This weekend really sent me back to the old days… Coming home before a slow weekend night, Friday or Saturday – looking through the Scene trying to find something to do. Those nights when there’s just nothing that seems interesting so you grab a bottle of wine, some take out, or even grab the ingredients for your favorite easy thing to cook (I love to cook), and hop into Blockbuster to find the latest OR the greatest movie you’ve either not seen yet, or haven’t seen since you were 12.
I miss those days! I could’ve seen it coming a few years back when RedBox was becoming the “thing”, and Netfix was still good… I think I may have even called it then! Now that the movie rental store has gone the way of the record store (Tower Records was a tragic loss), your current rendition of the $1 movie rental kiosk just isn’t living up to my movie-taste standards, at ALL. When it had a real competition, I mean a storefront and not the kiosk version of my old Fav, Blockbuster, it had real expectations to live up to. Now the kiosk only offers a round table diversion of Hollywood’s “finest” aught-13 hour at the end of any given Friday – which is no comparison to the independent film revolution turntable of the 70s by any stretch of the imagination. At least when there were aisles to browse of new and old, you had the option to take it back a decade or two when the best new release on the shelf was something to the equivalent of “Step-Up 5”.
Maybe we’ll see a new revolution for film in the coming decades. Maybe there will be a spawn of film elites to rise from the ashes of video rental store ex-patriots like Hollywood Video, Blockbuster, and Videoland (a small Kentucky version of the larger conglomerates). Record Store Day, and companies like Jack White’s ‘Third Man Records’ have helped in the recent vinyl LP resurrection – will there be a similar rejuvenation of the classic video store? I will say, I’m by no means endorsing a resurrection of VHS (my home movies alone are enough to boycott that train), but with advancing video projection and capturing technology, why wouldn’t we want to pull the stores where we can browse isles of classics like Boondock Saints and Apocalypse Now out of their untimely graves?
I’m one for change. But damn it all if there’s no room to change BACK to what once was great! Netflix, RedBox, not tonight dear boys. Tonight I will go find a torrent from the days of old, or get stuck on a gravy train of King of Queens. I miss my Blockbuster.
