The Video Store and Me

I have sort of a weird relationship with video stores. Some years back, when I was living with the former boyfriend I call Mr. Ex, we belonged to a fairly generic local video store. The selection was ok, but a little heavy on gay porn (which is of course totally awesome, just not really what I was looking for). Eventually, that store moved to a larger but much more inconvenient location, and one day, Mr. Ex came home and told me that he had found this great new video store with all these awesome obscure movies and he had joined and “Look, I rented The Sorrow and the Pity for us to watch tonight.” If you have never seen it, The Sorrow and the Pity is this 4-hour documentary about the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. It is totes awesome and as you can imagine really uplifting. Mr. Ex then insisted that I get my own membership to this video store. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t just use his membership and I had to have a second one, but it was one of those issues that really just wasn’t worth fighting over (there were a lot of those in that relationship). I asked him where the video store was and he said, “It’s on X St., next to the sex store.” Then he handed me The Sorrow and the Pity and said “Why don’t you return this since you’re going there anyway.”

I resisted the temptation to throw the tape at his head and trotted off to get my new membership. Once I was on X St., I walked into a video store that had opened a few months before and was right next to the sex shop. I told the guy behind the counter that I wanted to join. He looked sort of surprised, but handed me a form to fill out. As I was filling out the form, I looked around the store and I couldn’t figure out why Mr. Ex thought the place was so great. It was just a few shelves of shitty new releases, and everyone else in the store was heading behind the black curtain to the porn section. When I handed the form over to the guy and gave him The Sorrow and the Pity, I noticed a video catalog behind the counter with a fairly graphic photo on the cover. Since it was two men, I began to wonder if Mr. Ex was trying to tell me something. Then the video store guy told me that the video I was trying to return wasn’t from their store.

Me: “What?”
Video store guy: “This is from Video X, that new place across the street.”
Me: “Oh.”
VSG: “Do you still want the membership?”
Me: “Ummh… yeah.” I didn’t want to seem like a complete idiot (oops, too late).

With my new, never to be used membership card in hand, I walked across the street. There was indeed a new video store, and it was next to the OTHER sex shop. You can understand my confusion. So, I joined that video store, and although in theory, it was really great, it actually was not so much.

Because, you see, sometimes I just want to watch something stupid or cutesy or the latest Chad Michael Murray* release. And this store did not have a good selection of such films. It did have a really great selection of documentaries in Serbo-Croatian, but you know, sometimes you’re just not in the mood for that. Once my friend L and I were in there trying to rent a movie. We had already discounted approximately 12 titles because I knew that Mr. Ex would refuse to watch any of them. We finally settled on a fairly harmless new release, but the store only had one copy and it was out. L said, “Let’s just go to Blockbuster,” and the video store dork #1 looked distraught and said, “No, no, I can find you something great.” So, he asked us a few questions and brought out three movies for us to choose from. Two of them I had to veto (again because of Mr. Ex, sigh), but the third seemed ok, so we rented it. And it completely and totally sucked. So, I was not really trusting video store dork #1. Also, he referred to Katharine Hepburn as KaHep, which I found really annoying. But the worst thing of all was the way he and his fellow employees would sneer at me when I tried to rent Can’t Hardly Wait or asked if they had Never Been Kissed.

Within a year of joining this video store, my relationship with Mr. Ex ended (shocker, I know). I joined the Blockbuster down the street and my visits to the old store became far less frequent, because I was not so often in the mood for Serbian documentaries. I liked the Blockbuster. Sure, the selection was shit, but no one ever passed judgment on me for anything I rented. Sometimes, I would even get a teenage girl at the counter and she would tell me how much she loved Never Been Kissed.

But the long reign of Blockbuster is coming to a close, and Lord Kissington and I joined Netflix almost two years ago. It’s really the ideal situation. They have almost anything you could want to watch, and even if a Netflix employee is sneering at my choice of movie, I don’t have to see them sneering at me**. The only problem with Netflix is that sometimes the movies sit around for ages before we watch them. And often, when I’m in the mood for something lightweight, the next movie is not really appropriate for that. For example, right now, we have a critically acclaimed but depressing looking Tibetan film and Heavenly Creatures. And this weekend, I was looking for something more like The Prince and Me. Luckily, the next item on the list is The Princess Diaries. I can’t hardly wait.

*Totally joking. I have some standards.
**Not that Lord Kissington doesn’t sneer now and then, but how much can a person who owns Red Dawn really sneer at the movie choices of others?