As I still deal with the massive letdown Hollywood has put me through over the last several years, I find myself hearkening back to a simpler time before the intrawebs and the Twatter. Back when I was in Waller Elementary School in Bossier City, Louisiana, and my best friend (Gerald R., where art thou?) and I would plan sleepovers based on salacious movies that were playing on HBO that weekend. Good job, HBO Guide, alerting twelve year old boys everywhere that a film contained NUDITY and SEXUAL CONTENT! When I was in junior high, my dad brought home our first VCR (it was two components, and the PLAY/PAUSE remote control was connected with a wire), and we immediately watched anything Dad also brought home that he traded with his coworkers. I was thirteen or fourteen, and loved sitting through the classics like "Superman" and "Star Wars," but also found myself watching odd choices like "The Sand Pebbles" and "The Mouse and His Child." I spent my youth in movie theaters, or in front of the television, every chance I got. I absorbed everything. You can imagine my delight when these things called video stores began popping up when I was in high school and college. I binge-watched tons of videos on the weekends, especially at college when I should have been studying.
I also discovered that you could purchase videotapes, too. I have had many movie collections over the years, giving them away, and then turning around and collecting more. Next to my left arm as I type this are five VHS cassettes that I got at a local thrift store for 99 cents each after I got off work today. I'm pretty confident that my wife and I own more DVDs and videotapes than we do books. I caught the media collecting bug again, and have been concentrating on the letter "A," just to see how many I can amass (I only pick up films I haven't seen, I do need some parameters or else this hobby gets out of hand).
There have been a number of VHS documentaries over the last few years, and they have been pretty good. "VHS Revolution" covers the same familiar ground (Beta vs. VHS, Mom & Pop Video Stores vs. Blockbuster, the British government vs. Video Nasties), and it is also merely good. It clocks in at under an hour, I ironically caught it on Amazon Prime streaming, and I honestly can't come up with anything bad about the film. Or anything unique, or different, or shocking, or covering a subject that I wasn't already familiar with.
