Very good suggestion, except our Goodwills often have nothing. Don’t get me wrong, I regularly check any way, but it’s very rare to find something.
That said, I’m saving up some cash to get a TV from the military base. My friend can pick a 32 inch, pretty tv for like $250 at their little store on base.
Anamorphic does not mean 2.35:1. You can get anamorphic movies in any widescreen format, and non-anamorphic in any format.
Anamorphic filming is a way of getting an image of a certain aspect ratio onto a medium of a different aspect ratio. Say you’re using standard 35MM film, but you want to record a widescreen movie. There are two ways to do this - the first is to simply shoot the movie and crop the top and lower parts so that the content of the film is enclosed in a widescreen box in the center of the film. This has the effect of lowering the resolution of the recording, because you’re only using the center of the film and ignoring the outer bars.
The second method is to film in widescreen, but using an anamorphic lens that stretches everything so that it fills the entire frame of the film. Then on playback, you use a reverse lens that squeezes it back down into the original aspect ratio. In the end, you still get a widescreen picture, but you used teh entire surface of the recording media, and therefore the picture quality is much better.
Anamorphic DVD’s do the same thing. The raw image is a 4:3 picture with everything stretched so it all looks thin and skinny. Then the playback device squeezes it back down so it looks normal. The alternative is to ‘letterbox’ the original film and actually record the black bars onto the DVD. Anamorphic looks better.
In film, the anamorphic process is generally only used for 2:35:1 widescreen, but for DVD, anamorphic processing is used on just about everything. If your DVD package says, “enhanced for widescreen TV”, that means it’s processed anamorphically instead of being letterboxed. It may also just say “Anamorphic” somewhere on it.
The black bars frame the picture. Would you like the edges of a painting to blend into thematically-congruous wallpaper? Or would you like a frame around it so your eyes can see the composition as a self-contained thing?
A movie screen has a black border around it for the same reason. I don’t want the image on the screen blending into the front wall of the theater, thank you.
That same argument has been made on these boards. Sure, they’re only seeing two thirds of the movie, but at least there’s no empty space around it!
Oh wait, there is. It’s called “the world”.
Re: Forbidden Planet, here in America, it has always been available on DVD in widescreen. It was literally the first DVD I ever bought back in '97. It had widescreen on one side of the disc, and pan and scan on the other. I still see it in video stores-- has the old “snap” cardboard box. For those of you who say you have the pan and scan, I’m not trying to be snarky, but… flip it over and put it into your player…
Or, just wait a couple months… supposedly there is a collector’s edition coming out.
Sir Rhosis
Yeah, I know they’re stretched, but to me “squished” is how they look. Like a great big dinosaur sat on Andy Rooney.
Oh, and can I piggyback my own rant here? Why the hell, when you put out a foreign language DVD, do you not set up the subtitles so they don’t end up in the widescreen bars?! I have a widescreen TV and can set up your non-anamorphic DVD to take up the whole TV with the picture if I zoom in. It works well, unless I miss the bottom half of the subtitles because you don’t either make your DVD anamorphic or put them in the picture!
Oh, and they shouldn’t be white with no borders, duh, particularly in a black and white movie. That’s just amazingly stupid.
After almost 5 years working in a video store, if there’s anything I hate more than watching a movie in fullscreen it’s people who bitch about fullscreen DVDs like they’re sacrilege. It doesn’t make you sound more cultured or discerning, it just makes you sound pretentious. Don’t like them? Then don’t watch them or buy them.
As Sam Stone mentioned above, Stanly Kubrick is often cited as a director who preferred a full-sreen over a wide-sreen aspect ratio. Very interesting discussion of this on the Kubrick FAQ page. See question 11.
From the above link:
A director might choose to use that space, which would be lost in a wide screen showing, but restored in a full-screen showing, OR a digital conversion to full-screen DVD, as supposedly is the case with Kubrick.
And the reason that the full-screen original aspect can be recovered later is that the cropping is rarely done as the film is printed, but as it’s projected. The entire frame could show in the theater, but the hole through which the light is emitted, is shaed block it out. In my projectionist days we had half a dozen or so small metal plates that could be slotted in between the bulb and the bulb, each with a different shaped hole for a different aspect ratio. It was a museum theater that played films from all over the world – most commercial theaters aren’t equipped to show this kind of diversity. The film sizes were the only universal points commonality – they were either on 16 or 35mm film. Everything else was considerably more variable; including the frame size, film speed, and audio recording scheme.
Still, I agree, if it’s intended to be viewed in widescreen, that’s what the DVD should be, At the very least, there should be some universal laveling symbol. Maybe a little icon of Fred Flinstone watching his stone age TV.
“C’mon man, this affects all of us.”
Count me as one of those who prefer full-screen. Fact is, I’m not really “into” movies-- I enjoy them while I’m watching them, but I’m not at all fascinated by the meta-movie, so to speak, the way I am by other artforms like music. Unless it’s obvious that I’m missing something (which I can honestly say has never happened to me once) I’d rather not be distracted by the bars. Frankly, I’m not interested enough in film to care about the elements of it as long as the ultimate product entertains/stimulates me.