COLLECTING MOVIES

I collected movies on VHS but they took up too much room and were unbelievably inconvenient. Plus I hated watching movies in truncated versions, panned and scanned, cropped, etc.

DVD fixed that and in the early days of the format (the late 90s), movies became a revelation again. You were able to see them as intended, clear of vision. Plus they were cheap. I gobbled up the format and grabbed the movies that I hadn't seen correctly in years.

To see TAXI DRIVER the way Martin Scorsese filmed it, or to view the obscure David Cronenberg flick RABID in its wide screen format, was amazing. The movies that I thought I'd never see as intended made it into my living room: Peckinpah's oeuvre; Kubrick's masterworks; Italian crime films by Umberto Lenzi; the giallo of Dario Argento; the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray; the documentaries of the Maysles Brothers; David Lynch's madness; and way too many more to mention. Hundreds of them overflowing book shelves.

And now there's this crazy format called Blu-ray. Thanks Sony. I appreciate it.

Thanks a lot.