TO ALL STANDARD DVD USERS

I was once among you, living and breathing in blissful ignorance of the true power of my DVD player... until this weekend.

Having come into some money recently, I decided that I would finally find myself a nice HDTV and settle down. I had been enjoying a standard tube-based television, a gift from a close friend who moved a few years ago and didn't need it anymore. The screen was pleasantly large, and my DVDs appeared just fine via a standard red/white/yellow video/audio cable. Over the past few years, however, standard wear-and-tear began to appear. The power button on the front of the set broke, but the remote control was all we ever used and worked fine, so I ignored this as a cosmetic deficiency and, hey, the price was still right. More annoying were the speakers, which had begun to blow out creating a noticeable but ignorable hiss whenever the TV was set to a reasonable volume.

Then I got myself an HDTV, and the difference is remarkable. DVD is nothing when it isn't connected via component cables - this is a simple fact. I had no idea the image from my seven year old DVD player could look so good. So it's nice to know that even though a PS3 is in my near future, I don't actually have to replace my already massive DVD collection (which was annoying enough when I had to convert from VHS to DVD in the first place).

So, standard DVD player looking great. Took me about a day before I realized that I hadn't reset my DVD player to display anamorphic (I thought the formatting looked off). The real joy has come from my XBOX 360, now displaying at 1080i. HOLY FLURKING SHNIT. Bioshock is now the prettiest thing I have ever seen that wasn't a woman.

As a test, I downloaded episode 2.01 of Lost off of XBOX Live and borrowed a friend's DVD to compare the image between standard, already impressive anamorphic DVD and HD displays. The reduction in digital noise and deep, rich blacks are the biggest eye-grabbers. It's a marked improvement, even at only 720p on a set capable of 1080p, and cements my need to get a Blu-Ray player soon.

I was going to wait, but God bless the Best Buy Rewards system. After buying my TV, I checked how many points I was awarded (accumulate a certain amount of points and receive a coupon for X dollars off). Lo and behold, I'm getting a $250 coupon. That PS3 is practically payed off already. This in addition to the ridiculously low price I received on the TV (about $600-750 off comparable sets elsewhere), and Best Buy's policy of matching and improving upon price differences between local competitors (knocking off an additional $360), and boy, can you get a good deal on these things.

To make a long story short (too late), HDTV is completely worth it. There are a lot of fantastic deals you can find for yourself with a just an hour or two of research online, and the difference in quality is intrinsically obvious with even your existing DVD player. I knew I wanted one, but I didn't fully realize how much until I got one home.

FINAL THOUGHTS (FOR ANYONE MAKING THE CONVERSION):

1. DON'T FORGET TO ADJUST THE DISPLAY MODE ON YOUR DVD PLAYER TO ANAMORPHIC. It's easy to fix, and easy to forget about if you've had a standard 4:3 television for years and never had to fiddle with it. While you're at it, don't forget to adjust the settings on any videogame settings as well. They'll automatically look better already, but they'll look at least twice as good using their maximum output.

2. CUSTOMIZE YOUR VIDEO DISPLAY YOURSELF. When I purchased my HDTV, I asked about the video displays at the store. They're automatically set to factory default setting that pumps up the contrast and the color to a degree that is literally painful to watch when you look at it for too long. When I asked about configuration, the salesperson offered a service in which a professional comes to your home and adjusts them for you... for 300 dollars extra. I didn't pay for this extra, but was slightly concerned when I got home that I wouldn't be able to get the display to look right. WRONG. There are several settings available automatically on my set, and it only took the slightest tweaking to get the image to look as natural as can be.

3. GET AS MANY COMPONENT/HDMI INPUTS AS POSSIBLE. Trust me, once you see the difference, they're all you'll want to use.

If I discover any other extras or defects I'll update later, but if anyone reads this who doesn't think there's a difference in video quality between your standard TV and HDTV, you genuinely don't know what you're talking about.

Wow.

Film Theory 1.02

Cellular phones have killed movies.

Not in the way you think, either. Sure, we all hate those complete assholes who neglect to turn off their phones in the theater, so that halfway through a movie you might very well be enjoying, you have that annoying "DUN-nuh-nuh-nuh-DUN-nuh-nuh-nuh-DUH-nuh-nuh-nuh-NUH" noise coming out of nowhere. (And yes, I have occasionally been that asshole - but it was an accident, I swear.) I'm actually making the argument that the invention of cellular phones has had a massive, and largely negative, impact on the films themselves.

No really, think about it. The popularity of cellular phones in real life makes it outright implausible that any character in a movie wouldn't have one. As a result, they have the instantaneous ability to call anyone for any reason. Trapped by zombies? Call someone. Susan's husband is a murderer? Call her. "Hey Susan, you're husband's the murderer." "Oh, thanks!" Cellular phones would be the answer to practically every suspenseful problem ever created... and so they must be stopped at all costs.

Screenwriters are constantly forced to work around this frustrating device with the following lines of dialogue. Try to remember how many times you've heard them!

"Damn, I can't get a signal!"

"My battery's run out."

"They shot my phone!"

Every single time you hear one of these buzz-phrases, or variations thereof, think about the scene you're watching. If the character's cellular phone worked, would the suspense be dead? Would the movie, in fact, be over? Overwhelming odds point to yes.

I was doing some research on the original series of Star Trek recently, and I discovered an interesting factoid about the Starfleet communicators they invented for the show. Apparently, Gene Roddenberry created them specifically so they could break down or lose their signal, because he knew that otherwise, Kirk could just call for backup at any given time and that would be the end of the episode. Cell phones were a problem for screenwriters before they were even invented! (Another interesting tidbit is that the original Starfleet communicators were flip-phones, exactly like most cellular phones on the market today. Coincidence? Geeks working for Nokia? Or just prescient sci-fi? You decide.)


Very few movies or television shows actually embrace the possibilities of cellular phones to further their plotting, rather than work around them because they're a hindrance. 24 would be a very difficult show to write if Jack couldn't call Chloe at the drop of a hat to relay information, or receive blueprints of whatever abandoned warehouse he's breaking into this week. I'd very much like to see a season of the show in which Jack doesn't have his phone, and is constantly forced to borrow quarters in order to check in with CTU.

Another favorite of mine is the film Cellular, an already forgotten genre film in which Kim Basinger plays a kidnapping victim who calls Chris Evans at random, and needs to keep him on the phone throughout the entire film in order to save her family. Cellular actually uses cellular phones in varied and interesting ways from a storytelling perspective. Signals get crossed, so Chris has to steal someone's phone. His battery is dying, so he needs to steal a charger at gunpoint. He needs to stay silent because the kidnappers are in the room, so someone drives up next to him blaring their car stereo. Clever stuff. The film is basically a one-trick pony, but it's clever enough to keep finding new ways to milk its conceit for the full running time.

One of my screenwriting professors in college used to talk about popular movie cliches. For example, the shot of a character at a bus stop, about to leave town. The bus pulls up between the camera and the character, then pulls away, and he's still there. Yeah, it's a cliche, and yeah, we've seen it a hundred times. But as my professor said, "We keep using it because no one's thought of a better way to do the scene."

I know you writers are on strike, and I support you wholeheartedly. I just want to point out that you now have plenty of time to discover a better way to incorporate cell phones into your narrative, rather than find excuses to pretend like they don't exist. If someone ever figures out a way to ensure that cell phones always have a decent signal, it could mean the end of scripted entertainment as we know it (or they might decide to make every new film a period piece).

(Strange but true: Film actress Hedy Lamarr actually co-developed the wireless communications patent that eventually led to the invention of the cell phone. That's Hedy...)

Hollywood? I'm just going to make this clear: I swear that if I hear the line, "I can't get a signal" one... more... time...

I'm going to know that you got lazy.

(See this? This is you.)