REVIEW: The Plague Dogs

Martin Rosen’s production of Watership Down is almost as well loved as Richard Adams’ original novel. Rosen, who wrote, directed and produced the 1978 animated movie, was careful about what story elements and characters were changed or removed, resulting in probably the second-best animated adaptation of a novel (the first being The Last Unicorn). The movie became a critical and financial success, thus it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Rosen returned to Adams’ writings for inspiration. Probably because Shardik boasted human characters and unspooled to more than 500 pages, Rosen turned instead to Adams’ third novel, The Plague Dogs. Like Watership Down, Adams told much of the story from the point of his animal characters, in this case two dogs escaped from an animal testing facility.

And that’s where the similarities end.

The film opens with a black screen and a soft voice cooning “I don’t feel no pain no more.” Slowly, we hear first the lapping of water and then the sounds of a dog struggling as the title cards in red lettering begin to roll by onscreen. Once the credits run, we see what we’ve been hearing—a black Labrador vainly struggling to stay afloat in an enclosed tank of water. As two scientists calmly watch above, the dog finally gives up and slowly floats to the bottom of the tank. It doesn’t matter that you’re watching a cartoon. It’s still sickening.

The scientists revive the black dog and put him back in his cage. Later that night, when a man comes by to feed them (and take out the dead body of another dog), the black Lab’s door is accidentally left open. A terrier with a cap taped to his head notices, and tries to wake the Lab. It is thus we learn the names of Rowf and Snitter, and it’s the first we hear them speak, with Rowf, still fighting against the water, on the verge of giving up all together. Snitter finds the wire fencing between their cages loose, and slips through to convince his friend to escape. They do, but barely, and find themselves alone in the rocky crags of England’s Lakeland District.

Where Watership Down was pastoral, The Plague Dogs is bleak. Beautiful watercolors—both naturalistic and abstract—create the backgrounds of Watership Down, but here, Snitter and Rowf climb and fall over roughly-rendered harsh rock and deadwood, all in different shades of gray and brown. Rarely do we see any lively green and blue, and those instances are few, as few as the moments of joy for the two escapees. Even the red fur of the tod, a fox who joins the dogs, is as muted as the landscape in which they live.

The Plague Dogs also is violent. Very violent. If there’s anyone left who thinks that animation, with animals or not, is for kids will be cured of that belief after watching this. Sheep are killed and eaten, dogs piss constantly, a man has his face blown off by a shotgun....heck, at one point the tod tells Rowf, “The way you came over the fell, you’d think your ass was afire.” But Rosen’s animators pull it off with a remarkable restraint. The man holds his hands over his face as blood seeps through for only a few seconds before he drops to the ground. After the sheep are killed, they almost become part of the rock of the landscape, with only their heads and brown blood to reveal the dead body. It’s a haunting touch. Two other scenes in particular stand out—Rowf and Snitter’s first sheep killing and the infamous man-eating scene. In the first, instead of seeing Rowf chase down the ram and fighting it, we see brownish blood flow down rock into a brook, and then Snitter and Rowf with the felled ram. We only learn in the aftermath that the ram nearly battered Rowf to death as the Lab shakily limps back down the crag to rest on safer ground. In the other, a starving Rowf and Snitter watch as a would-be hunter falls to his death. Rowf sits on his haunches and looks at the body. After a brief look at Snitter, he gets up and walks off the screen. Both scenes are effective, because we realize what happened off-screen, and the deletion of both the action—which would have numbed for later, similar scenes—and the gore—which would have revolted the audience—saves the film’s quiet power.

In addition, the animation improved greatly since Rosen’s first effort. Motion of characters is never choppy or stiff, and their rendering is much more consistent than Watership Down. It ain’t anime or even Disney, but you knew that already. Rosen also made the wise decision to focus on the animal (the novel gave equal time to humans), which allows him to avoid big scenes that require full blown human interaction, always a problem for animators (see: Balto). Instead, we see the humans mostly from the dogs’ point of view: legs, torsos, feet, but rarely heads and faces. The only time we see a face is jarring and frightening.

The film is not without faults. The music at times feels completely out of place, especially in the film’s denouement. While the animation is solid, facial expressions are still somewhat limited, especially with the tod. An important subplot from the novel was taken out, evaporating some of the movie’s power. A large problem is the story itself. Once Snitter and Rowf escape the research center, we watch them stumble around the countryside trying to survive. There’s no instant pursuit by the scientists, who just seem content to let their research roam the countryside. Not only that, the possibility that the two dogs may carry the bubonic plague doesn’t surface until an hour into the movie, and then nothing is done with it. It is only after the dogs eat the hunter that any organized action is taken by anybody. In the novel, the media whips the populace up in a frenzy with the notion of “plague dogs” running around in their backyards. In the film, there’s no panic. It’s not until the end of the movie that the dogs actually are pursued. Watership Down meandered from scene to scene as well, but at least it had a direction—first finding a new home, then rescuing the does from Efafra. The Plague Dogs focuses instead on its two main characters and their transformation, which brings us to the film’s greatest fault—Rowf.

While Snitter has enough back story and problems to fill an entire novel by himself, Rowf is a cipher. He’s a laboratory dog. He’s afraid of water, a fact of which we’re constantly reminded. He hates men, or as he calls them, “whitecoats.” That’s it. Without knowing where he came from, how he ended up at the research center, how long he’s been there....well, it’s just hard to become emotionally attached. The tod has more life and character than Rowf, and the fox is in the story only half of the time. Rowf seems simply there to play off of Snitter, and with no strong plot to help out, that gets tiresome after a while.

It’s ironic then that Rowf dominates the movie’s most powerful scenes: the opening and ending, the sight of Rowf howling in his loneliness, the aforementioned man-eating. It’s a tribute to Rosen and his crew that these scenes are still affecting and disturbing even with Rowf as their catalyst. And when all is said and done, that’s what they’ve accomplished as a whole. With all of its problems, The Plague Dogs is still a powerful story. There’s so much I haven’t mentioned—the way the movie starts and ends in water; how the dogs’ dark adventure is like Rowf’s water tank; how the humans’ dialog is spoken over scenes of the dogs struggling from crag to crag, adding to their isolation; how Snitter’s view of masters changes…the list goes on and on. If you can find it, rent it, buy it. Watch it more than once, because for all its darkness the movie demands you discover it on your own. And you won’t realize until you try to sleep at night that the image of Rowf struggling against the water is still dancing before your eyes.

---
Film Information
Year Released: 1982
Director: Martin Rosen
Main Cast (voices): John Hurt, Christopher Benjamin, James Bolam, Nigel Hawthorne
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUDzklWlvho

Back to the Big Screen

When I told my Dad about the AFI Silver Theatre’s huge main screening room, he replied, “Just like they all used to be.” He had to rub it in, didn’t he?

Back in the 1970s, as drive-ins began fading out and ticket sales struggled, downtown palaces were forced slice their single-screen cinemas in smaller pieces to compete against the new onslaught of shopping mall multiplexes. By the time I reached high school, every theater in the Danbury area had split into 2 or 3 screens each—the Cine, the Palace, the Crown, the Bank Street Cinema, and the Fine Arts. Less than a decade later, the new 10-screen multiplex drove all but one out of business, leaving just the little art house in Bethel and the second run house in Newtown clinging to their niche audiences.

One screen, cut in half, sometimes in thrice. No wonder I was shocked by the Silver’s grandeur.

I vaguely remember seeing a movie as a kid at the old Palace Theater on Main Street before it was cut. The crowd was large enough to invade the balcony above, but my Mom got me safely away from any falling popcorn or soda. I last attended the Palace in the early 1990s, to see Highlander: The Final Dimension. This time, I got to be in the balcony, but only because the theater had cut it away from the screening room below—the balcony now was its own theater, with a sloped wooden “floor” yawning from my front row seat to the screen. The theater closed only a couple of years later.

I wonder if it’s time to reopen them.

An unexpected side effect to the advent of multiplexes has been the shorter runs of major releases. Two decades ago, a blockbuster film like Raiders of the Lost Ark would run all summer and into the fall. But with studios churning out more and more event crowd-thrillers to please the working class and school-aged clientele of the movie mall, the finite amount of available release dates grew smaller and smaller, until blockbusters—once a monthly event—started piling on top of one another. A major movie losing about half its audience after its opening week used to be an ominous sign of a possible turkey; today, it’s the general rule. This past summer, Spider-Man 3, Shriek the Third, Knocked Up, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ocean’s Thirteen, The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Evan Almighty, A Mighty Heart, Live Free or Die Hard, and Ratatouille all were released within two months of each other and all before July, with dozens of smaller studio and independent films filling the in-between cracks. Studios now expect blockbusters to win back most of their production costs in the hopefully huge opening weekend, accepting that audiences will move onto the next big release the next week.

The problem with this fiscal philosophy is that even modern stadium-seating rooms are fairly limited to a few hundred, if that. With highly anticipated releases like Pirates and Spider-Man, showings are sold out well in advance, leaving people scrambling to find later showings or another day. Which seems a bit counter-productive, given how movies are viewed today: comfortable lounge seats with cup-holders, multiple-speaker sound systems, tickets that finally have risen to double-digits. Movie-going has become an outing, just like going to a baseball game or concert.

So why not go full-bore and bring back the big screen?

Not every theater needs one, and not every multiplex screen must be gargantuan. But with more and more people installing personal home theaters, the idea of spending between $10–$30 to go out to see a movie has become impractical; movie-going used to be, and should be, a unique experience that cannot be replicated unless you’re Howard Hughes. Restoring some screens to retro size would bring back some of the lost grandeur and make the event movies a true event, and with the shorter runs of major movies, the risk is far less than it was 20 years ago. It works for the Silver—they manage to draw people in with dusty classics, foreign films, and one or two actual new releases. Imagine what would happen if the local multiplex had one “blockbuster screen.” Imagine seeing something like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter on it.

Movies still are struggling—last week’s Resident Evil: Extinction grossed more than its predecessor but actually sold fewer tickets. Theater-going quickly is growing from a regular activity to a special occasion; perhaps it’s time theaters began treating themselves the same way. They have little to lose.

She Was Wongo!

Gypsy and her cronies recently survived something called a Wild Women Weekend, and apparently they’re so bedragged and bushed that she hasn’t even posted any pictures yet, much less tell me anything about it. But some guy in a trench coat and fedora…or was it a checkered blazer and bowler?...anyway, this guy slipped me this video, swearing up and down that it was actual footage of the cataclysmic event. I only had to pay him $50 for exclusive rights:



Man, no wonder Gypsy’s been mum. Well-coiffed, beefcake barbarians are hard to come by.


(Sad bit of disclosure: I actually rented this movie, which came on a Something Weird DVD with two other lovely barbarian women flicks. Yes, I did watch all three, but I can't remember the titles of the other two, probably because Wongo euthanized what remained of my brain.)

Bride of Stardust

Stories spring from a common well of tradition, reaching back to the storyteller carrying down fables and legends from their youth long before the literary could live on the page. Everything is connected, everything inspiring offspring, everything a subconscious creature of its past, both personal and ancestral. Nothing is wholly original, and originality does not make a quality story. What does is the telling, the belief of the teller in his characters, her imagination, and their ability to captivate.

And yet, when a film bares a striking resemblance to another, the natural tendency is to compare and contrast, often unfavorably. A modern story, seeking at least acceptance, is forced to live against expectations built by a well-loved predecessor; if the newcomer fails to surpass, then it is branded a failure.

Stardust has been discovering this conundrum for about a month now. A fairy tale adventure with a healthy sense of whimsical wit? The Princess Bride staked that territory years ago and registered it at the Cinema Classics Department. And to be honest, the two films do share several traits: based on books by well-known authors (Neil Gaiman and William Goldman), an adventure rooted in the emotion of love, an adaptation with a major tonal change from the original work, pirates and evil princes, unexpected modern humor enlightening the faerie tropes, and, unfortunately, a less-than successful theatrical run despite generally favorable reviews.

But that’s only the surface scan. A fundamental difference exists between the two features: One is a story about a fairy tale, while the other is the fairy tale. The Princess Bride’s well-known twist is that the narrator tells the “good-parts” version, leaving out all the overly mushy and (in the book, at least) the more dreary traits. Stardust, however, has no such censor, and the whimsy plays hand-in-hand with a twisted darkness borne from the Brothers Grimm. Unlike Westley and Buttercup’s light-hearted adventure, real danger awaits in Stardust’s more macabre world.

The two films, despite their easy kinship, are two completely different experiences.

That’s the significance of the telling. One change in perspective, and the entire narrative atmosphere shifts, touching characters, schemes, motivations, and setting. Those expecting a spiritual rewind of The Princess Bride will be disappointed, a fault not of Stardust’s making but one for which the film is marked. Both films may succeed in their own way, but because one came before, the other is the lesser copy that didn’t quite get it right.

Expectations can ruin a good movie, as can history buttressed by an easily accessible archive. Since the 1980s, home video in its various forms has allowed moviegoers to watch films endlessly rather than wait for the next theatrical showing. Favorite movies are learned by rote, favorite lines repeated to friends and fellow fans as cultural code words, and all the while little forgotten failures become reborn as cult treasures. Why chance another story when a well-loved familiar is in hand? Maybe that’s the hurtful concession—while cinema now has a second chance for stranger tales, the attention of the audience is mostly elsewhere.

And thus, a tale well told is left unreeling in vacant theaters, undone by both similarity and difference.

A Good Trade

I’m not a melancholy man, nor do tearjerkers manage to manipulate me. One thing, though, one thing, no matter the story, will blindside a raw weakness in me and crack the stoic.

The last full measure.

Whether it’s the regiment of black Union soldiers, silently marching to their willing deaths on the beach, willing to die to prove to everyone that they are worthy of humanity not slavery, and the white soldiers, the ones who depraved them, realizing what they’re about to do and spontaneously snapping to a salute.

Whether it’s the metal man created for malevolence but forgetting and learning from a boy to be more than tool, the metal man hunted without mercy by those who fear him and in so doing launch their own destruction to rain down on them…it is the act of the metal man, shaken from his anger, to smile, turn, and fly into the annihilating rain to save everyone in exchange for himself, joyfully calling out his ad hoc hero’s name: “Suuuuperman.”

The tears flow.

Six years ago today, malevolence fell on us, sending thousands to their deaths in New York and Washington, DC. Six years ago, I drove by the Pentagon 10 minutes before it was hit, only to helplessly watch the television with most of my coworkers as the towers fell.

Within the horror, heroism bloomed. Firefighters, police, and emergency workers responded, many coming in off-duty. They chose this. They chose this life, they chose this moment. But an old wartime saying hammers the reality home: Real heroes never come home.

They give up their life so that another may live.

The people on Flight 93 understood. They and those who chose to enter the burning destruction, full knowing the end would come without warning but also knowing others would die if they didn’t, they understood what they had to do, and what awful but awesome trade they had to make. One life for another.

Today, tomorrow, forever, that is the ultimate lesson of September 11. It was a lesson that propelled strangers to come after the fires were out to dig through the wreckage on a faint hope more were alive. It was a lesson that fueled unrivaled donations to the American Red Cross and other emergency organizations. It was a lesson we should never forget: That the ultimate gift we can give is of ourselves.

Tonight, in the quiet night, the painful memory of that day perhaps is dulled, scabbed over by time. But then I think of the heroes, the real heroes, glancing up at the hell above them, yet still going in. And the tears flow.

American Wuxia

Patiently we waited in the AFI Silver Theatre lobby, milling amongst the display cases laden with pop culture relics recalling our childhood. While starring at the synthesized one-hit records and Rubik’s Cubes, we would hear the muffled roar of Brazil’s climax, signaling that its showing was running late. We didn’t mind.

Hey, we were simply waiting for Jack Burton.

When John Carpenter’s oddity barreled into mid-1980s theaters, the likes of The Goonies and Gremlins formed audiences’ conception of fantasy adventures with their amusement-park-ride décor, light-show magic, and deformed monster suits. General assumption dictated that Big Trouble in Little China was more of the same, and the trailers only reinforced that notion. But Carpenter—who, with the acclaimed and commercially successful Starman, had just shaken free of the horror genre after a string of hit movies—Carpenter had something different in mind. Something that mainstream American audiences or critics knew nothing about.

A riff on wuxia, done up sai yan style.

Also known as “Hong Kong swordplay,” wuxia long has been a crazy subtext to the martial arts cinema. Combining kung fu philosophy and swordsmen traditions with a mishmash of fantasy, comedy, horror, and tragic romance, wuxia movies play a melodeon of emotions, flipping and flying along on wires among lavish sets and colorful costumes mimicking a symbolic edition of ancient China. Although the genre’s roots reach back as far as the 1920s, the heyday of wuxia really started during the kung fu boom of the 1970s. The following decade, though, began with a radical reworking of the mythos—Tsui Hark’s Zu, Warriors of Magic Mountain. After the international success of Star Wars, Hark borrowed that space opera’s special effect techniques and Saturday matinee storytelling to translate what had been a style heavy on Buddhist and historical tradition to something more buoyant and randomly adventurous. The more dramatic traits of wuxia were and are still present, but in many of the popular specimens, they fight for screen time with the insanity.

It was this version of wuxia that Carpenter discovered and fell in love with, so much so that as he rode his recent Hollywood success, he decided to create his own Hong Kong fantasia, but from his perspective. Which, in the end, turned out to be ours.

As we finally drifted into the screening room, we were engulfed by an art deco cavern. The Silver has three theaters, two of which resemble the stadium-seating efficiencies of modern multiplexes. But the third has been restored to its mid-20th century form, its tapestry wallpaper embellishing between the wood carvings roiling on the walls. The ceiling feels a mile or two away. The screen is simply huge, while the seating dwarfs the 50 or so now finding perfect seats everywhere.

As the lights dim and the old Fox logo appears, there’s a strange stillness I can’t place. It is anticipation: As soon as Egg appears, questioned by his cynical lawyer, an ovation rises in the darkness, followed by giggling and geek-riven glee. The Three Storms get a even louder one when they appear in their grandiose entree. Ole Jack, meanwhile, got complete silence, because everybody wanted to hear every single line.

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat in a theater watching a movie everybody with me adored. Maybe it’s been never.

Big Trouble in Little China flopped back in Big 80s, eclipsed by, all things, Eddie Murphy’s The Golden Child. Critics shamed Carpenter for using Asian stereotypes in his movie, never realizing that the director actually was paying proper homage to the films the Asian industry was churning out. Those critics, and unfortunately the mainstream audience, were unfamiliar with Hong Kong cinema; their ignorance led to misunderstanding, and Big Trouble ended with the dreaded “ahead of its time” tag.

Over the years, Carpenter’s fun opus found its fans and slowly rose in estimation, strangely coming to help define the cinematic artistry of the decade that spurned it. Blame Jack Burton.

Sitting in the Silver, loving every minute of a movie I knew far too well, I realized two things. First, akin to the screening of The Terminator, I noticed things I never did before, but this time, it had to do with Carpenter and writer W.D. Richter’s (Buckaroo Banzai) sly character humor. Jack is Jack, and Egg is bemusingly sage-like, but I’ve never noticed how hilarious the globs of exposition were ratta-tating from Kim Cattrall’s Gracie Law, nor how gloriously earnest Dennis Dun’s Wang Chi tried to be.

The second is, well, Jack himself. The accepted great joke of Big Trouble in Little China is that Jack Burton thinks he’s the hero, but he’s really Wang’s sidekick. With one big exception, Jack doesn’t accomplish much heroic, and instead stumbles around completely out of his depth among a dozen Chinese hells, elemental henchmen, and Six Demon Bags.

Just like the audience.

That’s the honest fun of Big Trouble—Jack is one of us. For all of his bluster, Jack’s perspective is the same as his creator’s—the outsider experiencing Chinese magic and mythology for the first time. Carpenter knew he could never make a pure wuxia movie, so he made a twisted translation with a familiar cliché. The real joke of Jack Burton is that he’s more than a confused sidekick—he’s a Western hero waylaid in a Chinese wuxia movie, the modern cowboy equipped with his one-liners and bravado hopelessly out-of-place. Jack grounds the wuxia insanity with well-intentioned buffoonery, allowing his audience to both laugh and learn. We know Jack, even though Kurt Russell is playing a parody, and Burton calms the strangeness by entertaining us with what we know.

Big Trouble in Little China transcends nostalgia because it’s a preface, a guided introduction to another culture’s unique genre. Years later, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would become a surprise hit escaping the art house, opening the multiplex door for modern-day wuxia. Every year, Hong Kong fantasies perform for the mainstream—from House of Flying Daggers to The Banquet to Hero. This time, audiences were ready for the magic.

Thank Jack.

Netflix Almanac: August 2007

Well, three is better than none. Except when two is really one. Once that English major’s method of math begins to sink in, read on for last month’s slight excursion into kiddy kaiju and a wee bit of nostalgia.

Turk 182! (1985)
Only could the Big 80s spit out a film like this. While partying with his buddies down at the local pub, an off-duty New York City fireman (Robert Urich) rushes into a burning building to save a child, only to be blown out a window by an errant fire hose. The resultant psychological and physical trauma takes its toil, and with medical bills climbing and the bureaucracy denying any help, the fireman's younger brother (Timothy Hutton) takes matters into his own hands—with graffiti. Bob Clark’s crowd-pleasing contraption became a cable television staple, largely because of a solid cast boosting a paper-thin premise. Robert Culp leads the troupe of character actors, creating a realistic NYC late Seventies mayor frustrated by Hutton’s antics. Urich also excels, subtly essaying suicidal depression and hopelessness under a brave but cracked exterior. Peter Boyle, Kim Cattrall, James Tolkan, and Darren McGavin also contribute their little warped spins in underwritten roles. Turk 182! is one of those movies that shouldn’t work and sometimes doesn’t, but still manages to be addictive fluff.

Rebirth of Mothra (1996)
The 1990s saw the resurrection of the kaiju film, with the likes of Godzilla and Gamera receiving a reimagining long before Tim Burton coined the term. It only was natural that Toho also would revive its Mothra series; the monster moth had been the studio’s second-most popular character in the Showa era and enjoyed fandom from girls as well as boys. But while Godzilla experienced a new-found maturity in its showcases, Toho headed the opposite direction with Mothra, creating a trilogy for tikes. Which makes the inaugural production surprising—nearly half the film features one gigantic brouhaha involving Mothra, her larvae off-spring (she has a lot of those, doesn’t she?) and their antagonist. Unfortunately, that’s about the only real fun to be had. Rebirth of Mothra is weighed down by an environmental soapbox, a sermon delivered so stiffly I’m surprised they didn’t include a pulpit. An executive for a logging company accidentally unleashes Desghidorah (another variation of Ghidorah), which will destroy the Earth’s environment by sucking out all of nature’s energy and lifeforce. The executive’s two children, meanwhile, are embroiled in the goings on when he gives them the medallion that he found at Desghidorah’s ancient tomb. Soon, Mothra’s two twin fairies—riding a mini-Mothra—are racing against an evil one named Belvera to recover the seal, which can control the monster. The family eventually “helps” out (basically, they stand around and try not to get killed). The aforementioned battle takes place halfway through the movie, evaporating much of the excitement from the climatic confrontation. Rebirth of Mothra conjures some good moments, such the death of one of the creatures and Belvera’s scenery stealing, but those are swamped by an earnest effort to send the message, rather than let the story tell it.

Rebirth of Mothra II (1997)
With all of the kaiju tropes exhausted in the first film, the sequel wisely heads toward more fantastic territory. Belvera, the twins, and mini-Mothra are back, but the human family is exchanged for a shy girl, two bullies/friends-in-training, and a Furby with antenna. The little furball, which befriends the girl, is a key to an ancient treasure buried in an underwater city. The treasure is the only thing that will stop Dagahra, a sea creature (also ancient) originally designed to fix pollution but which has turned malevolent. The kids, pursued by two greedy fishermen employed by Belvera, explore the city while Mothra holds off Dagahra. Better writing and an emphasis on the supernatural help this outing find a better identity than its predecessor, even if it is aping The Neverending Story. The environmental preaching is still there, but it’s not as cumbersome. The action is steadily silly and the story even toys with a bit of dark consequences, copping out past the last minute. The kids also are far more likable and lively than their two counterparts in the original film, ultimately making Rebirth of Mothra II a decent adventure for its heroes’ audience.

Maelstrom of Movies

An anniversary passed quietly last month: 10 years ago, Warners Brothers released the first wave of DVDs in general retail stores. Some industry commentaries may pin the advent of home theater entertainment a bit earlier, but to the public at large, August 1997 was the month this new fangled technology first became available and the digital video disc (or digital versatile disc, depending on who you ask) entered the everyday conscience.

DVDs captured my interest the instant I saw them in Circuit City. Perhaps it’s hard to understand in the Information Age, but I never had heard of DVDs before, and that center display with the slim cardboard cases was their introduction.

Movie studios recently had begun releasing specific films in widescreen VHS, something I wished they did for all their tapes. Whether a movie boasts the epic screen or the old square Academy ratio, a director frames each shot like a photographer frames her stills. There’s a subtle language to film, one in which emotions and story are imparted not only with actors or script but with editing, camera movement, and shot selection. I never was cognizant of that art until Braveheart, which I saw three times in the theater. Mel Gibson used very inch of his frame in every shot, and when I saw the movie again on cable, I couldn’t believe how much the television screen butchered the picture. I finally realized why some movies seemed better in the theater than they were on cable.

While widescreen presentations still were rare for videos, every DVD Warners released in that first wave contained one, along with the film’s trailer and a “full-frame” version. I think I drooled.

Warners was the only major studio that fully believed in the new home video format—the others attempted to push something that was called DIVX, a disposable DVD that would be cheap but stop playing after a certain time. It lasted only a year. Obviously, people wanted their movies to last forever.

I’ve touched on it before—Hollywood’s initial disinterest turned into the film fringe’s gain. With the same vision as the Warners bosses, independent licensors soon gambled on the new technology and struck deals with the studios for their unwanted movies: the Army of Darknesses, the Portrait of Jennies, the Black Holes. They also acquired disused film libraries like the post-Corman New World, while negotiating agreements with European and Asian film companies to strengthening their new catalogues. Silents, serials, b-grade programmers, big turkeys, kung-fu adventures, Hammer horror, giallo… they all found a home on DVD, long before special editions became standard expectation.

By the time I bought my first and only player three years after that Circuit City find, the studios had taken note of the increasing sales and the success of the likes of Anchor Bay, Elite, Image, and Kino. They had quickly abandoned their DIVX obsession and slowly started playing catch-up. DVD was beginning to grow up, which only meant more movies for me.

Because of its initial concentration in indies and oddities, DVDs only fed my one obsession. I was the one in the video store seeking the goofy-looking box with the most dust; now, I had a hundred to choose from. For the first couple of years, I played my own game of catch-up, buying an average of 3 or 4 DVDs a month. Upon seeing my still-blooming collection for the first time, my friend Karen called me “a video store.” My sister was a bit more precise: “You have a lot of really strange movies.”

Yeah, I do. Ten years ago, thanks to circumstantial timing, the little cult films, the failures, the foreigners, the small ancients, the little-known but the loved—for a brief time, they took center stage, stealing the monologue and singing the lead. I was in the audience, and I’m still there, with the world’s guiltiest grin embracing my face.