Saturday, February 6, 2010

I'm on the offense.

Since this is essentially the first of what I hope will be many posts, I guess I'll do the customary introductions. Sorry if it's a bit long.

My name's Dustin and I've been a movie nerd since I watched Aliens when I was four years old. Growing up, I spent every available moment to hang out in the back of the video store where all the horror movies were kept and looked at the covers over and over again, dreaming about what could be contained on all of those tape reels and coming up with my own idea for how the movies played out based on my assumptions gathered from its box-art and synopsis, not realizing that my mind was able to conjure up far better films than what they would eventually turn out to be when I caught up with them some years later. I jumped at the chance to go with my mother to Safeway or Roth's or any other grocery store as they all had a video rental section back then. Even the dumpiest store had a horror movie section for me to hide in while my mother went about her shopping. I got to know those covers pretty well, to the point that even today it'll be easier for me to recognize a movie for its artwork than for its actual title. Eventually, all of those stores sold off their videos in the face of domination by the Hollywoods and Blockbusters, who in turn are now facing their own decimation thanks to Redbox and Netflix. Because of these excursions, I always dreamed of having my own collection of films to look over and ponder just like the video stores of my youth, spending hours making up my own films in my head based on just the garish artwork and hyperbolic descriptions peddled upon the box.

When we found out that by running my grandma's VHS camera through the VCR would enable us to copy rental movies onto our own blank tapes, a new era began. We copied every movie we rented, even buying the longer tapes that could hold four movies to a tape if recorded in its slowest mode. Even when that Macrovision protection shit started popping up, we still plowed on. Some off-colors and squiggles in the picture didn't mean a whole lot to a ten year old who was just happy to have all of these films available anytime he wanted. After a few years, we had a pretty healthy stack of tapes filling up the living room. There was at least a couple hundred of those tapes laying about, the TDK and Memorex labels creating their own sort of tapestry where they rested. This continued on for probably about five or six years until my grandparents moved to Eastern Oregon, taking their precious camera with them. By then, my mom had gotten us satellite and I had taken to recording movies off of HBO and Encore while we had them.

I had never actually thought about purchasing and keeping real copies of these movies until I was about 15 and my friend Nick showed me his little collection of about twenty movies or so. I was struck by how nice they all looked together and something about them clicked within me. They weren't anything amazing themselves, really. It was the usual stuff you could (and still can) find at any pawn shop like Jurassic Park and Forrest Gump but it just seemed...right. I think after that we both worked ourselves into this obsessive mentality where collecting these things were where we were supposed to be. We somehow worked our way into the local Domino's who would give us seven bucks a day to deliver their fliers to their customer's doorknobs. We would place just enough fliers so that if they checked, it would appear as though we had done the job we were supposed to rather than chucking the majority of them down sewer grates which was in fact the reality of the situation. After dumping those damn things, we would spend the rest of the day going to pawn shops and video stores looking for movies to buy until we felt enough time had passed and we went back to the pizza place and collected our daily "earnings." This continued for a little less than two years in which I acquired about 300 VHS movies. By that point, I had landed an after-school job at K-Mart and with no real fiscal responsibility, pretty much all of that money was going to support the habit. It would only be about a year before the next phase would kick in and push it into overdrive.

DVD reared its head in 1998 and at first I tried to ignore it and scoff, not relishing the thought of having to replace all the video tapes I had worked so hard to acquire. After about a year of investigating and comparing, it eventually won me over. For Christmas of '99, my mom bought me my first DVD player along with The Matrix (which I suspect was many people's first DVD), A Clockwork Orange, and a boxset with four horror movies: Sometimes They Come Back, The Dentist, The Landlady, and the majestic Leprechaun. I was floored watching these. I remember the day after Christmas, I had Nick over and made him sit through Corbin Benson cutting up a guy in The Dentist while raving how great the picture was. What really won me over was how easy it was to get all the movies I had been busting my ass to find on VHS. Within a year, I had bought Demons, The Beyond, and countless other Euro-horror films that were near impossible to find uncut versions on video tape. Ever since then, I've collected primarily DVDs with the occasional VHS when I find one that's not on disc yet. On any given month, I'll end up with at least another twenty or so movies if not double that, usually ones I haven't watched before. Even during the periods where I wasn't able to work I'd somehow find a way to end up getting five or so a month. I honestly don't know how I was able to but for what's going on eleven years now, my life has been dominated by these damn discs and it's an addiction I don't see lessening anytime soon. If you want to see what I'm left with, here's some pics I took a month ago. I didn't have enough room to back up and take a full picture so I had to do it in chunks and do a really awful job of putting them together in Photoshop. I need to buy some more shelves to put up which is why it's still a bit messy but here they are.

This is what you see when you first walk in.
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This is the best I could do to get them all in one shot.
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Horror/Cult Wall
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TV/Everything Else Wall
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Box-set Shelf #1
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#2
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Criterions/The Office
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Blu-Rays
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Unfortunately, all this leads me to my current dilemma, as well as the point of this blog (hey, only took this long to get to it!). While I've been lucky to have been able to afford all of these things, working over 40 hours a week, taking four or five classes a term, working an internship as well as spending time with my wife and son have left me with little time to actually watch these damn things. There's so been so many conversations about films where all I can say is "Yeah, I have it but I haven't watched it," that I feel like screaming each time it occurs. After taking the time to actually count, I've found out that out of a total of over 5000 DVDs, I have about 3000 movies in my house that I have never seen before yet I've paid money to own them and store them in their own room. I've decided to make a concentrated to get through them in order for me to claim that "Yes, I have seen all these movies." The two main factors working against me are the fact that I just keep buying the things when I have the money which obviously only adds to the pile as well as that there's simply just not enough time in a day for me to get everything done. I've tried seeing if I could go with no sleep but that always ends disastrously for me so that's no longer an option. I'm hoping that by keeping this blog, I'll have something that spurs me on and pushes me to get through as many of them as I can rather than throwing on another season of Family Guy that I've seen a hundred times. If nothing else, maybe you guys out there will be entertained by seeing whether I make it or if I get buried by my own addiction. I'll give a little review of the ones I've watched and keep an update of the totals for what's left and what I've added. Future posts shouldn't be as long as this behemoth, but hey, everyone knows getting through the first act can be a bitch. So I hope you keep coming back and see if this whole thing has imploded on me yet. I'll leave you now with how I plan on wrapping up every post, the stats:

New Movies Bought: 0
Unseen DVDS: 2941
Unseen Blu-rays: 45
Unseen VHS: 119

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