When Movies Were Movies

The Last Picture Show: We watch them watch Red River.

Album collectors tell you vinyl's the only way. An LP has texture, from the needle's first hit to the occasional scratch. The flaws, like leather, humanize the music; we feel the grooves, the spin. And it wasn't really in our control. You never quite get the needle exactly where the song starts.

Who remembers the days when movies were like that, too? We went to the theater to see honest-to-God film stock unreel on the screen above. I'm not opposed to digitally projected movies, which offer better consistency from theater to theater--but you notice the digital creeping in. We can see the grain in the sky, the pixels in the dark shadows.

The whole world's gone pixellated in my (brief) lifetime. I still have not seen a 3D movie in the theaters. Now you can watch Blu-rays in 3D, if you have the dollars to spend or the insatiable need to upgrade your DVD collection yet again. From my viewpoint, Blu-ray won't overtake DVD outright. The format doesn't offer nearly as much improvement as DVD did over VHS. The DVD market recognized that movies should not be chopped up to fit our televisions. Gone are the days of hideous pan-and-scan hackjobs, wearing out tapes from constant play, rewinding.

To my surprise, even the classics looked better on DVD. Some that I own (like Psycho and Notorious) are loaded with grain. But the distraction is worth it when the blacks and whites are so much richer than VHS could hope to offer. Optimal viewing needs a balance, though, and I wonder if pushing 1930s and '40s titles to Blu-ray is asking too much of them.

Yes, I'm reminicising about a shift in movie-watching that happened when I was a teenager. For almost ten years, we've readjusted our movie watching in a positive direction. DVDs gave us supplemental features, so we could bury into the movie, realizing, Hey, a movie could be worth more investment than just catching a clip on TV. And we watched films in their original aspect ratios again. How did it become acceptable to crop the movie? Who stares at Michelangelo's The Last Supper and feels satisfied with just seven disciples?

While Blu-rays and HD cable channels take us in one direction, iPods/Pads and streaming jump the other way. High-def's shinier, sleeker on the surface. The other road is convenient, portable, and quality is irreverent. But maybe they aren't so divided. I wager that high-def everything's more for technology fetishists than movie buffs, just like having all the on-the-go options. Who really watches The Fighter on a cell phone? Yet it's possible (you know, just in case...). All bases are covered. We control how and where they play. Movies are ours.

Thoughts, readers? Who's buying Blu-rays?

Next time: Netflix vs. Amazon vs. Hulu.