The Projector: A K (or two) too far? (Patreon)

I've been thinking a lot this week about Lane Brown's recent Vulture piece "TVs Are Too Good Now," which explains why the latest and greatest movies played on the latest and greatest home electronics equipment can look kind of bad. You should read the whole piece, but the gist of it is this: 4K TVs are essentially too high-res for most CGI effects, which are rendered in 2K. When watched in a projected film this discrepancy blends in better than it does at home. (TV effects are usually rendered in 4K but this pushes against pre-existing budget constraints so they don't always turn out looking so well, either.)

It's not the only way TVs have gotten better than ever in ways the experience watching them has not. Has anyone tried watching Seinfeld on Netflix? A nightmare! It's blown up to fit the 16:9 frame and the picture quality looks almost VHS-like. (I've seen better-looking public-domain films on Prime Video.) It might look okay on an iPad or a laptop but on a television it's basically unwatchable. It's hardly the only show to suffer from an attempt to bring it up to date for modern TVs, either. Remember when Buffy the Vampire Slayer got a badly received HD remaster a few years back? Hold onto your physical media. (Or buy it for the first time. A lot of it is dirt cheap these days.)

There's a flip side to this, however. As Brown mentions in the piece, old movies look great. Not all old movies, of course. Nobody likes what James Cameron did to T2, for instance, and some studios (and even directors) have erred on the side of smoothing out the grain and making the colors look too contemporary. But I can't recommend enough the experience of watching a truly great HD/UHD transfer of an older film. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, for instance, looks amazing in 4K, and companies like Criterion know how to merge the old and new like nobody's business. One of the first films I watched after upgrading my system a few years back was Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point on a Criterion Blu-ray. The grain, readers... the glorious, glorious film grain.

So is it a problem when the effects in, say, Shang-Chi look janky at home? For sure. The HD/4K era has introduced a slew of problems, including the mistreatment of old material in the name of remastering. But the right movie on one of these newfangled screens can be breathtaking. So let me throw out a question: on the whole, are we living in a new golden age of home viewing, or do the problems overwhelm the benefits?