I thought these were three great mash-ups of the year in film. One just came out, the other two have been circling the internet for a few weeks. I especially like the first two, specifically Matt Shapiro’s use of Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a Film). I’ve included them all below. Read the full story

From the people behind The Sequels That Bombed comes a new graphic highlighting the superhero genre through the years. I originally found it on Firstshowing.net via Koldcast TV and you can view a smaller version below, but you will definitely want to click it to check out the full thing. Read the full story

The other day fellow Film Stage writer Hash Aguirre told me he purchased J.J. Abrams’ summer hit Star Trek on iTunes via a digital file. I was extremely confused when he told me this because like me, Hash is a big time hard disc media supporter. This is when he hit me with a bomb shell I was never expecting. He told me that iTunes was offering DVD style features along with the films purchase. I couldn’t believe it, so I went on to iTunes myself and I saw the picture above. What I want you to notice is the upper right hand corner of the screen, the tiny box that says iTunes Extras. Then look underneath that box: Read the full story

Finally, a high profile filmmaker has spoken out against the crime of television pan & scan broadcasts of feature films. In the latest issue of the DGA (Directors Guild of America) Quaterly director Steven Soderbergh outright attacks networks such as HBO, AMC, and Showtime for cropping films shot in the 2.40:1 ratio to fit high definition wide screen TV’’s (typically 1.78:1) or worse, cropping them to a 4:3 ratio for standard definition viewing. “It’s [expletive] lame to watch Jaws— a film that uses the 2.40 ratio as well as any ever produced— in the wrong format on HBO.” Soderbergh goes on to describe HBO as the “poster child for stupidity.” Apparently,the filmmaker placed a call to someone at HBO with pull to make sure that the Oceans Films were not toyed with. The network he attacks the most however is AMC. He gets mad at AMC for advertising films in a letterbox format then airing them in pan & scan. This is odd since they embrace the letterbox format for all of their original programing, yet don’t appear to show the same respect for the films they broadcast on their network. In his final statement Soderbegh states “As directors, we can decide to fix this, quickly, or let it continue down its gangrenous path until there is no longer any distinction on TV between movies and television.”

I’ve been waiting so long for something like this to happen. I have complained for years about how the networks butcher a film’s composition for the sake of “fitting it” to a smaller screen (I own many films on DVD and gladly watch them in the 2.40:1 ratio on my tiny 13″ television in my bedroom). AMC isn’t the only culprit though. Some have gotten a little better by at least cropping a 2.40:1 format film to a standard 16:9 instead of a 4:3, but it is still unacceptable. I have to agree with Soderbergh about HBO being a “poster child for stupidity” though. I’ve only used HBO once when I went to college and my school offered it so they wouldn’t have to create separate movie channels. Die Hard happened to be starting and what I saw just angered me. They ran the film in 4:3 except for scenes where the shot was too wide. That is when they switched to the 2.40:1 for the necessary cut and then back to 4:3. I couldn’t understand. If they have the film in 2.40:1 why not just air it that way? I was actually really happy when I saw Oceans 12 on USA in the original ratio, but then I never saw any movie air that way again. TV networks are very aware that almost everyone owns a wide screen TV at this point. Almost all original television programming today is shot in with a 16:9 ratio in mind. So why would they continue to air films in 4:3? I guarantee that if I put out a survey asking people how they would want films displayed on TV and explained how aspect ratios worked that this whole mess would be solved in a week. As Soderbergh states, it is up to the filmmakers and producers to make this right.

Do you agree that television networks need to stop messing with film aspect ratios?