The End Days

There's a place in the world for a movie that calls to our innermost fear of evil, of the end of the world. There has to be some reason movies like Rosemary's Baby and The Omen still resonate with us, although I guess with those two it might just be fear of parenthood.

I started thinking about this not only because of my lunch last Thursday and because of this dopey movie, but because of a link I found on Scott's Words page. Is this for real? Who knows. What a horrible, evil, twisted worldview this person has.

My thoughts on the subject are as follows: these are not the end days. If there were a Supreme Being, He'd be a real asshole to determine the end days according to a clerical error made roughly two thousand years ago.

But what if we're all wrong, what if these are the end days and the Supreme Being turns out to be Cthulu?? I mean, like, bummer, right?

(Oh great -- major plot point: the Jewish scholar kid decides they need to get a Bible. Which translation, dork?)

Forget this end days nonsense. We must deal with a greater evil, one that is powerful and insidious and done in the name of humanity's greater comfort.

I speak, of course, of pan-and-scan. When we watched Multiplicity the other night, Darin and I noticed this horrible, invasive process far more than we ever had before. I'm seeing it again here. I know it's happening whenever my eye becomes glued to the picture and it's definitely not the cinematography.

Basically, pan-and-scan is the process that fits movies, which have a wider aspect ratio than does TV, to a TV's aspect ratio. The movie's wider screen allows action to be happening on either one side of the screen or the other or both. Well, of course, the TV's boxy little shape can't show action happening on both side, so those in charge of putting movies on video decide what you can see. And then, if possible, they insert an artificial pan to the other side of the screen, so you can see what's going on there too.

When you're watching a movie on TV and the picture seems to slide to one side or the other -- usually in a herky, jerky fashion, but this new method appears to be some kind of computer-smudging process -- that's pan-and-scan. And you see it in most movies on TV nowadays. Unless, as is even more common now, cinematographers choose the TV-aspect ratio in their viewfinders in order to be sure that the important part of the frame is always in the picture, whether movie or TV. What this leads to is boring, static films that look like (surprise!) blown-up TV shows.

The sooner we get HDTV, the better.