Ah-nold in widescreen
December 28, 2009 8:17 am Movies
I’ve been a lifelong Arnold Schwarzenegger fan ever since I saw The Terminator as a kid. Later in life, I naturally built up a collection of his films on DVD, starting of course with his 1980s science fiction and action classics (Predator, Total Recall, et cetera). As far as Schwarzenegger’s comedy movies are concerned, they’re not all winners, but I still enjoy most of them. I began adding those to my collection after I’d finished with his action fare, and that’s where the problems began.
Most of Schwarzenegger’s comedies were released in the late 1990s by Universal, and they were all in the dreaded fullscreen format. I found this out the hard way many years ago after I came home with a two-pack containing Twins and Kindergarten Cop. Not only were the films cropped to fit the fullscreen ratio, but Twins in particular had incredibly poor video quality; it looks like the source material was a shitty VHS copy! When I bought an HDTV earlier this year, these problems were even more pronounced. The worst offender is Last Action Hero, which I’ve refrained from buying; not only is it fullscreen-only, it’s also using a particularly poor pan-and-scan technique. I’ve seen this version of the film on television from time to time, and it’s so blurry, it’s practically unwatchable.
Now, Twins and Kindergarten Cop were recently reissued as part of a three-pack with Junior, and purported to be in widescreen format. Well, not quite; it’s only widescreen because the film’s been cropped! The publishers actually took the fullscreen version, sliced off the top and bottom, and are marketing it as “widescreen.” What a joke!
This kind of crap makes me incredibly angry. While it’s understandable that the Schwarzenegger action flicks would get a much higher quality home video release, that’s no reason to release subpar versions of his other films, many of which did quite well at the box office.
The solution to this is that when these films come out on Blu-ray Disc, they’ll be in the proper widescreen format without the shitty cropping. (The source material’s original aspect ratio is required for BRD releases.) For example, Last Action Hero is coming to BRD in January, and that’s the version of the film I’ll pick up. If Twins and Kindergarten Cop eventually follow suit, then I can finally replace my crappy DVD copies. I generally don’t buy comedy or drama on BRD, as films like that really don’t require or benefit from a high definition transfer like a science fiction or other special effects-laden film would; but when they fix severe problems with the DVD releases, then I’m all for it.
At least my DVD copy of Jingle All the Way is in good ol’ anamorphic widescreen…you just can’t minimize Arnold punching a reindeer in the face.
December 28th, 2009 at 4:38 PM
It’s Original Aspect Ratio all the way for me. I was converted to OAR way back in the VHS days with Jurassic Park. I remember back in the day when widescreen VHS had its own special rack. It was a niche market. Imagine… properly formatted movies a niche market! But, most people didn’t care that their movies were “formatted to fit your screen” back then. But I did after Jurassic Park. And I was watching movies on a 13″ 4×3 TV back then!
And then there was the myth that widescreen movies were missing image data on the top and bottom! That’s only true for shameful work like you describe on those Schwarzenegger movies. When I worked at Media Play, when I tried to explain to clueless customers what widescreen actually was, they’d look at me like I had bugs crawling out of my ears! They just didn’t get it. Filling their screen was more important to them than seeing a film in its intended format.
Now with 16×9 TVs and Blu-ray slowly becoming the norm, there’s a whole new set of problems likely to arise: complaints about any movie not in 1.77:1 or 1.85:1 still having black bars (“but I thought widescreen was supposed to get rid of those! Why does my Blu-ray of Indiana Jones still have black bars on my widescreen TV?!”) and scrubbing film-based movies of their grain, losing detail in the process (“Why is there noise on my picture for Close Encounters of the Third Kind? I thought Blu-ray was supposed to be crystal clear like PIXAR movies!”).
Plus there’s the myth that older movies would not benefit from new HD masters, when in fact the opposite is true; movies shot on film will gain the most from the hi-def treatment. Film is an analog medium, and as such can be scanned to make a new HD master at any desired resolution to extract the most detail possible from the picture. This detail, naturally, also includes film grain which is inherent to the medium and is not a flaw.
Can you tell I’m something of a nut when it comes to the technical aspects of porting movies to a home video format?
December 29th, 2009 at 11:28 AM
It gets even weirder when a film has two aspect ratios, like The Dark Knight on Blu-ray. Some of the outdoor/city shots fill my HDTV, while the rest of the film has black letterbox bars about an inch thick.