But that’s not what a movie is about, now is it? It’s not (just) about the characterization and the plot. That’s what sets movies apart from books: it’s a visual medium. Seeing a movie in P&S where it was not filmed that way originally (“the following movie has been modified to fit your TV screen”) is equivalent to, say, reading Shakespeare “translated” to modern English. Or at least to listening to music compressed to under 128kbps MP3 played over cheap $10 headphones with muddy bass and distorted highs.
There are plenty of movies with plots riddled with holes and characters with fold-out legs to prop them up that I still fully enjoyed, just because they were visually and audially engrossing films.
People are allowed to enjoy movies emphasizing whatever they like best, of course, and not all movies suffer to the same degree from visual cropping.
Typically there is a disclaimer about the film being “modified to fit your TV screen”.
The most irksome cases where it affects the viewing experience are when the camera has to pan back and forth between two people talking, so that only one talking head is in the picture. Originally the shot framed both people on screen facing each other, on the left and right of the image, but due to cropping they could not fit both heads in the reduced image. (Or else they show just the edges of the faces instead of the whole head, which may be even worse.)
Another annoying one is where there’s clearly supposed to be something peripherally visible to the person in a close-up (like someone pointing a gun at them from a doorway) but which was cropped out to keep the center of the cropped shot on the close-up.
Or panoramic shots of landscapes or the complex cockpit of an aircraft/spaceship, where you just know by looking at the image that about 50% of what is supposed to be a sweeping and impressive view is just not there.
I strongly prefer widescreen, but pan & scan is usually OK. There are some scenes that just don’t work, but the movies are usually perfectly watchable. One noticeably bad pan & scan scene was in Ghostbusters. On my old VHS copy the scene with the three Ghostbusters on the elevator looked almost like Bill Murray was talking to himself.