Videoheaven
                                                                                             
Director: Alex Ross Perry
Year: 2025
Rating: 6.0
The logistics of this film are astonishing. I don't know how they did it. Is there a magic button on the Internet that allows you to ask what films and TV have exactly what you are looking for? For example, if you wanted to do a documentary on apple bobbing, could you simply ask this database for any film that contained it and a minute later you would have a list. This documentary does exactly that with video stores.



Remember them? Gone like the Brooklyn Dodgers. Every year fewer and fewer people will have actually visited one. It will be like asking kids what a rotary phone is. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, there were about ten Mom & Pop video stores at one point within a fifteen minute walk. I had memberships at all of them. And then a couple in Manhattan that rented Hong Kong films. There was a Blockbuster nearby as well but it was like walking into a well-lit morgue. And one by one they all went out of business. The Russian lady with all the British TV crime series was the last to go. An American tragedy. Browsing a store filled with over a thousand titles was a treasure hunt. Streaming is easier for sure and the selection is fine for most people and if you subscribe to a dozen of them, you can always find something but it isn't the same. Will obscure films that Streaming sites don't want just disappear? Will physical media disappear? Will movie theaters go the way of the video store? I think yes to all three. The generations that support them are dying off.



Getting back to this documentary, it is three hours long and nearly the entire thing is clips from film and TV that take place in video stores or have video stores in the background. It is a hell of a lot of films. How did the filmmakers know? A communal effort on social media? The problem though is that it feels like they stretch the narrative - no talking heads - to get all the clips in. And a lot of the narrative is pseudo-intellectual gobbygook about the video store communal space, the potential danger, the humiliation within. How films portrayed the video store changed over time. How shitty the clerks were to customers. On and on. I never experienced any of that and I am sure most people didn't. You walked in, found something, checked it out and left. No drama. No humiliation. But then I never rented a film from behind the curtain.