Turning To The Back Catalog

It has been some time since I was in the habit of buying DVDs or watching them more than once, but I once did both in great volume. There was an electronics store on the way to my junior college back when I was still in Arizona. I would make frequent trips to it, often buying new and old releases. I was especially susceptible to the special they often had on one of the week's new releases. A movie which would thereafter sell for 19.99 was for a limited time only 16.99. This was really not such a great deal, but was extremely effective at enticing me personally. I also bought a lot of discs used, favoring a website that offered them at a fixed rate and through which individuals were selling their own merchandise. This mainly took place between 2001 and 2004. It's really remarkable how many movies I accumulated during that time.

Then Netflix had come into being. I hadn't rented movies much since my local independent store closed down, as no corporate chain really did it for me. Rather, as I said, I was buying discs. When Netflix came along, I no longer needed to. I have few discs from after '04, if any. I watched them plenty while still in school, but in the last four years, I have seldom done so. I was watching rented discs exclusively, and almost never watching anything twice. The result was that I was going through a high volume of titles, but perhaps not grasping them as fully as I might from repeated viewings. Others might get all they're going to from once, but my comprehension isn't quite like that, nor is my attention. I miss details. One of my favorite films is 'Executive Suite', and I keep picking up things. I must have seen it a dozen or two times by now.

The present circumstances make it so that I'm watching movies from my personal collection again. Where I had once had five discs out at a time from Netflix, I'm down to one. Where I had an easy time checking out and returning movies from the library, I now must be more careful since I cannot walk there from where I live, and anyway they are now open just five days a week. Lastly, I have no cable service, and free TV is not worth bothering with, as I believe I have made clear in the past. So it is that I put on one of my own movies after another, employing them as I did the tv in past times. It's basically satisfactory, and I do believe I may pick up on new things in time.  I could hope for nothing better of a silver lining than greater understanding.

Now, there's one other thing also worth noting. If you can believe it, there are movies I have had for some time which I never got to, just as with my book collection. I sincerely hope that I shall get to them. It's a question of the heart. It's irrational, and and as Woody Allen observed, wants what it wants. What it usually wants is to watch 'High Noon' again for the umpteenth time rather than finally buckling down and watching 'Easy Rider'. What can you do about that? The heart almost always gets its way. So it goes: September and October of 2010 constitute Calder's Great Ride Through Old Favorites. It would add some welcome spice to the proceedings if he were spontaneously joined by friends. Just saying...