Noo! 16:9? Yeah, it was 1.85:1 originally… WHYYYY

16:9 sucks all the fun out of movies.

Wow, this is quite something else. It reminds me a bit of Hal Hartley movies made around the same time? Absurd but not quite.

OK, the plot here doesn’t make much sense. He apparently has $500K in art and stuff, but instead of selling some of that stuff off, he goes to his uncle and asks for a $50K loan… and if he doesn’t pay him back in six weeks, his uncle will take all those $500Ks worth of stuff.

That’s just… stupid. I mean, he’s supposed to be pretty dim, I guess, but even so.

But I mean it’s a good setup for a screwball comedy, I guess.

This is a very funny movie. It reminds me so much of the screwball comedies of the 30s, but updated. The twist is that the Mattheau character isn’t very sympathetic, but the audience is rooting for him to become one. Which is a pretty 30s plot, I guess?

Anyway, I loved this movie. It’s almost a ⚅, but not quite — the last half is perfect, but the first half is a bit clunky in setting everything up.

A New Leaf. Elaine May. 1971. ⚄

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.

Ah right.

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. ⚄

This short was included on the Torrid Zone DVD.

That’s an impressively high-ceilinged office, man.

It’s kinda odd — I mean, it’s basically a 40s music video, but there’s “drama” parts where the characters deliver their lines in a rhythmic speaking kind of voice. It’s a bit interesting.

It’s super corny! (complimentary)

Ozzie Nelson and His Orchestra. Roy Mack. 1940. ⚂