Hello Penguinistas, it’s the Cubes Fan back to give you something you are not gonna like and this time, I’m here to tell you that watching shit at home is ruining movies. You are probably going to dislike this first because the last column I wrote, I told you that going to the theaters kinda sucked because it’s so much nicer to watch movies at home.

You might think, “this guy is just writing bullshit to write bullshit” and I can’t really deny that, but in the immortal words of Walt Whitman, one of this country’s greatest poets:

 

Here’s the thing, what I wrote last time about theaters was a lot about them failing in their experience and in how they distribute movies. The big thing that would fix their issues is if they would just stop releasing movies to streaming 4 minutes after they launch in the theaters. 

If we had to wait 6 months after the movie ended to get a DVD (I’m saying DVD here very purposefully because BluRay sucks), and then another 6 months to see it on streaming, they would make more people go to the theater because of how long they have to wait for the DVD.

They would also sell DVDs again, which makes them a ton of money and people would watch the movies in the proper resolution, which is what the filmmakers want.

The other thing you won’t like is that you are the problem because you probably don’t understand high definition settings. The only thing that is absolutely, 100% worse about watching a movie at home is that many, if not most, of you have your stupid high definition, 4K, crystal LED, pixel magic, curved screen, A.I. spying on you, obsolete next fucking week television on the “Ruin Movies” level of screen resolution.

I recently went on vacation, and I like to download movies to my personal viewing device* (PVD) so that I can watch movies on the airplane. I decided to go with the classic Star Wars Trilogy downloaded from a streaming service that needs no advertising from me because they fucked up three of my favorite movies.

I did not realize until I watched the movies that my PVD and streaming service mistakenly thought that I wanted to watch these films in a way that allowed me to be able to see the fucking gaffers tape holding together background set pieces. It sucked, not only because I don’t want to see the gaffer’s tape, but also because once you see that kind of stuff in the movie, you start to look more critically at the rest of the movie.

I’m here to tell you, don’t look at the Star Wars Trilogy critically if you like those movies. Nothing good can come of it.

So, I load Star Wars (IT’S CALLED STAR WARS YOU FUCKING NOOBS! A NEW HOPE WAS SOME BULLSHIT INVENTED LATER) and it is apparent from the first scene that I had the stupidly clear fucked up version of the movie. I’m not sure if you know this, but there really aren’t space ships for the most part and the ones we do have are not made from drywall, cardboard, and tinfoil.

The humans in the scene looked amazing. The reason they look so good is that they are real. The hi-def, A.I. enhanced picture of the humans really picks that up. Unfortunately, it also creates a hard transition around the humans to be able to show them that perfectly.

This hard transition from human to the surrounding bits makes it look like a 1960’s Dr. Who episode where the actors are clearly walking around on a stage. I know that reference is really old, so for the youngsters, it looks like the actors are standing in front of a green screen in the 1990s.

No longer am I watching Darth Vader storming the ship, but instead, I’m watching costumed actors running around a set. It may as well be the local high school spring musical for as fake as it looked.

Throughout the Trilogy, there are set pieces shot in front of matte paintings of backgrounds. Back in the day, artists would create a back wall on stages that were painted to look as if the actors were in an expansive place. These paintings were amazingly detailed and made it so that the viewer believed someone might be on a different planet or on a massive battle station or in a jungle or something.

These paintings worked perfectly on FILM. Now that every image has been digitized, sanitized, and anesthetized, those paintings look like paintings instead of looking like the actual thing they are supposed to be.

Back in the day, there were only films on giant reels that you had to watch on movie screens. If you wanted to see a movie, you had to go to the theater.

Then VHS brought movies to our homes, usually about a year after the movie left the theater, and because it was on a small tape and our TVs fucking sucked, all of us old-heads grew up watching our favorite movies with pretty shitty resolution.

Then digitization came along and the tech nerds figured out how to create DVDs, which not only had room for a whole movie, but made it look as good as the theater, AND also had room to put in tons of extras. It was perfect. Except we were still watching it on those 800 pound tube television sets that were now 27 inches wide, and were better, but still could not handle the quality of a DVD picture.

Except these assholes couldn’t help themselves and they kept going.

They had addressed what really was an issue in that TVs and portable entertainment really did look way worse than a movie theater. They did it by continually working on how to make better resolution for both. And then they went too far.

For no reason at all, they created the BluRay disc. Well, there was a reason; they wanted money so they created a new thing that you had to buy and they told you it was better.  Then they made television sets higher and higher resolution as well. This was amazing for people watching sports, but our movies started to look kind of odd on BluRay.

Of course, many people weren’t seeing the issue because they couldn’t afford the TVs that could handle the resolution of BluRay and then streaming came along, which started to kill physical media altogether even though the resolution was much lower.

Then they cracked the code on streaming as well so they could not only create new high-def stuff,  but they could make old standard def stuff into high definition. This is where things really started going wrong.

The salespeople of the world started to push this as the next great thing that everyone wanted and the general public is too stupid to understand that salespeople are lying to them.

They just started making the absolute highest resolution the default for everything and that’s how I ended up watching the Central High School shit version of Star Wars on an airplane. Many people would have just thought it was normal, because that’s how it looks on their television.

It’s not how it looks on my television.

I realized long ago that if I want my movies to look the way they look on the movie screen, I need to turn my television resolution down. There are many settings on most of our television sets that let you adjust the screen resolution.

One of them is often “Cinema” which people think looks shitty because it is often a bit darker than they are used to seeing. That setting is trying to take those hard edges off the people and give a nicer transition from human to actual set piece or actual place that they are filming.

That is how it is supposed to look. We are supposed to believe that the people in the movies are actually in that space even if it is on a set, or a green screen, or whatever. It is supposed to be immersive, but when you crank up the resolution to Ludicrous Speed on everything, you take all that away. All of a sudden, Luke Skywalker is standing in a fucking museum with a shitty landscape painting behind him.

And when you see he’s not actually in that space, you start to notice that he’s not a very good actor either. Then you realize that the script has a ton of holes in it. Then you realize that you might not ever want to watch your favorite movie again.

If you are watching sports, crank it up to 11 so you can actually see the spin of the pitch in real time, but if you are watching movies, you might want to make it look like an actual movie by easing back on the screen resolution. On your streaming services, you will actually save money by not paying an extra $12 a month to see the shittiest version of the movies you want to watch.

We are all complicit in this thing because we bought the bullshit they were selling. But we don’t  have to keep watching the worst versions of movies just because we were told the highest definition is the best definition.

If you like the way that looks, fine, watch the movie in a way that you like it. I’m not going to tell anyone what they like is wrong, but if you are just blindly trucking along with rubber Tauntauns on your screen, maybe take a minute to see if you can mess with your settings and bring that sci-fi animal back to life.

That’s it. Cubes Fan is out and I hope you enjoy your life until the next time I jump in here to tell you something you are not gonna like.