If you have a movie that's "1.66:1 anamorphic", it may not be.

[Deja Q]

http://gregl.net/videophile/anamorphic.htm
(scroll down to the middle)

I was watching "From Russia With Love" the other day and while it looked awesome on my widescreen tv, sometimes a secondary character would be partly clipped from the edge of the screen.

Knowing my TV is capable of manual formatting of the image, I sometimes will set the display to crop images -- but I loathe it when the DVD distributor does it for me, because they want to cater to one crowd over another.

Lo and behold, MGM does not do proper anamorphic transfers because of how they look on standard TV sets. Oddly enough, Disney does, but I can't think of many Disney movies of the 1.66 standard I particularly care for...

[Rabrrrrrr]

1. MGM really is the lazy brother of the film world.

I was thinking about widescreen versus full screen yesterday, and was going to write another rant about how pathetically fucking dumb and artistically illiterate the fullscreen watchers are, and how their inability to think affects how I watch a movie, instead of my way affecting theirs, and how totally unfuckingfair that is.

I mean, seriously, here is the picture of America:

Olive Garden
Fullscreen pan-and-scan movies
McDonalds
American Idol
Capital Punishment
Torture
Thomas Kinkade
Reader's Digest condensed books

[LanternWaste]

6. Don't forget...

"I mean, seriously, here is the picture of America..."

Don't forget I-pods and console games-- the new opiate of the masses. "Tune in, turn on and drop out-- the new I-Pod is just for you!"

[AllegroRondo]

2. I had a roommate who would not buy wide screen movies

"why would I want to have part of the picture cut off by those black bars?"

[ghostsofgiants]

3. People used to always say that to me when I would say that widescreen is better.

x(

[eyepaddle]

4. Ouch, that hurts.

I can't really think of a way to convince them how wrong that is, however--or at least a way that would work....sigh.

[edbermac]

5. Black bars don't cut off part of the pic. They show the WHOLE pic.

He must have been a freeper. Would anyone go buy a book with a third of the pages missing?

......LETTERBOXED - YOU GET THE WHOLE PICTURE.... ....NOT LETTERBOXED - MISSING A THIRD....

[Lautremont]

7. I worked at a video store once upon a time,

and I had to literally draw people pictures to explain it to them. At the time, only the odd Woody Allen movie was letterboxed - in their defense - so it was a much lesser-known phenomenon. But they would come in waving their rented copies of Manhattan, angrily complaining about the broken tape that wasn't showing them the whole movie.