Good Things Come In Twos (Movies Everywhere)

Am I not right? Good things come in twos? For today, that will be the case, and thus I present: Blog #2 for the day.

Movies Everywhere.

This is not a sequel post to my last entry. It is in fact a lament to the demise of the mystique of movies. Growing up, movies were a titillation and a great delight, a segue both from and back in to the literature that I was so quick to embrace. Seeing stories come to life was incredible. Our first VCR was a Beta, because Beta was better. Sadly for my parents, VHS was alpha and Beta remained forever in second (although VHS is now Dodo, whereas Beta is still industry standard in certain circles, which just goes to reinforce the fact that being the most popular rarely means being the best).

Growing up, I would receive movies for Christmas and Birthdays, great big VHS versions. Even as recently as Tim Burton's Batman, I was still clamoring for Beta. Now Beta is gone, VHS is gone, DVDs are dying out, HD-DVD is gone, and even Bluray is on apparently tenuous ground and it is still in its infancy. Digital seems to be the way of the future, and it has in fact opened up a world of cinematic opportunities. It kind of sucks.

Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that previously unavailable movies are now accessible to me, but I also miss the days when there were hidden gems to be sought out, treasures of the film scape that remained just on the other side of elusive. This new found accessibility has taken away from the romance of films. Growing up, I can remember begging my parents to buy me Willow when it was released on video. It has just come out and existed in the the $135 price range, which in today's dollars would be close to $2,456. Crazy, right? Nowe, you can get it on DVD with a pristine remastered picture for less than $9.99.

Even those movies that you can't find on DVD or Bluray? They are out there and they are waiting. It doesn't matter if they are banned where you are from. Remember Disney's Song of the South? Probably not, because it has never been released to home video in North America due to content that Disney executives in retrospect realized might be racially insensitive. Most of you know the song 1947 Academy Award winning best song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah though. The thing is, even that banned movie can be obtained now (although I am not condoning illegal downloading, I'm merely pointing out the accessibility of just about anything you might want to see).

Whoa, illegal racist propaganda online? Never.

Once mythic relics that would only ever be darkly whispered conjecture like D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation or Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will are now available on YouTube. Even more modern shocking films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Faces of Death that threatened the fabric of society, or the U.K.'s much maligned "Video Nasties" such as The Evil Dead (easily one of the most released DVD titles of all time) are rampantly and readily available.

In the end, I love being able to see what all the furor (and at times Fuhrer) was about with some of this relics, but it does detract from the overall magical mystique of the industry.

Sometimes I guess we need to take the good with the bad and make the best of both. Still, I miss the day where movies were an investment of time and finances - and where the studios appreciated that fact. As more and more recycled dreck filters through, and more and more people complacently support it, the further we come from the golden age of cinema.

Still, there are plenty of aforementioned 'unseeable' films out there, so who am I to complain. I actually got to see The Evil Dead on the big screen in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, United Kingdom; on the big screen in the very country that vilified and elevated it to cult stature at the same time. The good with the bad, right?