At the Video Store
                                                                                                         
Director: James Westby
Year: 2019
Rating: 6.0
It is a bit strange that this documentary brought on a sense of loss and nostalgia. It wasn't that long ago that video stores were everywhere. There were few things more satisfying than going into a well-stocked video store and browsing through possibilities. In my neighborhood - stretching from Flatbush to 9th street and 7th avenue to fifth there were about 8-10 video stores. None of them gigantic - often not much bigger than a large closet - but between them all you could find some pretty great stuff. At first vhs tapes and then dvds. All within a 10-minute walk of me.  Then in Chinatown there were a few rental stores of Hong Kong films and that were a godsend when I got into those films in the mid-90s. I had memberships at all of these video stores. The one that always got the Criterion films, others that had off-beat films, the Blockbuster that got a hundred copies of the new ones.



This documentary talks about the social aspects of video stores, getting to know people, chatting with the clerks, asking for recommendations. I did none of that. I am not by nature a social animal. I was all business. Find something that I had never heard of that sounded interesting. At one point when I realized that someday I was going to move to Thailand and my film choices would be limited, I began a rental and ripping rampage. I was renting five films from every store, going home and ripping them to hard drives. Over time maybe a thousand or more films. Thank goodness. Because it became like an Agatha Christie book - and then there were none. One by one they disappeared. None are there today. In this film there is a Russian lady who had her store in Park Slope. She was the last video store standing in my neighborhood. She was wonderful. I could rent as many films as I wanted and bring them back in a few days. I went through her store like the locust. Ripped everything no matter what.



I have never really gotten into the world of streaming. I think I tried Amazon Prime and then discovered that I was out of bounds here in Thailand and could not access them - same with most of the streaming services. But I take it that for most people streaming is great. You never have to go out, you have a decent selection, especially if you belong to a bunch of them - but it is nothing like a video store. One person in the film makes what I think is a good point. When you rented; you made a commitment - you had a physical item in your hand. You paid specifically for it. You had a deadline. You watched it. With streaming it has to be different. There is no physical object. You try a film and five minutes in if it hasn't grabbed your attention, you move on to another one. And then another one. End up watching one that you have already seen. Film is becoming throwaway like everything else. It has cheapened the movie watching experience. The companies are the new Gatekeepers. Films are also shrinking every time it goes to a new format. Lots of films never made it from vhs to dvd and from dvd to streaming. Over time they will become impossible to see. I have in particular witnesses this with Hong Kong films where so many are impossible to find or are out of print. Video stores - especially the huge ones they bring up here - Scarecrow with 120,000 movies - were also in a sense cultural museums - keepers of what came before. This is a fun film if you are a movie lover - lots of video store folks talking about their experience - a few well-known talking heads - John Waters, Bill Hader - and lots of shots of film cases - one girl talking about Chungking Express being her favorite film. 72 minutes.