It’s 1995, ‘Two Rebel Police’ has just arrived at the video store and for a small price you can keep it for the whole weekend, being careful to return it rewound. Talks with the manager (someone we all wanted to be or were at some point, a sort of IMDb of the moment) and before leaving you take a look at the horror section with its impossible sequels clearly invented to fool some nerd. That linnet used to be you, because letting yourself be fooled was also part of the grace. Were you happy.
When VHS reigned
I am not going to pretend in this post that we live worse now than at the time of going to the video store: we have all the movies we want at the click of a button and so many things we want to see that trying to cover them all is an absurdly impossible task. And yet there was something magical in that almost messianic act of going to the video store, wandering, watching, chatting and, finally, renting, which cannot be matched by streaming.
Now, this video by Don McHoull that compiles the greatest hits of cinema in the video store (not “from the video store”) takes us to this time thanks to movies and series like ‘Clerks’, ‘Friends’, ‘Rewind, please’, ‘Futurama’, ‘Stranger things’, ‘Captain Marvel’ or ‘Scream’ among many others. And it is that a video store was more than a procedure for which there was no other way to go: it was a small temple of cinema in which to feel safe.
Being honest, as much as we break our chests defending the concept of the video store, hardly anyone would go back to that time more than as an exercise in hipsterism: streaming is less magical but simpler, broader and, why not, with fewer fake sequels that try to trick you. Netflix lacks charmbut at least you don’t have to rewind ‘Roma’ after watching it.