It's Saint Patrick's Day! I'm wearing green underwear, as far as you know, so no pinching will be necessary.
A Thing in my Possession: A Laserdisc When I was a youth, I would spend literal hours wandering through my local Blockbuster Video as I struggled with deciding what movie to rent. Often I would have to walk every single aisle at least once to make sure I had looked everything over and had carefully weighed all my options. I couldn’t just pick out a movie I wanted to see, I had to pick out the *right* movie. And with literally hundreds of vhs tapes to pick from, I had to be sure.
But there were two parts of the store that were safe from my explorations. I still have the rough layout of the store in my mind, so I can even mentally point out where they are. Just to the left of the checkout counter was where the foreign films were. These didn’t interest me, for reasons of impenetrability. I wouldn’t understand them. I didn’t have my mind opened to the possibilities of foreign cinema until high school when i worked at a bookstore and a coworker expended my horizons through the Criterion Collection and hand recommending me some of his favorite Korean films.
But on the opposite side of the checkout counter up against the wheelchair ramp between the two levels (ours was a split-level Blockbuster) were the weird laserdisc movies. I didn’t know what they were, but I knew they weren’t for me. We didn’t have a laserdisc player and I wasn’t interested in movies I couldn’t watch. But I was missing out! I didn’t know it at the time but laserdiscs were the first high definition home video format. It had roughly twice the resolution of VHS, and looked great even on CRT tvs (which was important because LDC and Plasma were still pretty rare). And because it was the format where you could see widescreen movies, instead of cropped pan-and-scan versions, the cinephiles loved it. I didn’t even know I was watching movies in a different format that how they were originally released! I only learned widescreen was an option because of a display by the laserdiscs with side by side comparisons of the same shot from Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Nowadays that people have widescreen tvs, it’s standard for movies on home media (let’s be clear, streaming) to be widescreen, but back then it wasn’t even a consideration. If you paid attention you probably saw a “this film has been modified to fit the screen” message at the start of the tape, but I didn’t even know what that meant. Laserdisc was a special format where the best versions of movies were often released. Star wars fans still collect the original trilogy on laserdisc because it’s the home release closest to the original theatrical experience (George Lucas even made changes to the VHS before the special edition rereleases.) There are as all handful of films that never received a DVD or Blu Ray home video release, so are only available in higher definition on laserdisc.
So fast forward to the present day, when I have completed my transformation into a real movie lovin’ sicko, and I have since learned about how cool laserdisc was as a format. I’m not going to get into collecting them, because I already have enough collections, but if things had turned out differently I would have been. Anyway, an internet friend of mine has announced that de to an upcoming move he will be downsizing his considerable laserdisc collection. He’s mostly getting rid of movies he either has duplicates of, or won’t watch again anytime soon. He’s going to sell most of them, but as he is also a proselytizer of the format, he’s offered to send out a free laserdisc to any of his internet friends who want one. I jumped at the opportunity, if only so I could own a small piece of home media history. He sent me the list of discs he was getting rid of, and the one that jumped out to me was Lawnmower Man. Lawnmower Man is a movie that shares a name with a Stephen King short story, and literally nothing else. The movie is so different, that despite having his name on it originally, King sued to have it removed. Which is extra funny because the version of the movie on laserdisc that was sent to me is from the batch that prominently says “based on a Story by Stephen King” after the lawsuit was settled. So he had to go back and sue again for additional damages after the studio broke the court order removing his name.
The movie itself is about a scientist played by Pierce Brosnan using computers to turn his lawnmower man into a genius. It’s full of mediocre CGI and is a horror story about the powers of technology. It’s not a good movie, but it is a movie that sticks in my brain because I saw countless trailers for it on the other VHS tapes I rented at Blockbuster back in the day. If my laserdisc story was to come full circle, this seemed like the best option. So now it sits on my desk. And it’s a good thing working laserdisc players are pretty expensive on the secondhand market because otherwise I’m afraid it would be the start of a much bigger problem (collection) for me. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: Shutting Up I’m a pretty opinionated guy. By which I mean I have lots of opinions. And for the most part, I’m fine with that. I don’t mind having opinions on little things like which movies are good or the right way to cook vegetables. I also have opinions on more important things like fundamental human rights and which Taylor Swift album is the best. And I share these opinions when asked, or when people subscribe to my newsletter.
But I also try to remember that opinions are based on the information I have available to me, and that information can be flawed. Which means my opinions can be changed with new information. I’m being a little vague here and that’s on purpose. Earlier this week I wrote one of these on an opinion that I felt pretty sure about. I even outlined it and made bullet points and everything. But the situation was an ongoing one and as I heard more perspectives that challenged my own I started to doubt myself. Here are people who were sharing their lived experiences and while I don’t want to deny those experiences I had trouble understanding how they came to the conclusions they arrived at from those experiences.
Now this is a mid-level opinion, and it’s one where as I continue to question if and why my conclusions could be wrong or should be changed. But even on mid level opinions, I think I’m better off just shutting up. This is one of those situations where the best thing for me to do is probably shut up and listen to other people. More often than not in my life when I’ve identified those moments I haven’t regretted listening instead of talking. So I decided not to share my opinion this time. Maybe I’ll do so later, after I continue evaluating the information I have, and maybe I won’t.
To be clear this isn’t a topic you probably have an opinion on already. It’s a small fandom squabble happening in a tiny corner of the internet. But it matters to the people discussing it. All I would be doing is bringing more attention to it, which I know because I had to do an explainer of the whole situation at the start of the version of this I deleted. So instead you get this. A wandering, set of paragraphs that say nothing.
So I'll say this: When a cop asks you questions: Shut up! Stuff I'm watching: I finally got around to finishing the 4 season CW Nancy Drew tv series. I'll be honest, I mostly completed it out of a sense of obligation. It's not a terrible show by any means, but before watching the show I had no real interest or connection to the characters or premise. I had never read a Nancy Drew book, and to this day I still haven't. I'm sure they're good, but I can't compare this series to them at all, due to my ignorance. What surprised me most about this show when I first started watching it, was that it was very explicitly a show about supernatural events. In this series ghosts and other spooky things like curses and witches are all real. This puts it much more firmly in the realm of a show like Buffy The Vampire Slayer (although not nearly as good) than a show where a young sleuth solves mysteries. By the series finale they're throwing around curses and demons and not-technically-time travel with such abandon that it feels like every problem and solution are just being made up on the fly. Because with poorly defined magic you can just do whatever you want. but fans would say the show is much more about the relationships than it is the specifics of supernatural activities, and I would have to agree there. Somehow this show made me ship a couple for the first time in forever. And because on half of the ship was a ghost, they eventually move on to the afterlife and are never mentioned again. Justice for Bess/Odette.
I recently mentioned that I'm trying to watch all the official black and white releases of movies that were originally shot in color. I continued that this week with Parasite, which is already a great film and one of the few times in my lifetime where I agree with the academy's choice for best picture. It may not have been the pest picture of 2019, I haven't seen them all, but it was the best picture nominated for that award. I am real glad I revisited it this week, and I have to say the black and white version is absolutely stunning to watch. I don't know that it's better than the original, after all it's still the same film, but it might be the version I go back to the most often.
This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Settle For Me
