This is a paragraph buried in Dave Kehr’s typically erudite piece on the restored Godfathers:

The tight grain of the image, so important a component of [Gordon] Willis’s original low-light photography, has returned to particularly spectacular effect in the four-disc Blu-ray edition. The effect is not unlike that of a pristine 35-millimeter print projected in perfect focus — a rare enough phenomenon in a movie theater and, until quite recently, inconceivable in the living room.

The point of that second sentence isn’t noted often enough: Home viewing today can be with an outlay of not too much money up front not just a fair equivalent of theater-going but in a lot of cases better. (And of course for most people in the country the option of seeing, say The Godfather on a big screen in any condition isn’t available.) As I wrote earlier this year:

And these days, of course, the movie theater has become a zoo. (Before a film I saw recently at a megaplex, we were shown a commercial that featured a cartoon piece of snot in an old west setting being run out of town by a sheriff named “Mucinex” or somesuch. The theater showed it twice before the film—and then had it blaring again on an oversized screen in the lobby.) Given a scenario in which a couple or a family can a) stay in and watch a movie in superb and powerful reproduction at home in peace and quiet with popcorn at hand or b) pay $20 and $40+, respectively, before snacks to schlep to a cacophonous environment, be bombarded with commercials, experience poor projection, and have someone texting in the seat next to them, the choice isn’t even close.

A couple of weeks ago I went to one of the swankier plexes in town—the Harkins Fashion Square, in Scottsdale—to see Wanted. Outside of the picture’s being dark (because the company was scrimping on projection lamps), it was showing on a screen that couldn’t accomodate the width of the film.

In other words, a public showing in a theater suddenly became the equivalent of a cropped VHS picture on a square TV. While amenities like stadium seating have made things better, in most other ways home viewing gets better even as old-fashioned movie-going is regressing.

Which brings us back to Blu-ray, which still has not taken off. There are myriad reasons: The discs are too expensive; there aren’t enough films available, and far too few tony titles that really show off the clarity; and the players remain costly, too. (There are other, unseen, drawbacks, too, like the hidden costs of DRM.)

And in any case, the consensus seems to be that they will be around in any case for only five to ten years, until all home movie watching becomes wholly digital and wholly HD. The battles about control of those digital bits aside, what seems incontrovertible is that the very near future holds immense progress on something that matters more than DRM or box office or anything else: Movies being seen the way they were meant to be seen.