JuJuDeals

Imagine yourself sitting in front of your luscious new HDTV. You’re reclining in a comfortable chair. The lights have been appropriately dimmed, and you have a bevy of snacks and drinks within arm’s reach. You can almost feel your surround sound speakers itching with anxious excitement, waiting for the moment you allow them to blast you with glorious, depth-of-field creating sound. You pick up the remote, press play, and are greeted with…

A low-fidelity, bootleg copy of Earnest Goes to Jail.

Seriously? What were you thinking? If you needed to know some great movies to watch in High Definition, you could have just asked. We’re full of recommendations. Here are 10 awesome Action/Adventure movies to enjoy on your HDTV:

• The Fifth Element- This gorgeously filmed movie is just begging to be watched in HD. There is so much detail in nearly every frame, with vibrant colors and vivid backgrounds. Plus, it’s just an all around fun movie. Every character is memorable, with special nods going to Gary Oldman as the sinister Jeanbaptiste Emanuel Zorg and Chris Tucker as the completely over the top TV personality, Ruby Rhod. With Tucker’s so-weird-it’s-awesome turn as the ultimate conclusion of the garish TV host, it’s hard to believe that this movie came out well before reality TV had become a part of the everyday entertainment spectrum. Just make sure you get the Remastered version, as the original HD cut has some errors. Look for “Experience High Definition” on the front-bottom of the cover to be framed in silver, not grey. Also, among the sound options on the back, look for “Dolby TrueHD.”
• The Incredibles- One of our all time favorites. The art direction, inspiration, casting, and execution of this film are near-perfect, showing once again that Pixar can do no wrong. The super-stylized characters and fantastic art deco set pieces are shown off to excellent effect with some of the most interesting cinematography a CG film has ever seen. Take particular note of the Dash whizzing around the island, as you really get a feel for the speed when you can see every tree in the jungle flash by in High Definition.
• Blade Runner- A movie so good, we’d watch it in standard def, projected onto a garbage bag. In HD, forget about it. This movie was criminally under-appreciated when it was first released in theaters, only to develop an enormous cult following on VHS and DVD. It practically wrote the book on the way the future looks in film. If you’ve ever seen a bustling megalopolis or decrepit, lived-in future in a film, know that Blade Runner did it first.
• Star Trek Reboot- We know you saw this in theaters. Everybody saw this in theaters. Twice. Whether you’re new to the franchise or a die-hard Trekkie, everyone loved this movie, and with good reason. It’s a loving reimagining that hits all the right notes; nostalgic when it should be, reverent when it should be, and completely different when it should be. The only problem with this movie is that it ends.
• Iron Man- Watching this movie in High Def is like walking through a hot rod convention in the future. Every glossy, high tech piece of cherry red equipment pops off the screen. Robert Downey Jr. remade his entire career on the strength of his performance as the sarcastic industrialist genius Tony Stark. Couple that with the fact that it’s one of the funnest movies of the last few years, and you have a guaranteed crowd pleaser.
• The Dark Knight- This movie may lack the bright colors and shiny chromes of its comic book film cousin Iron Man, but don’t let that fool you. Gotham City is captured in all its grit and desperation, with the Batman sinking into the inky blacks with appropriate stealthiness. Some scenes were even filmed in IMAX, so if you have reeeeeally wide screen, you’re in for a treat. Heath Ledger’s role as maniacal madman The Joker absolutely shocked audiences who had been scratching their head at the casting choice, and left millions mourning the loss of an actor who many didn’t fully appreciate until too late. Whether you love comic book adaptations, hate them, or are completely indifferent, this film rises above any easy labels and tells a deeply human story of nobility, vengeance, and loss. Do not, under any circumstances, miss this movie.
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy- Okay, yeah, I know we’re cheating here. It’s three movies. So what. They’re all great entertainment, and benefit wonderfully from viewing in HD. The grand, epic landscapes give a breathtaking sense of scale, and the battle scenes are truly dizzying in their detail. This movie raised the bar for fantasy films, as well as for scenes of enormous armies clashing into each other. If you have a day to kill, we recommend watching all of the extended editions back to back. Just fight the urge to go outside in your elf ears and forest green cloak.
• Dawn of the Dead- So this movie is a little more on the Action/Horror side than Action/Adventure, but it’s still a great movie to watch in HD. The subdued hues of the movie give a great feeling of the oppressive, claustrophobic, and decomposing atmosphere of the zombie apocalypse, and the bursts of scarlet viscera show up admirably as well. The blacks are deep and inky, giving the shadows a truly threatening presence. Things really get kicking in the final scenes, when hundreds of hungry undead are clawing for the unlucky survivors, and HD does a great job of showing off every grizzly, gory ghoul.
• Sin City- Another movie that nearly everyone has seen. Sin City blew people away with its two-fisted take on noir and its astonishing stylistic choices. The entire film is in ultra-high-contrast black and white, with occasional splashes of color to draw attention to specific cinematic elements. The story follows several protagonists in an interwoven tapestry of individual noir tales, but each odyssey has some story and thematic ties to the others. If you like film noir, you’ll love this jet-black and ivory-white love letter to the genre.
• Watchmen- While this movie does have its share of action, it is not exactly an action movie. The film is a sight to behold in HD, showing off nearly everything good about the medium; pitch blacks, ever present urban grit, grand, sweeping cityscapes, and fantastical elements truly unique to this movie. We can’t imagine watching Dr. Manhattan’s crystal clockwork rising from the red dust of Mars in anything but High Def. Jackie Earle Hailey turns in a fan-favorite performance as Rhorschach, the monotone, broken-souled vigilante with the ever-shifting ink blot mask, and the ensemble cast does a wonderful job of conveying just what kind of damaged person would actually try to put on a mask and do battle with something so undefinable as “evil.” This movie may have superheroes, but it is truly a human drama.

No, it’s not a bizarre reworking of the beloved Tom Selleck crime-busting show Magnum: P.I., though we at JuJuDeals certainly appreciate the heroic efforts of the fantastically mustachioed champion of justice. You may have noticed one of those two letters (”p” and “i”) following a set of numbers like “1080″ or “720″ on an HDTV you were eyeballing, and taking a cue from the brilliant, deductive mind of Magnum P.I., you just had to know what they mean.

Well wonder no more, detective.

In this case, the P’s and I’s we’re referring to stand not for “Private” and “Investigator,” but instead for “Progressive scan” and “Interlace.” Interlace was, until recently, the standard way to broadcast and view television images. See, unlike the flipbooks you used to make in elementary school by drawing in the corners of your textbooks, standard definition TV didn’t just show a series of complete, unadulterated frames in rapid succession. It used a method called “interlacing,” where it cut out every other row of pixels and replaced them with the rows that would have appeared in the next frame.

Imagine a set of horizontal window blinds with an image projected on them. Now imagine that behind the blinds was an accompanying image that would have followed the original in sequence. What interlacing did, essentially, was open the blinds halfway, slicing the two pictures so that you saw half of the first image and half of the second. This was to smooth the illusion of motion that TVs trick your brain into perceiving. It was a good idea, but you did lose quite a bit of image clarity.

Then came all these newfangled HDTVs and High Def computer monitors and what-have-you, which can show you things in Progressive scan mode. This is a lot more like the flipbooks you got sent to the principal’s office for making. Progressive scan TVs show you the complete, individual frames at high speeds. Pause the picture, and the image will be complete, perfect, and still, like looking out a window at someone else’s way more interesting and action-packed life.

Simply put, “i” is okay-but-outdated, and “p” is as true-to-life as we can make it…

For now.