Rain City Video here in Ballard has been selling off their backstock of video tapes. I really hadn’t wanted to be acquiring any more videos. We’re probably moving in a year (we got confirmation from the landlord on our rent increase which means he’s not selling this year) and there’s no reason to buy new stuff if we just have to move it. Also, with VHS being phased out I wanted to be purchasing DVDs instead of tapes.

I’m not the fan of DVDs that most people (writers on the internet anyway) seem to be. I really don’t care about all those extras. It doesn’t matter to me what the director thought when he was making the film. I’m not really interested in the alternate endings or missing scenes. I don’t want to know how the makeup was created, or the special effects were designed. I know enough of the technical aspects of film making and special effects to be able to guess how an image is created. I’m glad that all that stuff is available I’m just not jonesing for it myself.

The one aspect of DVDs that I do prefer over tapes is the ability to search and watch a film by chapters. With some films it’s not the story I love it’s a just a few moments in the middle of everything else. Being able to go directly to those moments is the biggest appeal of DVD for me.

That and the fact that they take up less shelf space than a video tape. And they stay in their cases when you take them off the shelves. And a DVD takes longer to degrade than a video. Practical things.

Rain City, however, has made buying their older videos more attractive by selling them for less than the cost of a rental. They’ve got a six foot fold out table sitting near the entrance of the store piled high with videos. They used to have just a sales rack selling tapes at $4.95. That’s cheap enough that I’d always look and see if there was something I just had to have. Then they set up the table and the sign – “Tapes $4.95 or five for $15”. The table was stacked three layers high. Irresistable. If I own it I don’t have to worry about late fees. So every couple of weeks I go in and see what they’ve added to the mix. This week they’d upped the ante – “5 for $15, 10 for $25, 15 for $30”.

I couldn’t find fifteen that I wanted. I’m trying to find movies that Nizzibet will want to watch as well. We have date nights, Fridays and Saturdays, and that’s what started me renting movies to begin with. If the movie is something that the Nizz isn’t likely to want to watch then it needs to be something that I’d be willing to put time into in my unscheduled time.

I did find ten – A Better Tomorrow 2 & 3 (subtitled), The Tall Guy, Adaptation, Belizaire the Cajun (which we already have a copy of but the tape is wearing out and the movie isn’t available on DVD yet, Delusion, Miss Congeniality, Open Your Eyes, Undercover Blues and Don’t Look Back. Descriptions of all these movies should be available at the Internet Movie Database, I’m too lazy to provide links right now myself.

We ended up watching Don’t Look Back, a movie with Eric Stoltz as a junkie who steals a bunch of money from some drug dealers and the complications that follow. It’s not a good movie. Good movies are miracles. Once you consider how much money and time and people go into making a movie it’s impressive when one of them turns out to be good, let alone great. But it was a better movie than I expected and it managed to surprise me once or twice and that’s not easy to do.

Now I’ve got find room on one of these bookshelves for all this things. Fuss. Whine.