There is a great uproar in Vancouver this week as the news of the impending end of Videomatica spreads. I see a lot of talk of how much people "loved" that place. Interesting that they put it in the past tense. Do businesses thrive on fond memories?
Truthfully, I may have rented from Videomatica once in the ten years I've lived in Vancouver. I was certainly more disappointed with the closing of Happy Bats, another independent video store with a shorter history, which closed to more limited fanfare recently. As much as I miss Happy Bats (their well-stocked Blu-Ray selection was what kept me coming back), I have to recognize that they were destined to close, and that if their average customer spent as much money as I did there, they would have closed sooner.
I wonder how many of the people mourning the loss of Videomatica have Netflix accounts now. Or, more to the point, I wonder how many of them have been in the store in the past year. The past five years? The past decade? I think the likelihood is that the vast majority of them will only now be missing the sign as they go past it. The nostalgia is great folks, but the nostalgia will live on without the flailing business. And the nostalgia was always going to outlive the business.
In all of the disappointment, I'm not hearing or reading anyone claiming they are now going to have trouble finding movies to watch, or finding out about movies they may have otherwise missed. And if they are, then they're most likely spreading the word of their disappointment on facebook or twitter, using the exact tools one might use to spread the word of movies others may have missed.
Point is, while the business of watching movies is changing to bigger hands, and that sucks, the joy of watching movies and sharing the experience with friends is getting easier to come by. So stop whining. The same technology that's putting video stores out of business can and should be used for the good of movie lovers. And if you hate losing a business so much, then why weren't you spending your money there?
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4 comments:
Shaun (of the dead?)
Cogent analysis by and large. The only quibble I might have is your assumption, quite common by the way if mistaken, that alternate delivery systems will provide access to all the films that we did. Many films available on VHS never made it to DVD and our fear is that similarly, many films will never make it to alternate delivery systems. In essence, you'll never get to know what you never new existed.
Brian Bosworth co-owner Videomatica, where our new motto is "Come in and rent a movie, for nostalgia's sake":
http://www.theonion.com/video/historic-blockbuster-store-offers-glimpse-of-how-m,14233/
I wrote what I *think* was the first Videomatica closure story to go public, posted Thursday on my blog, Alienated in Vancouver - it's a giant interview with Graham Peat, expanding on a piece I'd done the previous week or so on the death of video stores in general. Thought I might respond to a couple of things in your post...
While I've only rented a handful of movies in the last year at Videomatica, that's mostly because I've never been a big renter of DVDs; I'm more inclined to buy the titles that I know I'll watch more than once than waste my money renting them - especially if I can find them on the cheap. I check the used section of Videomatica on a regular basis, used to trade in a LOT of movies there (when they could still afford to give decent credit for'em, something they haven’t been able to do in awhile)... and while it might seem kinda quaint that anyone anywhere who owns a computer and knows how to use it still buys DVDs, there are quite a few good reasons that I do this: the movies you can find online generally don't have commentaries or extras attached; are of highly variable quality, image-wise; sometimes have format issues, or won’t play properly on certain players, or are otherwise a pain in the ass for relatively low-tech types as myself (say, if they aren't in English - and this IS an issue; I've found some films I've wanted online, like a torrent of the COMPLETE Italian version of Pontecorvo's QUEIMADA, which is actually NOT on DVD - but it's IN ITALIAN, with no subs; torrents of foreign films generally have subtitles attached as a separate file, if at all). In many, many cases, for films I care about, I’d MUCH rather own a DVD than find it online free, even though I can.
...Though as Mr. Bosworth says, while it might not make a difference to some people, there are films simply not available online – including films that still haven’t been released on DVD, and may never be, given the changes in the industry; if you seek out the excellent, provocative, nearly-forgotten 1990’s film CLEARCUT, for example, with Canadian actor Graham Greene as a pissed-off Native activist (or is he a demonic manifestation?) who kidnaps and tortures a mill owner, the rips of it one finds on torrent sites are all the pan-and-scan fullframe VHS presentation, which is likely All We Will Ever Get, now. The internet IS really good for finding SOME things - for example, if you've been reading Cinema Sewer and suddenly find that there's some weirdo '70's porn title that you need to see, you can probably get a torrent of it somewhere, given the immense amount of porn that's out there (and that's the sort of thing that you might NOT find at Videomatica - bet they don't have many Zebedy Colt titles, tho' I could be wrong...! They do have some Radley Metzger's - but prolly not his Henry Paris years, y'know?). But I assure you, dozens of films I've sought out online simply can't be found as a torrent, and if they DO turn up that way, it won’t be at DVD-quality (to say nothing of Blu-Ray). For serious cinephiles, the death of physical media (which is what the closure of an institution like Videomatica portends) means that there will likely be several films that go missing-in-action all over again (just like happened during the great VHS-to-DVD format shift)... which loss most people won't even notice, because they'll be so drunk with glee over the sheer quantity of more mainstream films they can find easily and cheaply...
(End of part one, part two following).
To get back to your post, to just show that I've been putting my money where my mouth is, I've bought at least a dozen films in the Videomatica sale store in 2011 alone - Gaspar Noe's ENTER THE VOID (even longer than the theatrical cut!), Jodorowsky's SANTA SANGRE (finally on R1, with tons of extras), the great Canadian horror-in-the-woods exploitation film RITUALS (now available from Code Red, after many delays, with a Lawrence Dane commentary), a decent 70's Jim Brown/ Gene Hackman prison movie called RIOT, the (expanded, uncensored) reissue of the Roger Corman exploitationer HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP... those are just the ones that spring to mind. For people who buy DVDs, the absence of a shop like Videomatica is not good news, since NONE of these titles will be stocked at any big box anywhere. While they WILL be easy enough to buy online, I find that buying online has hazards (too easy to spend money on things you don't REALLY need - it's harder to shop frivolously when you're out in the Physical World) and other drawbacks. I do often ask BJ or Robin or other Videomatica staffers about the DVDs I buy - have they seen it, do they know much about it, is it this cut, that cut or the other, do they know the release date on a given title, or availability... hell, sometimes I even ask them about films I have no intention of buying, because it's fun just to bullshit with knowledgeable people about film, and they have immense reserves of specialized knowledge in their heads). I mean, maybe this all seems old-fashioned, but fuggit - it beats spending ALL my goddamn time in front of a computer monitor; I spend enough time here as it is. The role of video stores in the life of cinephiles in a community is pretty bloody significant (even if it's obviously not that important to you), and none has been more important to my life or the lives of many others like me than Videomatica - because it’s run by people like us, FOR people like us. And paradigm shift or no, PEOPLE LIKE US STILL EXIST.
So, I mean, you do get at something true in your post - movies AREN'T so hard to find right now, and there’s a REASON stores are closing; but, I mean - those of us who are upset are not just WHINING, or being hypocrites, dig? Just because YOU don't feel this particular pain, doesn't mean it's unreal! Videomatica has been a HUGE part of my life over the years, an essential resource, and while I AM prepared to cope with the closure (and will likely find new ways to find at least MOST of the films I want)... I'm not happy at all about it. And have every right not to be.
A final note - Graham Peat makes some comments on my article about what all these changes will mean to the PRODUCTION OF CONTENT - that we may be heading towards a world where "it's all free and it's all crap" - but I'll leave you to check that out on your own, if you care to.
http://alienatedinvancouver.blogspot.com/2011/05/videomatica-is-closing-graham-peat.html
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