saxguy, that would not be the choice I would make. I would not allow the media format to dictate what I watched. Nor would I willingly watch a DVD version of a film in other than the original aspect ratio (OAR) in most cases.
What I would suggest instead is that you have ready a set of techniques to deal with aspect ratios that do not match your screen. Meaning that if you have a choice, rent or buy the Widescreen Anamorphic version. If you have to rent a Fullscreen DVD (because you patronize Blockbuster Video) or because the original material was made in Fullscreen, show it with "sidebars". If you rent an Anamorphic disk of a 2.35:1 production, expect the narrow letterbox bars top and bottom.
Some material I enjoy, such as the movie The Abyss is only available in letterboxed widescreen (the black bars are recorded onto the media). I use a constant width 4:3 display, so I don't care an awfull lot (in my setup it means a slight but noticeable lower resolution in the image, as I use masking top and bottom with my projector), but hopefully your display or DVD player will let you "zoom" the center section of the image to fill the width of your screen, cropping only those black letterbox bars.
The world is full of different aspect ratios, and 4:3 and 2.35:1 are very common, and your 16:9 display is a good compromise between these two aspect ratios.
Gary