So our sucky local video store is going out of business. I intend to dance on its grave. Once upon a time it was a great video store, and then it was bought by a national chain and became a really crappy video store. (Not that independent video stores are really so great. There was one nearby that had a fantastic selection but a slightly psychotic staff--marital arguments in front of the customers, etc. One day I went in and they told me they were closing. "Wow," I said, "This is a really good store. I'm sorry."
"Yeah, so are we," the guy barked at me in an incredibly snotty tone, like it was my fault or something. )
But, anyway, they're selling to the bare walls! Even the fixtures are for sale!
So naturally I went in and perused on a couple of occasions. And I actually had a hard time finding stuff I wanted to buy--not that there weren't some things I was tempted by, but the pricing strategy--13 bucks for new releases, 8 bucks for old releases--set a pretty interesting bar. So, yeah, I'd like to see Seed of Chucky, if only to reward them for hiring John Waters and using the tag line "Get a Load of Chucky", but I'm not gonna spend 8 bucks on it. And, in fact, after a week and a half or whatever, the shelves are still pretty full of stuff. People snapped up the movies worth owning pretty quickly, and this leaves a kind of fascinating glimpse into which movies are beloved and which aren't. For example, I found a copy of It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad Etcetera World, which is a deeply flawed but still kind of enjoyable movie. I figured we could watch with the kids, and that would be worth 8 bucks. Ah--no such luck. "That's a classic," the woman behind the counter told me. "It's 13." Sadly, it wasn't a 13 dollar classic as far as I was concerned, so back it went.
On the old releases shelf, there were plenty of movies I'd never heard of, which I would have expected, and many I had heard of, which kind of surprised me. Legally Blonde 2--several copies of that one. A couple of copies of Minority Report, which was a hit, and critically acclaimed, and a decent movie as far as I was concerned, but fundamentally not loveable. Still sitting on the shelf at 8 bucks.
It occurs to me that rather than waiting for the AFI or somebody to put out their best movies lists, or most beloved movies lists, or whatever, a pretty good way to judge which movies--even recent movies--have become classics is to watch what happens as all the video stores close down. The stuff that disappears when the discounts aren't really all that deep--definite classics. The stuff that's still there after a week--bound for the dustbin of history, and probably the dumpster outside.
