"Let's go get sushi and not pay."
Feel free to skip over the following blathering for the usual DVD list...
So Shades has been out of town over the weekend on a work trip and I had a few days to wile away. This often means some quality time to catch up on movies I want to watch, but she doesn't or spend hours playing video games. This time I did a little of both, but spent the bulk of my time cleaning out my disaster of an office (those of you who know me can relate). I technically watched two movies: Klute (1971), which I had never seen before and a repeat (for me) viewing of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with some friends...we topped it off with some Star Wars Lego. So spending a lot of time cleaning my pit of an office isn't really that exciting, is it? The point I'm sloppily getting to is that part of the extreme clutter (clutter EXTREME!!!) I have to deal with is out of control media. I am traditionally an electronics pack rat and have been loathe to throw away things, but recently I've been in a purging frame of mind. This has included many things, but this time the piles of media have not escaped.
I sold or threw out a lot of vinyl (don't worry, I still have tons) that I might have kept. Yeah, it's sort of cool to have an original pressing of Led Zeppelin II, but a trashed one (pretty much all of them are) is never going to be played so out it went. Shades would call this progress, I suppose. Also among the casualties were stacks of VHS tapes. I, like others I suspect have gotten to the point where they really don't watch tapes anymore (it's hard to go back, isn't it?) and if the material's not unique (home movies) and is easily available on DVD, they aren't going to be watched. The few things I have kept mainly include stuff that's never going to be available on disc, such as MST3K episodes that they can't get the rights to. That stuff hangs on until I have time to transfer them to digital form. I've still got a few Beta tapes, but most went into the trash a while back. I've thrown out 78 rpm records (most are really quite worthless) and even a computer. Even my laserdiscs, which used to be represent the pinnacle of my video collection are now becoming purge targets. Sure, there are some that will be kept because of their unavailability on DVD such as the original Star Wars films and a few Criterion lds with bonus material they didn't licence for DVD, but most of them really aren't worth keeping around. *sigh*
So this got me thinking: maybe the coming of on-demand everything video-wise isn't such a bad thing. I won't have to repeadly buy versions of the same title on discs only to end up throwing them away. But let's see how all the rights management BS works out, shall we? Until then, I'll have to continue to hoard some media...but the purge marches on...but enough of that, let's see what future purge-worthy (the word of the day: purge) DVDs we have coming this week:
Benjamin Franklin The PBS mini series.
Cisco Pike (1972)
Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season
Educating Rita DVD Savant has a review here...I think this is the first DVD release for this one.
Flightplan The big hit of the week doesn't have a 2 DVD set or an unrated version...how odd!
The Fog (2005) Never fear, this one comes in rated/unrated versions...ahh, that's better!
Oliver Twist (2005)
Repo Man: Collectors Edition A re-do from an earlier DVD...
The Virgin Spring (1960) Criterion releases another Bergman film.