I don't even care if the bars are larger than the picture, or how large the bars are, it just makes me feel better knowing I am for sure watching the movie the way I am supposed to, in widescreen.
You.Are.Insane.
I'm not "Joe-six-pack"..but I do like seeing the picture as large and as clear as I can, while still seeing objects in the dimensions as intended (round objects being round, not egg shaped). That means I don't 'stretch' a 4x3 picture to fill the screen, or zoom it to fill the horizontal at the expense of the vertical.
Play with the settings on your screen and your dvd player..maybe even the cable box. I know the settings on my player in combination with the widescreen telly produce different results than just using the settings on either alone. I live in a pal reg 4 area, but get many disks from NTSC reg 1. While my player and telly will play the NTCS disks automatically, if I turn the dvd player off and move the switch at the back to NTSC instead of PAL , I get a picture with no jumping or twitching...but it changes the image size slightly. Cycling thru the TV options of 4:3, 16:9, Cinema, Subtitle, Zoom, or Auto usually fixes it
Really, if you love your image being boxed by black bars..then get some black perspex and make a nice frame and glue it to the front of your TV.