UNBELIEVABLE!! Days of Heaven, Platoon, Die Hard and Ong-Bak... all NOT in HD!

Well just in case... I've set the DVR to get all six of these movies anyway as they appear over the next week or so (including Platoon's next replay).


The worst that can happen is they'll be disappointing, but they also might be surprises, as apparently Platoon was (for those who did get it the other night).


All in all, Ong-Bak is still the one I'm most looking forward to because it's the one I haven't actually seen already. I understand it's supposed to be remarkable from a martial arts perspective because there are NO SPECIAL EFFECTS. No CGI magic. Just pure skill! I don't have any great expectations on the story or the rest of it, but I have been told the martial arts sequences are quite surprising because of the pure skill exhibited.


But for anyone who hasn't ever seen "Days of Heaven", it's a classic which won the Cinematography Oscar for Haskell Wexler. Genuinely beautiful when I saw it in the theater back in the day. Let's hope the print and HD(?) transfer does not insult the craft.


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"Days of Heaven (1978) is an exquisite, lyrical film of exceptional visual beauty and only the second film of writer-director Terrence Malick, following his critically-acclaimed success with an equally-haunting and visually-striking Badlands (1973). This moody, elegiac film has universally been acclaimed as a cinematographic masterpiece, from the talents of Cuban-born European Nestor Almendros (and 'additional photography' by Haskell Wexler), with naturally-lit, sweeping, 70mm images of crystal clarity and scope, and artfully composed scenes reminiscent of Andrew Wyeth paintings. The film's tagline proclaimed: "Your eyes... Your ears... Your senses... will be overwhelmed.


"However, the surreal, epic-type film counterposes its superlative photography with a slim tale of working class protagonists, told with sparse dialogue and the jarring, quirky, drawling, and dispassionate, colloquial voice-over narration of a streetwise, but unschooled 13 year old girl (Manz). The film is also a social chronicling of the rough-hewn, simple lives of migrant American harvest workers in the Gilded Age during a time of growing industrialization, told with a mix of classical music, contemporary music, and natural sounds."

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Very strange. It doesn't show in "HDTV Listing" subset schedule.


But it does show in the "Daily Schedule" (showing all channels) where it is listed just for the non-HD Sho channels it will appear on.


And it also does show on "Movies A-Z" in the "P" group.


This is odd, since normally all movies on Sho East or West also show up "HDTV Listing" (else what good would it really be??). But I suspect their filter for "HDTV Listing" picks up just those movies which are designated as "Widescreen HD" or "Widescreen Upconvert". Clearly Platoon has neither of these designations in its info.


This would also explain the largetime gaps in the "HDTV Listing" that I've always puzzled about but never been able to fathom. Now it makes sense... although it's still very annoying as you're likely to miss movies like this unless you're browsing your provider's Onscreen Guide (Comcast, for me) for the next two weeks, as I just happened to be yesterday. I didn't even know Platoon was playing, regardless of whether it was in 16:9 or HDTV or upconvert or OAR or whatever because I only look at Sho's "HDTV Listing".


Oh, and this would also let TitanTV off the hook as being the culprit here. It's obvious that the source of the confusion goes back to Sho itself... assuming it actually was 16:9 (and HD) as others have reported.

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Haven't seen it yet. Still have another 1 1/2 hours before it starts. Are you saying that MaxHD presented this in 4:3? WHAT A CRIME!!!


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Well I must say I am quite confused by this day's schedule. The times shown are in several out-of-sequence groupings, and don't seem to match "reality" as shown on other schedule sites such as TitanTV.


So how would I utilize this page to "minimize my chances of missing something"? It seems totally crazy. For example there's nothing scheduled between 11:35AM and 7PM. That's obviously wrong. Also, the leading items are out-of-sequence PM entries (and appear to be the missing afternoon items) except that they don't reflect the afternoon of May 8!


I guess I'll send an email to them, as is my civic duty.


But "Days of Heaven" in 4:3 on MaxHD? Good grief. What a shame.