Last Friday, I found myself at the mall, wandering aimlessly from store to store waiting for my parents’ arrival for our dinner date at our usual haunt, Applebees. High strung, short on sleep and five months without a cigarette, I found myself particularly uncentered following the work week and hellacious drive down the interstate to the mall. Still, I’m a sucker for the mall. The mere thought of snagging a pretzel alone renders me Pavlov’s Dog, and I absolutely love rifling through the posters at Spencer’s with the same enthusiasm as my 14-year-old self. If anything could bring me back to equilibrium, it was a trip to the mall!
Among the sea of vape-addicted Gen Z’ers and miserable parents chasing their kids — I actually watched one poor mother sigh and I swear to god I think her soul left her body — I ended up at FYE. Formerly a place to buy these weird music playing contraptions called CDs, FYE is more or less now a hip place for pop culture dorks of all ages. Toys, collectibles, vinyl records, cool graphic tees… this place is like heaven. Even if I’m a good decade older then the next closest person in age, I feel among my people in that place. And yes; they still have a ton of CDs and DVDs and Blu Rays. And it’s with that that I went from anxious and grumpy to reminiscent and awestruck. Remember physical media? Now take a second because your brain may need to adjust to this concept.
A Movie Buff’s Holy Land
Not to sound like a boomer, but back in my day… give me a second to stop the self-induced cringe… okay, we’re good. When I was a kid, teen, even early ’20s, I loved nothing more — and I mean nothing more — than sleeping until one in the afternoon. What did I love second most? Going to the video store. I mean, it was ecstasy! Were I to be granted use of a time machine, I could have transported from the FYE to the Blockbuster. Instead of having a mid-life crisis induced anxiety attack to the score of “Beep Beep I’m a Sheep” and hearing teens drop lines like ‘hitting the cart,’ I’d be pacing the aisles of Blockbuster, shuffling through the various shelves. Wall-to-wall movie posters. Videogames. A movie buff’s holy land.
Make no mistake, when you’d go to the video store, the stakes were high! One wrong choice could render your trip worthless. Yeah, you’d get your snacks. The popcorn, the Snickers bar, the Mountain Dew. But if you picked a dud of a film, it might as well have all been for nothing. Still, a trip to the video store was an event all in itself.
Meeting the Movie Store with an Agenda
You go with an agenda: I want to find this movie. And yet, the onslaught of titles leave you with no easy decisions. Even if they had the new release you went for, as soon as you saw “Raging Bull” or “Pulp Fiction,” you had to at least question if this is when you needed to finally watch the classics. Regardless of the selection, the adrenaline rush was the same. The anticipation rising the whole ride home, culminating with you planting your ass on the couch, snacks in hand, lights off and movie on. It was glorious!
Nowadays, you still have the couch and the snacks… but with the advent of streaming, the mystique is completely absent. The stakes non-existent. And the reward minimal. With an endless amount of streaming subscriptions and a near limitless film library to choose from, it feels like most times, the choice doesn’t even matter. In fact, most times, it feels like the chosen film is really just there to serve as background noise while you scroll Reddit for two hours.
Are iPhones and Tablets the Future Filmmakers Envisioned?
And that’s what hurts. The convenience of streaming has almost devalued the impact of film. Taken for granted because of the immediacy of streaming, watching films on an iPhone is hardly what Steven Spielberg or Francis Ford Coppola hoped for the future of film. Yet here we are. And there I am.
Checking out the $5 dollar bin at FYE. Thinking how amazing it is that for a hundred dollars, I could get twenty great BluRays and have my next two weeks of watching completely set. Only problem, in this modern age, I don’t even own a BluRay or DVD player. Hell, who does? Unless we count our Playstations. And even if I did, I know that after I house a hunk of beef at Applebees, I’ll just put on “The Office” for the hundredth time and fall asleep to the shenanigans of Dunder Mifflin. Dreaming of the glory days of those video store Friday nights.
