The US Tartan Video DVD release is not "anamorphic widescreen" whatever it may say on the box. It's full frame, and by thoughtless cropping and scanning ruins some of the most interesting compositions! No wonder Tartan went out of business! What the hell can we do except boycott certain products?
share I hear you loud and clear, iainhammer. Tartan Video are a bunch of pieces of sh*t. I had another DVD from Tartan that had this same problem, The Page Turner. The only way to watch them in widescreen format is on your computer monitor with a software media player like VLC, http://www.videolan.org .
Since the computer software can display it correctly in widescreen format(without chopping off the right and left ends of the film), I can only conclude that Tartan employed some fly-by-night piece of crap DVD-Authoring company to work on both of these films for them. And Tartan got what they paid for!!! I wonder what other Tartan films have this same incompetent flaw built into their widescreen films.
The Tartan US DVD I just watched was most definitely anamorphic widescreen. My TV is not set to automatically stretch non-anamorphic discs; they always appear as window-boxed on all four sides unless I manually tamper with the image. This film automatically filled my widescreen TV monitor without any cropping or stretching of the image. Andrea Arnold has composed her last two films (Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights) in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Perhaps she has had later issues of Red Road revised to match?
My IMDb lists: http://www.imdb.com/user/ur5570856/lists?ref_=nv_usr_lst_3