Vinyl (2000) & Records (2021)
 
   
Vinyl
Director: Alan Zweig
Year:  2000
Rating: 7.0

This is an amusing and yet ultimately sad look at obsessive compulsive record collectors. Like all compulsive things it is an addiction that is really hard to break. Also like most addictions it fills a hole inside them. The director Alan Zweig who himself is a neurotic collector interviews a dozen or so collectors about why and how it has effected their life. Not really in a good way. Most of them are sort of mystified why they have no girlfriend (most of them are male) and then the camera pans the room to show thousands and thousands of records and you sort of understand why. Floor to ceiling. Piles and piles of them. All organized mind you.

One guy says that when he has to go to the bathroom he has to clear piles to get through and then put them back. A bad stomach day would be a bitch. Another guy admits his wife left him because of his obsession and he hates her because she took half his collection. One guy moved to a small apartment in Toronto (where the film was shot) and had no choice but to get rid of his collection - but rather than selling it or giving it to Good Will he looks for a garbage bin that is way out of the way and throws them all away - and hopes no one finds them because he doesn't want anyone else to ever own his albums. Another guy swears he will have every album ever made - his job - at a car wash and he can tell you the song order on every album he has.

You begin to get the feeling that if some of these guys weren't collecting records they would be serial killers collecting tokens of their victims. These people are nuts. The director probably most of all as he slowly loses it during the film because of a mouse infestation and an inability to find a girlfriend and have a child. But he is also very droll and funny as you watch him call out these people for making the choices they have. The same as his.

Now I say this fully knowing that I have a bit of this in myself - not for records but for DVDs - though to a large degree I broke it when I moved to Bangkok where there isn't much to buy and I don't trust the mail to get packages to me. It also helped when all the DVD stores in NYC closed because nearly every weekend I would go to them and browse and come home with a pile of movies. It gave me pleasure just having them around me even knowing that I might never watch many of them. But that compulsion still resides within me and recently when I went home with a stop off in Hong Kong I picked up a couple hundred DVDs. Madness. Yes. But you just never know when you are going to want to watch some obscure Bollywood or Hong Kong film so you better buy it while you can because physical is going out of fashion and these films will never be streamed by anyone. Or so my thought process goes. So though I thought these guys were a dollar short at a dollar store, I fully understood them. My advice to them? Move to Bangkok.
Records
Director: Alan Zweig
Year:  2021
Rating: 6.0


This is a follow-up to director Alan Zweig's documentary Vinyl from 2000. I saw that a year or two ago and to a large degree this is the same documentary with different people (though not all) who are avid record collectors. Avid would likely be a gentle word. Most people would call their collecting obsessive. They have thousands of records - some of the most obscure things you will never hear of. It amazes me that these records were even made but there is something beautiful in that. Real democracy. Those are the ones they really have affection for. The mood of this documentary though is very different than the first one. You came away from that one almost feeling sad for these people. It was a sickness, a drug, an escape from reality and a rejection of normality. Almost all of the people looked and sounded miserable unable to have relationships and just finding refuge in their collections. This one is very different. The narrator and interviewer Zweig seems to be in a very different place - he sounded so bitter and depressed last time around - now he is in a relationship with two kids and is just in a better place. And that carries over to the documentary. The collectors are all still obsessed but it makes them happy, it fills up their life, listening to the music gives them joy, many are in relationships (but rarely merge their records) and if they are not, they are fine with that. Most people are not in good relationships - at least they have their records.



I think a lot of movie fans are also movie collectors to a greater or lesser degree and can relate to some of this. Not all of us have rejected the physical for streaming. I don't want to be limited by Gate Keepers who decide what I can watch and then take it away. So I became a collector and have about 5,200 dvds and then thousands more in digital form from ripping from rental video stores, friend's collections and downloading from YouTube and such. Obviously, I will never get to watch most of them unless I live to a thousand. Which is in fact my plan.