It seems like only a few years ago that the bloody horrors of the high-definition DVD format wars pitted brother against brother and traumatized a generation of couch potatoes. But really, it was only a few months ago that HD-DVD, now as forgotten a cultural phenomenon as Crystal Pepsi, was finally defeated at the hands of Blu-Ray. Now, with movie fans the world over having only one new delivery vector on which to spend their excess cash, it is the grim moment that we must face the casualties of that war, and the biggest may be movie magic itself.
At least, that's according to Guardian film blogger Phelim O'Neill, who's been doing a bit of soul-searching as regards the desirablilty of seeing literally everything that Blu-Ray can show us. A common complaint amongst hi-def enthusiasts is that the medium plays havoc on old movies; in the pre-CGI days of low-tech theatrical special effects, sets, makeup, and camera trickery were often spared from being too obvious by the fact that the camera generally didn't catch it all. In high definition, every paper-thin wall, every pasteboard mock-up, every wig and every guy wire is apparent to even the laziest viewer.
But that's not O'Neill's beef. His complaint involves modern movies, where incompetently executed CGI can look far phonier than the back-lot studio sets of yesteryear; where "any surface with even a slight kick to it reveals camera crews, bystanders, movie equipment"; and where "important plotlines and revelations go unnoticed as you spend minutes staring at the fabric of costumes, the wallpaper". Movies, he argues, were never meant to be a mirror to reality; they were always meant to be a hazy, diffused fantasy, and the more realistic they become, the more they lose the special qualities of unreality that make them such a successful artform.
"I watched the standard DVD of No Country for Old Men, then saw Tommy Lee Jones again in the Blu-Ray of In the Valley of Elah, two films made in the same year," O'Neill writes. "In the first, Jones looked merely craggy; in the second, it was as if putrefaction had set in." While we're sure that Jones wouldn't take kindly to being the poster child for not looking too closely at people, it's become increasingly hard to deny that the enhancements of high-definition can be a mixed blessing; as O'Neill says, how are you supposed to know what to look at when everything looks so good?
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