Adopt a DVD

I look at my DVD collection and I first think of the missing teeth. One disc is missing from a 2-disc John carpenter case which had The Thing (I already have a better copy of that) and Prince of Darkness which I intended to watch and ended up looking for on Youtube when I gave up looking for the disc. I loaned Fido - a Canadian zombie movie with Carrie Anne Moss and Billy Connely - to a producer named Anthony who hasn't responeded to a message or a prod or a reasonable question in. . .well, in February 2011 it will be 2 years. I'm not re-buying it unless it is with money voluntarily given by Anthony or mugged from him. (Of special note: the most important quality of a producer is honesty. He's welcome to lie to everyone else, but he must deal with me only with integrity. And since is doesn't HAVE TO kiss up to me or honor a simple thing like returning a borrowed DVD, and he has failed to do that, his window for proving he is honorable is closing fast. I forgot to open my Something MORE About Mary box, and so I don't know off hand if I still have my special features disc. Jay, the friend who introdced me to would-be-producer Anthony still has one of my discs, Orgazmo by Trey parker. But that's not theft or neglect. It was found and I decided to pointedly leave it until it has been watched. But maybe movies can't be forced on people.

The next thing I notice when I step back from the DVDs is the cheer volume. If I equate these with mental clutter I think maybe I should remove them carefully like moduals of memory from HAL 9000. Is it really necessary for me to use all of these as a touchstone to transport back to the 80's or 90's or the Zeros? There was a time when it all felt necessary, or part of learning my craft as a budding screenwriter and director. Am I ever going to need to watch Ace Ventura again? Well, maybe. I start making a pile of movies I might never watch again. Maybe I got them as part of a deal.

Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 may be the worst movie I own. I can't get rid of it because it's on the same disc as the other two. That also means that if I watch it on my laptop it won't fill the screen so I won't get full picture quality of the crap.

On the other end of the spectrum is David Cronenberg's Fast Company, which also has two of his shorts Crimes of the Future and Stereo. I have listened to the commentary and seen these movies dutifully and nothing has found purchase in my brain let alone my spirit. Stereo has a nice mind-reading premise and there is a shot I plan to reference in my own mind reading film but the tone is far more arty than anything I would want to make. Both shorts feel like there was an assigned running time and everything was shot long and edited long to fill that out. If an image is laid bare it doesn't gain meaning, as far as I'm concerned. it just seems ponderous. Fast Company is a serviceable bit of "Canadian film" in the usual sense. It doesn't look like a Cronenberg film. It may be a personal expression of his, as he says, because he does like race cars. But it would have been nice if one of the cars was a giant bug. All things considered it is better than his other car movie, Crash which I don't have (not to be confused with Paul Haggis' Oscar-winning and self-important yet forgetable multi-story LA TV movie of the week, which I do have in the most expensive version). Cronenberg's crash was notable for having a car chase that manages to be slow and boring, as well as sex that is kind of boring, and I was never stoned enough to appreciate it apparently.

I have 2010 The Year We Make Contact, and yes I have watched it this year. But I don't have 2001: A Space Odyssy. The last time I saw the Kubrick film was January 2001 whwn I borrowed a friend's VHS tape of it and watched it alone in the dark at home and actually kind of liked it. I did this because I had heard MGM had no plans to re-release it which seems a shame. I don't feel any impulse to see it again though. If I do, I'll borrow a DVD and just listen to the cast commentary.

I have the Canadian movie Defendor (sic) about a mentally challenged superhero. I like it, but I also know it is unlikely I will watch it again. Maybe it's just a matter of age. It's harder for me to forget movies even though other vital issues fall by the wayside. I have Doctor Detroit, a mugging fest about a guy posing as a pimp, which is a lesser pimp movie than Night Shift but I think more entertaining than Risky Business (which I don't have but recently borrowed from the library).

Closets full of DVDs anyway appear to present a statement: this person appears to have too much time on his hands.

90 minutes to two hours or more per DVD case, then commentaries and docs and anso some TV series. I have every episode of Wonder Woman, and I remember the circumstances under which I was able to get through most of those as they hit the stores. But for possible legal reasons I won't go into that here. It would undermine the field that I work in. Even though I was on nights at the time. I have every Young Indiana Jones episode, and I know I haven't made it through all of that and yet I like Indy. There are some great documentaries about real history, very educational, but since I had no choice but to have those as part of a very expensive package I have been stubborn about not watching them. I would have preferred some behind the scenes or commentaries or interviews or inclusion even as a special feature George Hall's bookend sequences as OLD Indiana Jones with an eye patch. Maybe those were tossed aside when Lucas realized Indiana Jones at Age 70 would look pretty much exactly like Harrison Ford - numerically old but nimble and fit. I have every Mork and Mindy available on DVD, though they don't seem to have yet released the Merth episodes which I have had to look up on a certain website. I wouldn't mind forcing myself to sit through the animated series either, but maybe I would just have it, watch one episode and just never get around to enduring it.

I have a lot of VHS to unload while it can still be unloaded. VHS was my generation, the eighties an early nineties, how I saw most of the great film and a lot of the crap - the good and bad crap. I have at least set aside a box of those for the day I have the gusto to haul it to a store than might buy it or to a library that might find the tapes a good home for donations. Maybe the latter will be the case for a lot of these. Even my Star Wars and Raiders movies on VHS are little more than paper weights. It isn't like they can be handed down like a family heirloom. Any kids of my own I might have or my neice and nephews won't be interested in the historical significance of VHS any more than Super 8. I'm old enough that when I was single digits until age 12 or so I would go to North Bay's public library and borrow a Super 8mm projector or a 16mm projector and sometimes a screen and a bunch of film reels and play those for family and neighbors. Then I was borrowing the record LP size cartridge movie discs that predated laser discs. Those tended to skip a bit but they were pretty cool anyway.

I have a hard time throwing anything out. I want to think it will benefit humanity in some way. It's like the generous way someone offers you the last rancid slice of pizza before it goes into the garbage.

Maybe a library or The Liason of Independant Filmmakers of Toronto or some other organization can put out a call for DVDs that people want to get rid of that they are simply storing but that should go to people who are actually interested in watching movies rather than using them as coasters. Tyler Durden, in a movie I'm not giving away, says, "The things you own end up owning you." Very true. I mean I question the impulse to give anything away, since that is what suicidal people do as an early warning sign and it's not like I've made great leaps in the personal life or career lately. But clutter is clutter.

I have moments of posessive tension when people take too long to watch a movie and give it back, maybe partly because of matters mentioned above. But in a sense the leap of faith in loaning out movies is something I've done since I was a kid or showing movies. That's my way of connecting and communicating. THIS means something to me. See if you like it. Of course a person can wonder why officially escapist movies mean something to me, but those people dont impress me. A well told story is a ritual, and even the silliest contains elements people can connect to. Or impose themselves on and interpret in their own private and maybe opposite way.

Anyway, still making lists to separate the wheat from the chaff.

(And yes, I just googled that line to see how to spell "chaff." )