monkeys and my butt

okay, i just remembered something to rant about. this week, tim burton's remake of planet of the apes has been on tv a couple of times. because i know that there's one local station here that doesn't edit the movies it plays, i arranged to tape it for later viewing seeing as i'd missed it at the theatre and it's not really a movie i'd pay for at the video store. i'd heard all the reviews when it first came out, but i've remained curious enough about it to perk up when i saw it in the tv week. last night, while queueing up the vhs tape to record csi (so i could watch the apprentice), i caught a couple minutes of the movie. at first i thought maybe the tape was going wonky or i was more tired then i thought because everyone on the screen looked kind of weird and distorted. that's when i realized that they'd squished the widescreen to fit on the narrower tv screen. i hadn't seen that done to a movie since, um, the early 80's. i couldn't believe it. i still can't. the technology is there to either pan & scan (ptooey) or letterbox it to preserve the panorama. but, no. they decided to make it look like some crazy sunday afternoon 70's western rather than miss a few side bits or piss off the stupid by putting in the black bars (which, btw, you don't notice after the first few minutes of the movie, so stop fucking complaining about letterboxing being too "distracting"). oh, i'll still watch it, but i refuse to be held responsible for the level of distruction i will lay upon the earth as a result of being subjected to two hundred and forty minutes of squishy, too-tall, too-skinny monkeys running the planet.