With our tax refund this year we bought a new TV, a 50″ Samsung plasma television and a significant upgrade from our previous television, an early HD-ready set, much smaller but not flat-screen, that weighed about a thousand pounds.  This, in conjunction with recently inheriting my parents’ cast-off surround-sound speakers, has resulted in a “home theater,” I believe the kids these days are calling it.  It was fortuitous that Amazon shipped our television the very day of Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, so we can see HD programming in all its splendor.  My last TV was set up to receive HD through a receiver in our Tivo, so the image we used to have wasn’t bad at all; however the colors were not as vivid as a plasma TV can provide, and the smaller monitor meant less detail.  Significantly, I can now more easily detect a difference between a standard DVD and a Blu-Ray…and now I am rapidly becoming a Blu-Ray advocate.  The difference is stunning.  Any curmudgeon who rails against having to adopt a new format I can only presume has not upgraded his system.  If you have a smaller TV, DVDs are fine.  At 50 inches (he said, sucking in his chest), wowza but that’s a nice picture.

Now, I am painfully aware that my personal library of DVDs has grown out of control.  It fills two giant bookshelves in our living room, and has stretched to a shelf in my den.  There are two reasons it’s grown so large over the last ten years: (1) the many opportunities to buy a cheap DVD, and (2) my borderline-absurd habit of purchasing a film simply because I like it and want to display it on my shelf as some sort of “evidence” of this otherwise abstract affection.  Now that I’ve gone broke splurging on this television, it gives me an opportunity to start revisiting this collection, to make good on my ten-year-long investment and actually watch the films in my library.

I had planned on making the Inglourious Basterds Blu-Ray the inaugural film for my new TV, but alas, I’ve yet to get around to it (though of course I’ve seen the film, and love it).  At a friend’s request we watched Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder first.  Prior to calibrating the TV, the brightness and contrast was cranked high, and the color was especially vivid, or vivider than vivid.  Naturally it looked gorgeous, if eye-straining.  Some research online and my wife and I calibrated the TV on our own, hoping to prolong the TV’s life.  It still looks fantastic, but animation looks especially grand.  I had previously been skeptical that an animated film would be worth releasing in Blu-Ray, thinking that there were limits to the detail that could be seen; however, after watching first the Futurama film and then Ralph Bakshi’s Fire & Ice on the HD format, I now believe that animation in Blu-Ray can look even better than live action film.  Simply put, the colors in animation are not meant to mimic reality, not even in a rotoscoped film like Fire & Ice.  Bakshi’s film, with its designs by acclaimed pulp illustrator Frank Frazetta and background paintings by James Gurney (later of the Dinotopia books) and a then-unknown Thomas Kincaid*, on this presentation really capture the quality of a vividly backlit painter’s canvas.  I doubt this film could ever look better – the impression was of seeing an image exactly as the director intended, with an accurate and subtle color range.  I also did notice details I hadn’t seen before, most likely because of the size of the set, such as the bite marks on a “beast-man”’s arm after he removes a slug-like creature; even a humorously smutty nipple slip which some animator snuck in while illustrating the scantily-clad princess.  Although a superior presentation will never turn the pulpy and pleasingly-adolescent Fire & Ice into a great film, the new factors at play here (including the 5.1 remix) did engage me in a way which the film never had before.  I recommend it, in particular to fans of fantasy illustration.

After this, it was spending a weekend doing the obligatory sampling of modern Hollywood blockbusters – I chose to rewatch the X-Men trilogy in BD.  As opposed to the animation I’d screened, the colors now were of a more subdued quality (partly a choice of the directors), and obviously the flesh tones were more subtle and realistic.  At this point, I was more accustomed to the presentation and found nothing earth-shattering, although I did become more emotionally involved in the action–in particular the series’ high point, the second film–in a way which I had not experienced since watching them in the theater, where the size of a screen creates a certain subjective impact during the viewing experience.  Later in the week, I watched the 2009 indie horror film House of the Devil and found that, despite the film’s self-conscious use of grain (it is set in the early 80’s, and in many ways imitates the style of genre films from that period), the film’s use of black shadows and long subjective shots of wandering through an “old dark house” had a visceral impact heightened by the presentation.  This is a film which relies upon putting the viewer in the protagonist’s shoes, seeing a threatening world through her eyes: the larger the screen, the more powerful is this effect, which heightens the suspense.

But if I was going to work through my library of titles, that meant watching those DVDs–many of which will likely never get a BD upgrade.  Thanks to the “upconverting” effect of watching a DVD on a Blu-Ray player connected via an HDMI cable, even the 80’s TV show “Cheers” looks just great, or as good as it ever will.  (At this point in any article of this kind, the reader will begin to judge the writer’s viewing habits.  You are perfectly welcome to do so.)  But my Blu-Ray player is not region-free, and unless I care to laboriously rearrange my cables each time I want to watch a non-Region 1 disc, the upconverting effect, as well as the 5.1 surround, is not present for that circumstance.  Nevertheless, I wanted to see how the French film Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra looked on a bigger monitor.  This wonderful live action comic book adaptation–never released in the States, since the Asterix comics here are known to few–actually looked quite good, even when connected by “mere” component cables.  The colors were especially good, particularly in shots of sunsets or bright blue skies over the desert.  However, although faces looked just fine, technology failed when it came to representing the desert sand.  The grains were a pixelized mess, something which BluRay would be especially adept at rendering.  (It was a marked contrast with watching so much Olympics coverage in HD, where I felt that I could reach out and sink my hand into the snow.)  Despite this shortcoming, I doubt I’ll be seeing this film released in a Region 1 Blu-Ray anytime soon, so I’ll keep my U.K. DVD of this very entertaining film.

Back to high definition, I decided to test an older film by watching Criterion’s The Third Man, which went out-of-print almost as soon as it was released on BD.  At first, spoiled, perhaps, by Olympics coverage and more modern films, the grain was distracting.  (This, from a film enthusiast!)  I had read, on websites such as dvdbeaver.com as well as in Video Watchdog, that Blu-Ray makes film grain more pronounced, one of the potential downsides of HD.  High definition is meant to capture tiny details, and when it comes to a film made in the 1940’s, grain as part of the negative will make up much of those “tiny details.”  But I quickly grew accustomed to what I was seeing: those swimming particles on the image actually brought me closer to when I first saw this film, on the big screen during its revival circa 1999.  I found that it brought a curious warmth to the film, perhaps of nostalgia, but also for the nature of film.  There is a different quality to watching an older film in high definition – it evokes not the details of “reality,” or even the heightened colors of artificial reality, but rather the intimacy of cinema, as well as the tangible quality of the medium (being film).

As I continue to explore my library, I promise my next entries on this subject will be more about the films themselves.  Watching these movies again, they come alive in new ways.  When it comes to cinema, bigger really is better.

*Painter of Light (TM).