Fullscreen

It was time to relax. I had it all ready: the bag of popcorn, the large glass of cranberry juice, the fluffed-up pillows on my futon, and my feet up on the table. The feature presentation of the evening was to be Million Dollar Baby, a critically acclaimed film that I'd long been eager to watch. I had borrowed it that day for free from the Middletown Public Library.

But then, just as I was ready to settle down into two hours of cinematic bliss, I looked at the DVD box. To my disdain, to my consternation, to my horror, was that loathsome word: FULLSCREEN.

After unleashing a violent series of expletives, I got up, put on my jacket, went downstairs, drove to Blockbuster, paid $4.50 for a rental of the widescreen version of the film, came back, and resumed my evening.

An extreme reaction? Hardly. When I watch a movie, I like to watch the actual movie, not the fake hackjob version. There is no surer way of raping the artistic work of a cinematographer than to render a film into a fullscreen edition.

Movies these days are usually shot in a 16:9 ratio (sometimes in even more rectangular ratios like 2.35:1). This is the rectangular shape of the movie that is projected on movie screens; it is the movie as it was shot and as it is meant to be seen.

Most televisions, however, are still more of a square shape (4:3 ratio) than a rectangular shape. And, as anyone who graduated from kindergarten will tell you, a rectangle will not fit into a square. So if you want to watch a film on your TV, you've got two options: shrink the rectangle down so that it will fit inside the square, or chop off the sides of the rectangle and force it to fit.

The former method accounts for the "letterbox" format of widescreen, with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. The latter method is fullscreen.

Rendering a movie into fullscreen can cut out up to 45% of the original picture. That's right - you're literally seeing only two-thirds or less of the movie you're watching! And any attempt at artfully setting up shots is completely compromised.

For instance, I grew up loving the Indiana Jones films, and watching them all the time on VHS. The VHS tapes I had were fullscreen versions of the films. When the DVDs finally came out a few years back, I got to see the widescreen versions - and what a difference! I remember one particular shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a head-and-shoulders shot of Indy. In the fullscreen version he's simply in the middle of the frame - not a very interesting shot. In the widescreen version, however, he's only on one side of the screen - the entire right side of the shot is a beautiful background panorama. That's how the shot was meant to be seen.

It's not just artistic visions, however, that fullscreen versions compromise; sometimes you miss vital plot elements. Consider this info from Wikipedia's article on Pan and Scan:

Pan and Scan versions of DVDs are often called Fullscreen. But this method can also severely alter compositions and therefore dramatic effects.
For instance, in the film Jaws, the shark can be seen approaching for several seconds more in the widescreen version than in the pan and scan version. For the opening crawl [of text] in each Star Wars film, on the pan and scan versions the viewer has to wait until a line of text of the opening crawl reaches the center of the screen to read through that whole line. On the widescreen versions, each line of the opening crawl text appears in its entirety beginning at the bottom of the screen.

Additionally, in Indiana Jones (I don't know why I'm choosing all these examples from Spielberg), there's a scene in Raiders where Indy is sitting down in a bar with Belloq, the villain. At the end of the scene, all the Arabs in the bar suddenly pull out guns and point them at Indy. But in the widescreen version, this is foreshadowed by a hand in the right foreground handing off a pistol to another mysterious hand. A small detail perhaps, but an interesting one that heightens tension, and leads up to the climax of the scene. And yet it's simply lost in the fullscreen version.

Fullscreen versions of films should not exist at all, and they wouldn't if directors had their way. But there are too many idiots in this country who think that if the picture doesn't fill their screen, they're missing out. They have it backwards: they don't realize that when they watch fullscreen they're missing a third of the movie.

So remember: friends don't let friends watch fullscreen. When you watch a movie, watch the whole movie.