fun working at the video store

[thehefner]

Ok. When a fat 50 year old man of some undetermined ethnicity comes into the video store and returns a DVD, I have no problem with that. Certainly no, that's the job. When said DVD is a copy of "Cum Belchers #12," that's gross and makes me uncomfortable, but that's the job and we have to deal with porno sometimes. When I open up said DVD to find, right next to the disk, a big wet sticky splotch in the corner, that is NOT COOL. DUDE. NOT. COOL.

I showed it to my supervisor John, who looked at it, then silently pulled out paper towels and windex, cleaned it off, and handed it back to me.

NOT. FRICKIN'. COOL. DUDE.

What is cool, however, is the show SCRUBS. Holy SHIT this show is amazing. It just wins on every level. It has dry wit, random humor, excellent and deep characters, great character development, and a plot! Yes! An overreaching plot! My god! I always suspected that John C. McGinley was my god (my first inkling was when I saw him hunt Ice-T for sport alongside Charles Dutton, F. Murray Abraham, Gary Busey, and Rutger Hauer), but now I have futher evidence. So far now it's McGinley and Wilford Brimley neck and neck. But don't count the Borgnine out just yet! Seriously, though. SCRUBS is awesome.

And THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY is also awesome. I put it on the store DVD player after we finished the first season of SCRUBS, and my God, that film is just brilliant. Even with the bad dubbing, false advertising (seriously, Blondie is only "The Good" by default!), and the fact that Blondie isn't really all that blond, it still kicks serious ass and holds a special place deep in the cockles of my heart.

EDIT: Look, I know I'm a snob. But seriously, who the hell in their right bloody minds would rent, or for God's sake BUY, a DVD in Full Screen? Why? Because they can't get over those two black bars? With full screen you get LESS movie and horrible pan and scan techniques that really haven't improved at all in the past 20+ years. Yet the video store recieves a couple more Full Screen DVDs over Widescreen for all the big titles coming out. I just don't bloody well get it.

Comments

[ortugatay.livejournal.com]

YES. I am in love with Scrubs so much--I'm so glad you've seen it now! I really want the first season for Christmas. And Zach Braff should just feel free to have my babies. :-D

[fishymcb.livejournal.com]

I second that - it's a shame I haven't watched more than a handful of episodes of Scrubs myself, but me likey what I saw. Particularly the episode where Zach Braff's character lands in the "Just Friends Room". We've all been there, boy howdy.

[fiveseconddelay.livejournal.com]

So you finally saw what I've been raving about for the last two years. And I got Outlaw Jose Wales whenever you are ready.

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

Actually, I watch some movies in fullscreen, and I'll tell you why.

One word: resolution. Because to my mind in fullscreen, you are seeing more movie. Not more of the scene, but more detail in what you do see. More details in faces. Text you can read. Better colors.

Letterbox is great for showing me vistas, but they're tiny little vistas. I can't see any of the trees; they just little blobs. It's not just the size of the TV; the limitation is in the number of scan lines. You get 480 of them on a TV screen, and it doesn't matter if you make the tv 10 feet tall. When you letterbox a movie you can end up with an image a mere 240 lines tall. That's like watching a movie on your cell phone screen. That's the trailer version you don't download unless it's immediately followed by, "Damn, I have to get DSL or something and get rid of this modem."

Pan & Scan isn't perfect, not by a long shot. Sometimes it's actively lousy. Often. So which side of the disc I put in depends on what I expect the movie to be like. Some films are composed to be p&s'ed later, and so you lose little except scenery. And since film cells are more square than oblong, sometimes instead of P&S they'll take extra content from outside the frame in the theatrical release. In that sense, the theatrical release is a pan & scan of the actual film. (But often that image contains boom mikes and such. It even makes it onto the print, and a badly framed projector will show that. Really ruined Lemony Snicket for me.)

Other directors really take advantage of the full screen. Leone is of course one of those directors. Generally, the better the director, the more likely I am to value the full image over being able to see the details. For your basic summer comedies I'd rather not tire my eyes out squinting to see details that aren't there.

A badly P&S'ed film is just as obnoxious, for different reasons that you already know about. Especially in a two-shot; I've seen more than one scene where all you could see were the tips of the nose and the lips and a lot of scenery in between, because the two characters were talking to each other face on from opposite ends of the wide screen. If a film contains a scene like that it should not be made available in fullscreen. But if the director anticipates the P&S version (or, in the case of some Pixar movies, where they actually re-compose some scenes for the P&S version), I'd rather see what I see in higher resolution.

The solution is going to be the new high-definition DVDs and wide-format TVs. That will end the debate for certain. Meantime, I'm going to make my choice of fullscreen vs. widescreen on a case by case basis.

[2sick2pray.livejournal.com]

a.) No. No that's not cool. That's not cool at all.... That is in fact, terrible.

b.) SCRUBS RULES.

[findingjuliet.livejournal.com]

dude! i just found scrubs myself about a month ago. i bought the first season on DVD and then downloaded 2-4. I, too, love Dr. Cox, but obviously I identify more with the Braff character. Sometimes I even know what he's going to do before he does it, even when I know that the writers are clearly doing something that they expect the general public to find unexpected (at least with regard to dating). His relationship to Dr. Reed is painful for me to watch at times, though I don't want to get into discussing it with you until you've seen it all (though i'd love to discuss with you at some point). i have them all downloaded if you want and can't get it yourself from mininova.org

[findingjuliet.livejournal.com]

fuck, dude. this is yancy. i guess ty was logged in on my computer.

crazy ass new roommates.

[stdelia.livejournal.com]

Very yucky, and also I agree with the widescreen bit.