Ever since I was a little girl, I have wanted my own film opening. You know, where there is a very appropriate to the theme of the movie song playing over a girl getting ready to go out, or something to that effect. Before I met Nick, I actually used to put on a CD playing a song that I would like to be my movie montage. Usually it was "Dangerous" by Roxette (this was humorous, even at the time-pretend that it's irony).
So, maybe I am giving away too much about my tastes in music.
"Nothing But a Good Time," Poison. "Your Song," Elton John. "Life is a Highway," Tom Cochrane. All excellent theme songs, no?
I also had an obsession with always playing "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" by the Police on the jukebox every time I went to the Cinema Shop, our video rental store, in some attempt to seem cool to the senior boy who worked there.
I miss video rental stores. I read a very good, though a bit dry, book about them last year. I'm fairly sure that it was someone's thesis, but it made some excellent points. First it said how everyone of a certain age and older can remember how the video store started out as this little hole-in-the-wall shop where you had to get a membership card to rent movies. New Concord had two-Heavy's and Visions. Heavy's was across the street from Shegogg's IGA and it was where my father bought his first membership to a video store. It was an extremely small store with limited selections, so April and I tended to always rent the same movies.
I fell in love, love, love with this live action version of "The Wind In The Willows." I rented it pretty much every week. Once we moved on to bigger video stores, they did not have this obscure video. It became one of my first purchases in 1998 when the Watsons joined the rest of the world on the internet, and I discovered ebay.
So, anyway, Dad eventually must have seen the writing on the wall, and we secured a membership to Visions, the rental store on the other end of town with a bigger selection. It was overwhelming the first time we stepped in there. The shelves were filled with empty movie boxes, with styrofoam inside where the tape should be.
We went to Visions every week. April and I saw every movie that they had in the children's section with the exception of "The Cat from Outer Space." I don't know why, but for some reason or another, neither of us wanted to see it. One time, when we were apparently sick and unable to go, my dad went and got a movie for us. And, of course, that was the one he picked! We refused to watch it, and to this day I have never seen it.
Anyway, somewhere along the line, my best friend Michelle took me to the Cinema Shop, which had opened sometime after Visions. It was run by a professor who loved movies and apparently bought every one ever made. There were hundreds of movies there. Unfortuately, rather than the whole styrofoam box set-up, you had to just look at the covers (which were taped to pieces of plexiglass) and memorize the number that was written on the cover. Then, you went to the clerk and told him the number and he hustled to the back and found it. Granted, there were a lot of movies, and I'm sure this was the most convenient way to go about it, but it was always embarrassing if you wanted a movie that had any kind of insinuation in the title. Because the clerk had to read the title to you, to be sure that it was the movie that you wanted. It took Michelle and me years to work up the courage to rent Casual Sex?
We loved the Cinema Shop. Every Saturday night when we were in high school, Michelle, Tanya, and I would go to Pizza Hut and then to the Cinema Shop. They had rooms in the basement where you could sit and watch your movie, and that is what we nearly always did. Watching these dumb 80s movies (which was almost exclusively what we rented) with them were some of the absolute greatest times of my whole life. Because even if it sucked, we made fun of it to the point that it became funny to us.
Anyhow, to get back to Mr. Thesis' point, he said that after that came...dun dun dun...Blockbuster. And Blockbuster killed all independent video stores. Because Blockbuster was brightly lit, and colorful, and didn't carry porn, so no sleazy people were roaming around. And they carried tons of new movies, so you didn't have to wait a year to see them. Blockbuster came to Zanesville sometime when I was in high school, because it was one of my sister's many, many jobs. She liked working there because she got to see new movies before they were available to the public. She did not like working there because people were mean if they had late fees and were not allowed to rent movies until they were paid.
So...enter Netflix. Which was karma for Blockbuster, because then it died. Netflix had the great idea of never charging late fees. Which is good, because as I speak, I have a DVD beside me that I have had for a year and a half and have never gotten around to watching, but I refuse to send it back because I really do want to watch it, someday. Ah, Netflix. I loved you once.
But now I do not love Netflix as I once did. We have Hulu and I like it better. It has more options to watch now. And since all of this stuff comes through the TV, it is convenient. Netflix really needs to up its game, in my opinon. But, then again, maybe it's just trusting that some people are too lazy to return a film for 540 days, and therefore are paying for the opportunity to borrow a video for possibly years on end.
Anyway, I have digressed far from my topic, but oh well. Imagine me now, nerdy looking librarian girl, typing away, while the perfect song floats around her, telling you that she is obviously much more than she seems. How about "The Girl Gets Around" by Sammy Hagar?
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