Home Video Paradiso
By Nick Pinkerton

Is there anything cinephiles love more than stirring the ash of their first conflagration of love? Why, remember sneaking into the neighborhood cinema, “watching your first two hundred films on the sly,” always sitting in the front row, ruining your eyes, so that you could “receive the images first, while they’re still new?” Remember that old movie house, whose programming was a mélange of chop-socky Shaw Brothers, Chaplin, distressed prints of old “women’s pictures,” lurid Spanish Westerns?… And that kindly old projectionist, half-blind, who showed you his treasured collections of curled-up lobby cards, filed away in rusty film canisters? No, Antoine Doinel, if you’re under 30, or if you grew up anywhere outside of an international cultural epicenter, you almost definitely don’t.

You remember walking to, or having your parents drive you to, some sordid shop in a strip mall (or a supermarket), some place called Movie Time or Video Gallery or West Coast Video, next door to an Applebee’s. Maybe you remember going time and time again to certain weird, magnetic boxes as a kid—most often in the horror section—like Popcorn (“Buy a bag, go home in a box”) or Pray for Death. And if the dearth of culture in your hometown was sufficient, maybe you had to gain a working knowledge of each store’s anemic ‘Foreign’ sections as a teenager, taking mental notes on which place had what, or calling everywhere in a 20-mile radius looking for titles that would now seem laughably middlebrow to a jaded Kim’s clerk. You didn’t lose it at the movies; you lost it in your rumpus room, in front of a 25” Sony, wearing sweatpants. With a two-liter in front of you. Probably to Young Guns. It’s not such a picaresque seduction as our forefathers had, but then these are not such picaresque times.

I was lucky enough—or maybe it was more of a tortuous tease—to catch a little of the dying repertory era: there was The Movies (later The Real Movies) in Cincinnati, wonderfully programmed by Larry Thomas, which croaked in 1997, and when visiting my mother in Washington D.C. I got to watch the theaters in Georgetown drop off, one by one. But by and large I am of the home-video generation, we who saw the Great movies for the first time on a handkerchief-sized screen instead of being trampled by their leviathan pictures. And the market suggests that we’ve now come of age—the advent of DVD, the institutionalization of letterboxing after the resistance of “I paid for my whole TV!” grousing, the blockbuster numbers put up by home-video sales, the remastering of every banal sitcom ever to come down the pike, the exhuming of more grindhouse fare than a thousand 42nd Streets could hold… For better or for worse, we’re neck-deep in a living room Renaissance.

It’s with all of this in mind that REVERSE SHOT inaugurates our new, expanded DVD section. By maintaining our usual standard of rigorous writing for all movies great and small while covering a wider range of new DVDs, our hope is to act as a shining torch amidst the crowd of home entertainment criticism, the vast majority of which seems to be confined to websites called “DVDManiacz” where semi-literate shut-ins split hairs over Dolby. Rather than risk redundancy, writing again on already-reviewed titles fresh-from-the-theater and showing off their spiffy quadruple-disc get-ups, we will concentrate on films whose releases or re-releases are DVD-only affairs, and we intend also to expand our scope to bootleg and foreign region releases (Eric Hynes’s piece on the Russian bootleg DVD market points the way). Our priority will be to write about these DVDs as DVDs and as films both, keeping our focus on all the trimmings peculiar to the home viewing experience and the movies themselves, reduced but unbowed.