This DVD has the oddest aspect ratio problems I’ve ever encountered. It came up as something approaching 1.2:1, but it’s really a 1.37:1 film. (And it claimed that it was 1.5:1!) So to get it to stretch out to something that approaches normality, I had to tell mpv to play it as 16:9! It turns out that this DVD has been mastered with black borders at the sides! The borders are in the video file! I mean, I’ve seen that with black borders top/bottom (quite usual, “letterboxing”), but I’ve never seen a DVD with burned-in window boxing fit for a 16:9 TV. That’s just absurd. So they just waste a lot of horizontal data area for blackness.
Very strange — and it’s a brand new DVD, so perhaps they’ve fired everybody that knew how to master DVDs?
Movies used to have lighting.
Wow, that’s a young baby.
This is quite an intriguing movie. I really didn’t expect this to go where it did — and I guess a few years later, a movie like this would be pretty difficult to make?
That said, I wasn’t as gripped by this movie as it wanted me to be.
Dodsworth. William Wyler. 1936. ⚄
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