Originally Posted by DVDfever:
“That's like saying you could crop every part of the Mona Lisa except for her smile, because that's all people look at(!)
However, the reason her smile is enigmatic is because of everything that surrounds her.
I saw No Country for Old Men earlier, and while I thought the film sucked, it was very well filmed, and even if people were in the middle of the picture, you couldn't crop it without destroying the visuals.”
16:9 cropping is not as drastic as that - and film is definitely not art. Art is static, you admire everything about it. Film is where you focus on one particular part of the image, the one with the most action. When you watch the fight scene in Star Wars, you don't look at the background, you look at the fight, in the centre of the screen.
Cutting off a piece of the background is hardly going to spoil your viewing pleasure, and will let the picture fill the whole screen in the process. Of course, if you are a die-hard fan full-widescreen films are good to see, but for normal people like relatives or your parents, they don't really care about that, and often complain about the black bars.