edited by Jonathan Doyle

Mafioso (The Criterion Collection, 3.18.2008) Nino Badalamenti is a supervisor in a car manufacturing plant who hasn't taken a vacation in over two years. On his way out the door to visit his beloved childhood hometown of Sicily -- with his blonde wife and daughters -- Nino is handed a package by his boss and asked to deliver it to a powerful and influential Sicilian gangster named Don Vincenzo. Once in Sicily, Nino has a hoot seeing friends and family, but his wife has trouble fitting in and is unfairly dismissed as a snob by Nino's family. Even more worrisome, Nino finds himself entangled in an intricate web of secret mafioso dealings and is eventually sent on an unexpectedly... elaborate errand. (continued)

Upcoming

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Hancock

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The Whackness

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Diminished Capacity

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson

Holding Trevor

Kabluey

We are Together

July 9

Full Battle Rattle

July 11

A Man Named Pearl

August

Eight Miles High

Garden Party

Harold

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Meet Dave

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

The Stone Angel

July 18

A Very British Gangster

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Lou Reed's Berlin

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Two Tickets to Paradise

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Boy A

In the mid '50s, before

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In the mid '50s, before CinemaScope lenses were perfected, everything and everyone looked horizontally distorted. The joke was that actors had the "CinemaScope mumps." But on widescreen TVs today -- in bars, people's living rooms, electronic media showrooms -- the distortion is easily double what the CinemaScope mumps syndrome delivered, and nobody blinks an eye. Across- the-board high-def widescreen TV is being promised by Direct TV and Comcast, etc., but the vast majority of broadcast images are still standard-sized (aspect ratio of 4 x 3, meant to fit your mom and pop's TV)...and yet!...the idiots who own widescreen TVs are showing everything at the 16 x 9 ratio because they want to get their money's worth -- i.e., I bought a widescreen TV, I want to see widescreen TV! Filling up your 16 x 9 TV screen (like what...a gas tank?) is the single most cretinous visual vogue afoot in today's digital-entertainment universe, and there are hundreds of millions of widescreen TVs that are beaming this idiocy right now...horizontally bloated newscasters on ESPN, vaguely egg-shaped basketballs...the proportion of every last object pulled sideways like Turkish taffy. I'm saying this not because it's new, but because widescreen TV bloat has become the dominant visual mode by which tens of millions absorb TV images, and I resent this moronic aesthetic being so ubiquitous in our culture.

Claire Simpson's editing of The<< previous | next >>Speaking of the recently and

Posted by Jeffrey Wells on October 26, 2005 at 08:40 AM