last christmas while home visiting my wonderful family (they sometimes read this blog – so be nice) i was subjected to this very issue that Ebert goes on about here. i can’t agree with him more. it is a sin against artists, directors, writers, actors, and the very medium to so corrupt it by viewing anything at the wrong ratio and thus changing the very way in which it was INTENDED to be viewed.
you are slapping brilliant artists in the face by ignorantly complaining that you “want to fill your screen” or that you “hate those black bars” (sorry mom and dad). the thing i really don’t get is why this doesn’t just LOOK wrong to people. i understand wishing that everything was shot at an aspect ratio that will maximize your expensive new screen, but wishing doesn’t make it so…and neither does stretching programs to inhuman and abnormal proportions.
if you genuinely don’t see the difference (or don’t think you do) i beg you to try a little test next time you’re watching something “stretched”. wait for a good scene where this abnormality will be most obvious…a scene of a character or two walking down a street together would be a great example. pause your dvr/tivo/dvd/vcr whatever (or if it’s a long enough scene just let it keep playing) and switch from the way you have been viewing it to the other options available…and see how suddenly people don’t look so chunky, stretched, and abnormal. it’s a world of difference. if you can’t see it, well i guess i just don’t know what to say, there’s no way i can help you.
sidenote: don’t try to cheat and use the “zoom” feature that many screens have available, where you fix the aspect ratio so that nothing is stretched, but then to get it to fill in your screen you zoom it so that in close ups heads are cut off or other important things. you will never know what you might be missing if you do not view things they way they were intended by creators to be seen…you could be missing everything.
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This problem hits on so many levels. Forget the artist’s intent (TV has been thwarting that with pan & scan for ages), the fact that you’re looking at squashed people is the worst.
We’ll be dealing with this for many years to come. There are still a lot of people who don’t have HD sets with wide aspect ratios. It blows my mind that if you want to watch something ON DEMAND that it isn’t automatically available as a letter boxed image at least. Sure you get the occasional “widescreen” and “standard” versions, but why wouldn’t the “standard” version be letter boxed? If it was letter boxed then someone with an HDTV could zoom and view it as it was intended and at the correct aspect ratio. It doesn’t make sense.
I’m not surprised, however, that people watch their movies or tv shows squashed. When I worked at Best Buy (those were dark times) I explained over a hundred times to the common DVD buyer why they should buy “widescreen” and not “fullscreen” of their favorite movies. They would never believe me when I told them that they were seeing MORE of the picture with letter boxed movies and not less picture. The black bars are a huge problem for people and it doesn’t matter where they are apparently.
Much of this problem stems from ignorance. There is a short (3 minutes?) film that Martins Scorsese narrates that shows what one misses when you watch a movie in pan and scan (aka fullscreen), and it should be required viewing and play after previews at every movie for 15 years. They should add another minute about wide screen TVs and then that would solve this problem for good… mostly.
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I couldn’t agree more – I hate the squashed people!
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