The Movie Travails Continue

THE CONTINUING DRAMA OF THE NERD AND HIS MOVIE COLLECTION

or, How Our Narrator Discovered to His Horror A Discrepancy Most Injurious, and Then Proceeded to Solve It, Although Many Factors Weighed Against Him

Well, as collectors like myself are all too aware, the Barnes & Noble chain puts all Criterion discs at half-price during the month of July, a month when most people in Texas just sign over their paychecks to the power company so we can sit in cool little boxes until we overload the grid (Cue the chorus singing “Tradition!“). This year, however, I actually set aside enough to, I promised myself, buy four discs – that would be two for each paycheck.

The first two were items I genuinely lusted after, Godzilla vs Biollante (I had forgotten how odd that one was) and the set of Richard Lester’s Three and Four Musketeers, which were formative to the young me. We’ll get to the second paycheck’s purchase in a moment.

There are still many Criterions I want (and looking at this October’s releases, there will be even more), so I combed through the catalog to make my next choices. Most of my wish list I could back burner because “I’ve already seen that one” (and you can just shut up right now about already having seen the two movies I had already bought), and then I hit a snag. You see, I use the program DVD Profiler to track my collection. Used it for years and years, bought a lifetime license back in two thousand mumble mumble. It allows you to post an online version of your collection, which I use in the wild to make sure I don’t buy duplicates. That even works sometimes!

Honestly – I do not like this cover.

So scanning through B&N’s catalog, I came to Being There, and just to make sure, I alt-tabbed over to my collection, and holy shit, Being There was, ironically, not there. What the hell. I love that movie, and studied Peter Sellers’ brilliant blank slate for a play I once did. How could I not own a copy?

So I walked the fifteen feet to the Movie Room and checked. Yep, there it was. Now, as we’ve gone into tiresome detail, I had just re-catalogued the collection. A little more poking proved that somehow, the beginning of the Criterion section – the numbers and letters A through C – were not in the catalog. Strange. I chalked this up to the Criterion discs being stored and packed separately from those other hoi polloi discs, but cross-checking verified all the other letters were still accurately accounted for, which kind of runs counter to that theory.

Anyway. The then-current count on the collection was 1985, which was a pretty good movie year, but I knew that was going to change. But first, back to the B&N page! The more current release I felt I needed was the Todd Browning triple feature headlined by Freaks, and after some internal debate, probably the purest example of hubris since Brutus decided to assassinate Julius Caesar, I bought the Bondarchuk version of War and Peace, which is, you know, eight hours long, all told.

I have always wanted to see it. The fact that I’m probably going to have to wait until retirement to do so just means I now really have to live that long.

So! On to getting the collection current again. But wait! Invelos was offline? Thunderation!

This does happen more frequently than it should, but if you check into any internet DVD Profiler User group, you see a lot of “Here we go again” entries. DVD Profiler downloads a list of currently released discs to facilitate cataloging, and without that, the program is paralyzed, at least as fair as entering new discs is concerned. After several days it was back, and in the meantime my B&N discs had arrived (B&N’s shipments are really damn skippy, I must say!) and I could finally make my reckoning complete.

The count was now 2024, the year everything went to shit. Luckily I found two more discs at a Friends of the Library sale, so now it’s at 2026, and we have entered the unknown. (If you must know – and who doesn’t? I managed to replace discs of Mad Monster Party and The Boxtrolls. My puppet animation game is strong.)

I had fully intended to write more about other things, but I am called away. Afternoons like this only remind me how much I miss doing this, so I’m going to work harder at not working harder but making time to write more. The whole manufactured furor over Superman almost got me here, but why add more noise? And that’s what it was, noise.

Anyway, a bit more on that when I get back.

(I’m not as good at leading up to a cliffhanger as, say, Warren Ellis, but I’m working on it.)

July 27, 2025
Categories: Mindless Blather . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Well, That’s Over

I finished the first version of this post just past Memorial Day. Why, you might ask, has it taken so long to actually publish? Well, gestures at everything around.

Once again, I want to express my admiration for folks who do this on the regular, no matter what. I, however, am of a weaker bent. If the world is on fire, I’ve a mind to say, nobody needs to hear this. And all the polishing and re-writing gets pushed away. (It also didn’t help that I was actually polishing and re-writing it and a WordPress glitch erased everything I had done soooooo)

Then again, I once did a series of social media posts… was it on Twitter? I think it was, before that went to shit… where I was whining about going to my murder mystery dinner theatre gig because I’d had a bad week, but I eventually came around to the realization that the audience was there because they needed a laugh, and I was there to provide that. That whole thread ended with “But doctor, I am Pagliacci!”. Did the show (of course. I am – or was – a professional), and actually had a blast.

Lesson learned: do the shit.

So anyway. Pagliacci reporting for duty. Now, if everyone in my life would stop getting sick and requiring my time, I might get this to be an enterprise that updates a little more frequently than every three months. *rimshot* applause

 Back to the Past.

A tenterhook
This is what one looks like, incidentally.

Yes, I’m sure, as our country burns to the ground, that you are still on tenterhooks to hear about the continuing struggle betwixt myself and my movie collection. If you’re joining us late, I have recently moved and not all of my discs moved with me, for various reasons. DVD Profiler claimed I had somewhere around 3300 discs, but it was an unreliable narrator because I hadn’t been doing due diligence when I gave away discs and the like.

So I’ve been going through what is actually here with me in the residence, weeding out duplicates and finding out what remained behind. Some of it was expected, some heartbreaking. I once had two copies of Paranorman, now I have none. But somehow I wound up with three copies of Star Trek Beyond.

“Hey, my nephew knows Photoshop, I bet he’d do it for cheap!”

So now, after all this, I am currently at 1939 discs and/or sets, including a couple that DVD Profiler refuses to recognize (I acknowledge that the box art for Captain America: Brave New World is dreadfully ugly, but come ON). The first recount was like. 1954, which left me with the utterly bizarre urge to go out and buy three more, so it would total 1957, the year of my birth. That likely speaks to my quotient of what the kids refer to as “The ‘Tism”, but it got quelled when I remembered my son pined for the Doctor Who discs, which pared the number down to 1939, the year The Wizard of Oz was made. I realize that only means 18 discs for him, but I kept all the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker he hadn’t already made off with.

Now the middle of June and I have gotten it back up to 1955. Two more and I have to find another year to fixate upon.

So I am close to completing something I have desired for years: my very own movie room. I was so excited that the day I finished the re-cataloguing, I took a video, even though I wasn’t really finished:

I am a senior citizen and am allowed my eccentricities (see number of discs, above).

I will agree there is some neatening-up to be done. Those unattractive boxes set horizontally across each shelf will likely stand as a monument to my inability to pull every disc beginning with a certain letter out of multiple boxes until I have advanced to another letter further into the alphabet. Also. bookshelves have more vertical spacing than is needed for DVDs and especially blu-rays. But I had a bunch of bookshelves and those specialized media shelves are much pricier.

To continue bragging about my space (though honestly looking at these pictures from my desktop, it looks like a room hastily set up by a weirdo without the skills or resources to make it look professional) (imagine that):

You couldn’t get a good view in the video, but perched over the TV are a couple of gifts from my wife: the Horrified B-Movie Victims figures, and the Godzilla neon. The HORROR neon is a gift from our old friend Rodney, and it leads to the action figure of Vampira, which is a gift from me.

There are two of those pricy media shelves, which are for special parts of the collection. You see one under the Horror neon which holds the superhero movies (shut up, I still love them and will continue to love them) and some box sets. And, as you can see, the complete Monty Python and Emma Peel Avengers sets.

But the first media shelf I bought was specifically for the Criterion Collection (and Twin Peaks sets, which I’m going to bet join other David Lynch entries in the Collection, anyway). This was to replace an older and larger media shelf which did not survive the move, probably because I put it together twenty years ago. Hopefully, these two shelves will last another twenty years, at which point I will be dead and they will be my son’s problem.

So far, so good, just typical white man oooweee, Looka what I done! but then it starts getting weird.

I attempted to put the finishing touches on it Memorial Day weekend, which was the longest span of free time I’ve had in months. The space was practical at the time of the video, yet somehow, I’ve yet to watch a movie in its entirety. I started the new French Three Musketeers last night, and though it is undeniably a quality product, I was unable to get more than halfway.

After a moment of panic and thinking omigod I’ve forgotten how to watch movies, I settled down and have been thinking about that. I have been very busy with the move and all the bullshit that comes with it while still working 40 hours a week and caring for my wife, a brittle diabetic… so maybe it’s a bit of guilt that I’m not doing anything connected with those instead of entertaining myself.

But then, I would also have to cut my beard.

But now I realize that this feels like a stretch of time back five or six years ago, during the pandemic, during lockdown, and nobody had an attention span anymore. We were actively worried about survival, and what dreadful news the next day would bring. And we all remember who the President was then. And here we are again, only, I feel, in a much worse situation because it’s been proven my countrymen are venal, hateful idiots. If I’m feeling guilty about anything, it’s not donning a beret, smoking Galoises and plotting strikes against Nazi bases.

To attempt to turn myself back to the subject at hand: I got through the first Trump years with the help of Marvel movies, and I will doubtless again. Even if they outlaw them. Especially if they outlaw them.

And that’s where it’s been for a while. The world situation hasn’t gotten any better – and there’s my massive understatement for the day – my wife is currently in the hospital, and here I am with my fierce chiweenie dog and unit of a cat, waiting for news. So dammit, let’s finish this thing, shall we?

In a symptom of the Marvel backlash I had been predicting since Endgame, I read one article excoriating Captain America: Brave New World because “obviously Marvel was unprepared for Trump to be elected”. First of all, Who was? and second, How should it have reacted? These movies take years to get to the screen, but also if by some happenstance, Marvel had turned Thunderbolt Ross into a Trump analogue… yeah. I don’t think outlawing such things would be beyond the pale for him. As it is, I think a Chief Executive admitting his wrongdoing and accepting punishment for it is a perfect middle finger to Trump.

Thankfully, he now has his own little war to distract him, so my entertainment is safe until the nukes start flying. Sleep well, everybody, and I sincerely hope we all get to see Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Now press the damn Publish button, wouldya?

 

June 19, 2025
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Senile Ramblings . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment