I feel like I should issue addendums and corrections. Certainly better than inserting more parenthesis, I think. I don't, for instance, think Nemesis was better than Spider-Man, a film against which none of my listed objections for the former apply.
And an anecdote: I had some time to kill before The Two Towers started, so I went to Wal-Mart, because I am lame, and because there is nowhere else to go in Sunnyside, and because I don't know why. I wandered around for a bit, and looked at DVDs, essentially the only thing in the store that attracts my interest outside of necessities like food and, I don't know, paint and lawn chairs. Here's the thing, though, that caught my eye. Or one of the things. Wal-Mart, like a lot of places, has stands full of really cheap DVDs, of films like The Apple Dumpling Gang Save Parliament and Benji Meets The Harlem Globetrotters and Contractual Van Damme Feature.
The thing is, at this Wal-Mart, at least post-Christmas, the cheap DVDs aren't on a stand anymore. They're in a cage, like the kind you see basketballs sold in, and a large crowd was hunched over it, pawing through this huge pile of bargain films. I mean, literally a pile.
All sorts of interpretations present themselves, I suppose, depending upon your point of view. The success of DVD as a format. Pop culture as cheap feed which consumers eagerly wallow in. I don't know.
DVDs are way successful, though, which is kind of curious. VHS copies of movies were never, in my experience, treated as such a ubiquitous item. DVDs seem to almost be impulse purchases these days. That's quite the canny marketing move. Did Hollywood create such a market for all sorts of films out of whole cloth, or are we to believe that it was always there, unhappy with real film reels and VHS, just waiting for something small and digital? I am suspicious. And yet I'm buying up DVDs like everyone else, because all of a sudden it seems absolutely imperative that I have access to every episode of The Simpsons on a moment's notice. This is really weird.
Oh yeah, and one other thing that gave me pause. In the book section, stacked next to "How to Talk to Angels" and "Chicken Soup for the Angel-gabbing Soul" sat the new Umberto Eco novel. Huh.
And an anecdote: I had some time to kill before The Two Towers started, so I went to Wal-Mart, because I am lame, and because there is nowhere else to go in Sunnyside, and because I don't know why. I wandered around for a bit, and looked at DVDs, essentially the only thing in the store that attracts my interest outside of necessities like food and, I don't know, paint and lawn chairs. Here's the thing, though, that caught my eye. Or one of the things. Wal-Mart, like a lot of places, has stands full of really cheap DVDs, of films like The Apple Dumpling Gang Save Parliament and Benji Meets The Harlem Globetrotters and Contractual Van Damme Feature.
The thing is, at this Wal-Mart, at least post-Christmas, the cheap DVDs aren't on a stand anymore. They're in a cage, like the kind you see basketballs sold in, and a large crowd was hunched over it, pawing through this huge pile of bargain films. I mean, literally a pile.
All sorts of interpretations present themselves, I suppose, depending upon your point of view. The success of DVD as a format. Pop culture as cheap feed which consumers eagerly wallow in. I don't know.
DVDs are way successful, though, which is kind of curious. VHS copies of movies were never, in my experience, treated as such a ubiquitous item. DVDs seem to almost be impulse purchases these days. That's quite the canny marketing move. Did Hollywood create such a market for all sorts of films out of whole cloth, or are we to believe that it was always there, unhappy with real film reels and VHS, just waiting for something small and digital? I am suspicious. And yet I'm buying up DVDs like everyone else, because all of a sudden it seems absolutely imperative that I have access to every episode of The Simpsons on a moment's notice. This is really weird.
Oh yeah, and one other thing that gave me pause. In the book section, stacked next to "How to Talk to Angels" and "Chicken Soup for the Angel-gabbing Soul" sat the new Umberto Eco novel. Huh.
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