get this to work, but, who knows, maybe I’ll figure it out one day. I have been able to connect my smart phone to it (via cable), however.

So, it’s a typical situation—actually pretty good hardware tied to software that trips over itself constantly, particularly around IP concerns that render the machine half-useless out of the gate. Caveat emptor. But if you can get it to work, it fucks.