The Twilight of Video Stores

Last Friday I drove a few miles to take pictures of the exterior of video rental store on a major suburban street. It's closing and I'm writing about the contraction of the parent company, and more generally the demise of video rental stores. When this particular place closes in about two months, it's going to leave a fair-sized vacancy in a mid-sized, grocery-anchored shopping center that also includes a post office, pizza buffet, pet salon, tax service, dentist, insurance agent and whatnot.

The store was selling off its stock of DVDs for $3.99 each, or three for $10. I looked around. What could I find worth having at that price? What would I want to see more than once over an unspecified period of years, until DVDs are obsolete to point at which DVD players aren't even on the market?

Not many. It wasn't because of a small selection. The sheer volume of movies made in recent years is remarkable (God forbid stores like this carry anything made before about 1980, unless it won an Oscar), though maybe it only seemed that way looking at shelf after shelf after shelf of disks, all waiting for someone to buy them.

Equally remarkable is how easy it is to judge most of them by their package. The verdict: they're mostly not my kind of movies, however competently made, or they're just plain bad. But I did find a couple of jewels in the rockpile -- two-thirds (two disks) of the entire run of Fawlty Towers, something I could watch every year or so without risking staleness.

The in-store movie playing while I was there was The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, a live-action prequel to the 1994 live-action movie. I saw that first one in Indonesia, subtitled in Bahasa Indonesia. It was tolerable partly because of the theater's air conditioning, and partly because I got a few jokes that the non-English-speaking crowd missed.

Viva Rock Vegas, on the other hand, got on my nerves pretty fast. Who thought it was a good idea to include the Great Gazoo? And it wasn't even Harvey Korman, who had some other part in the movie, doing Gazoo.