Book Details
| Title: |
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I Lost It at the Video Store |
| Author: |
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Tom Roston |
| Times Read: |
|
1 |
| Last Read: |
|
01.23.17 |
Other Books Read By This Author (0)
Notes History
| Date Read |
Note |
| 01.23.17 | An oral history of video rental stores' rise and fall. I found this very interesting but my main deal with it is it's so short. It's a tiny book and only 150 pages with crazy margins and big type. it feels like it's like 10,000 words or something. A lot of the people that participated (like James Franco, Luc Besson, JC Chandor, John and Janet Pierson) have just a handful of tiny quotes. Really the book belongs to Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino... partially because you also wind up getting the story of how Clerks and Reservoir Dogs got made. I wish I could've heard from Steven Soderbergh and... I dunno. I actually don't know because as short as it is, the book doesn't really feel like it missed anything. I think maybe the idea is only 150 pages big? That seems wrong, but who knows. I liked how they went into a lot of the business behind the VHS market and how it basically afforded that early 90s first wave of "independant film" like Sex, Lies and Reservoir Dogs and Clerks. It's fun to think about how Stripped to Kill 3 and Silent Night, Deadly Night 3 paid for Whit Stillman's Metropolitan. This also brought back fond memories of my own personal favorite rental store as I was coming of age and the countless hours spent in those moldy narrow aisles studying every spine and formulating my cinematic tastes. Wonder Book & Video it was called, in Frederick Md. Still open I'm happy to find out!!! No doubt due to its massive used book labrynth. Man, that place was great. Have a highschool project on Fritz Lang due for German class? No problem! They had Die Nibelungen on VHS. Interested in a Night of the Living Dead/Reefer Madness double feature on one cassette? We got you fam. Accidentally rent Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom tv series thinking it was just a long movie? You're Welcome. Anyway, this book was worth the price just for the trip down memory lane that it spurned, but I liked the content as well. I do wish it was longer. |
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