Mamarati

wow. I didn’t know about that whole pan and scan thing. I just watched 12 Angry Men. I’d never seen it before. I liked it a lot. Kind of scary when you think about it… how many times this must have played out in life…

I’m trying to watch some good classic movies this summer. It’s sad how many good movies I’ve never seen before. I mean, I didn’t really start watching movies till late in life, being all poor and stuff…

Anyway, after the movie, on Turner Classic Movies, they had an informational bit with several directors talking about how much is lost when they do pan and scan on movies that are shot wide… you know, this movie has been formatted to fit your screen or whatnot.

And it was impressive… I think there are several movies that I’ve seen on VHS that were probably ruined due to this. I mean, I like to get all out of a film that I can. I love to watch the director’s cuts of movies in addition to going to see them at the theater… and of course if there’s a book to match the film I want to read it. I mean, I want every perspective.

Directors are often pretty brilliant folks, and at the very least, they THINK about everything. They think about things that you may not notice after watching the movie ten times. But it’s there, and whether you know it on the surface, you probably picked up on it somewhere just beneath. That’s the movie experience, you know?

I can remember one time getting into an argument with a bunch of people about a scene from Kill Bill (the scene were uma thurman is in the coffin trying to get out) and I was going through it frame by frame with my interpretation of what thoughts/feelings/perceptions it was supposed to evoke in one… and everyone was like, OMG! Are you kidding? It doesn’t mean anything. She’s just trying to get out of the coffin. And I’m like, people, we are talking about Quentin Terantino here. You cannot tell me that every frame in this movie hasn’t been through his head a dozen or way more times before it was ever even shot. This is a man who thinks, right? I think that scene was just as orchestrated as any other scene. I could be wrong, but…

And so, on the pan and scan info thing, they showed all these movies and what you lose when they do this and… it’s really important stuff. It’s all stuff that really is elemental to the look, feel, meaning of the movie. Shots directors worked long and hard to perfect.

So I’m not going to watch any more of that formatted shit any more. I want to see the movie like it was intended.

More info on pan and scan:

Wikipedia article

This is a great article about how viewers don’t know what they’re missing, by John Cunningham