Collector’s Corner – Reel Film Chronicles

The Irishman

There are a few modern directors whose movies I make a point to add to my collection at my earliest possible convenience, and Martin Scorsese is one of those few. The Irishman is Scorsese’s latest movie, a contemplative exploration of legacy and as we grow older and begin to weigh the choices we made along the way with the consequences of those choices, a final reckoning we all must face. It also serves as a melancholic reflection on Scorsese’s own filmography and in many ways feels like the thematic culmination of ideas he’s been exploring since the very beginning of his career. The Irishman seems like the end of an unofficial trilogy of Scorsese movies that include Mean Streets and Goodfellas. All of these movies explore the lives of criminals (specifically gangsters) and the inevitable consequences that those sort of lives eventually yield, but because each of them was made at distinct points in Scorsese’s life and career, we’re given a unique collection of perspectives from the same man on the same themes. The Irishman was rather notably produced by Netflix and released on their streaming platform in…

Predestination

If you’re a fan of time travel in film, there are certain movies that are required viewing; Predestination is one of those movies. Watching Predestination for the first time a couple years back, it was the cinematic equivalent of love at first sight. As a testament to how much I love this film, this will be one of the rare articles I write that is completely spoiler free, because this is one of those movies that I hope people are able to experience as clean as possible the first time. It’s not that I think that spoilers “ruin” movies per se, but some movies definitely benefit more from going in with fresh eyes, and Predestination definitely falls into this category. I knew that this was going to be one of those go-to movies when I was in the mood for a film about time travel. Based on a short story from 1959 called “All You Zombies” by Robert A. Heinlein, Predestination is a perfectly constructed, tightly-paced movie that has one of the best implementations of time travel that has ever been put to film. Time travel is a hard thing to get…

The Wizard

Being eight years old upon initial release in 1989, The Wizard would meld together a love of video games and movies to prove itself as a tent pole film of my youth. While you could dismiss the film as a generic, maybe slightly messy, road-trip family drama whose purpose was to exist as an advertising vehicle for both Nintendo’s games and hardware and Universal Studio’s theme park, it was certainly lost on us as children, and more importantly, it didn’t matter. We’re talking about an age where video games were often regarded as a waste of time for children and any degree of validation in the form of popular culture was going to be embraced and met with a high level of excitement. What an amazing experience it would have been to see your favourite games showing up on the big screen, being played by actors you recognize, only to have the climax of the film reveal what would become the biggest game of the era (Super Mario Bros. 3). Yet, I don’t recall seeing this in theatres in ‘89 but I…

Hellboy

There’s an unspoken contract whenever Cale and I get together, and that is to stoke the flames of each other’s passion – or more like addiction – to collecting movies. There’s been many times where I’ve fallen out of step, weaning myself off collecting; when I visit Cale, it’s akin to staring into the abyss, except in this case, the abyss stares back with a deluge of physical format movies. With my wallet propped open for the long fingers of bluray and UHD discs, I found myself riding shotgun in Cale’s SUV – fueled unquestioningly by nothing less than the extinguished souls of demons – barreling towards the mall through a labyrinth of one-way streets and multiple cities. I couldn’t tell which direction we were moving at any time, nor which boundary we passed through, as I bore witness to impossible city limits and a cacophony of roundabouts that would leave the head of any sane person spinning. He parked the car just as the clouds parted, and we headed in to this archaic store; indeed, any store dedicated to the sale of movies…

Robocop

Robocop will always hold a special place for me in the hallowed halls of cinema. Not only is it one of my favourite movies from one of my favourite directors, it was also one of the first R-rated films I ever saw. Watching in wide-eyed fascination as a mutilated, reconstructed cyborg shot a rapist criminal in the dick to save a hostage was what Obi-Wan Kenobi might have called my first step into a larger world. Paul Verhoeven’s social satire laced with a touch of religious allegory immediately caught my attention captured my imagination and caused this tingling sensation down in the depths of me. In short, I was hooked almost immediately, and over the years, my appreciation for and enjoyment of Robocop has only grown. So when the good folks over at Arrow announced a new release of this iconic action/sci-fi masterpiece, I knew instantly that my wallet was going to get a little lighter. For me, this was the year of Arrow. Criterion is still the king of the boutique labels, and for good reason; they’ve set the standard for quality…

Collector’s Corner: 12 Monkeys

Almost since the beginning, Terry Gilliam has been a mainstay in my movie collection, and my DVD copy of 12 Monkeys has been around since university. It easily claimed a spot on the list of Essential Cinema that my friends and I hashed out over countless drunken nights and weekend marathon gaming sessions of SSX Tricky. So I was super stoked to upgrade to the Arrow release of 12 Monkeys a couple weeks back when Ryebone and I made our annual pilgrimage to FAN EXPO, it being a staple of my cinematic diet for so long. And also a little sad. Not at the superior visual and audio quality of the new Blu-ray version, which is awesome, but at the replacement of the specific DVD copy that has been a part of my life, literally for decades now. For some, sentimentality over a particular copy of a particular movie that was mass-produced around the world may be difficult to grasp. It’s the same basic drive that fuels all sentimental connections, I suppose; that particular thing is associated in one’s brain with another thing that occurred in…

Collector’s Corner: Prince of Darkness

John Carpenter. When you absolutely, positively have to scare every last bubble-gum chewer in the room, accept no substitute. Some people live with no regrets; regretting stuff is pretty much all I do. With regards to my video library, one of my current regrets is the lack of John Carpenter films, which I’ve started to remedy with my recent acquisition of Prince of Darkness, an integral entry in his self-described “Apocalypse Trilogy” alongside The Thing and In The Mouth of Madness. In this company, Prince of Darkness is the weakest entry, but it’s also a great entry. Any time you can get Donald Pleasence, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, and Alice Cooper in the same film about an ultimate evil force trying to bring about the end of days, you can’t go wrong. Carpenter’s pantheon is the perfect complement to the films of David Cronenberg. Both filmmakers came out of the same school, focusing a great deal on horror and sci-fi, and both have a very economic form of storytelling. Some days I want to watch an epic Scorsese drama; other days I want to be kicked…

Movie Collection part 6: The Third Era

The Second Era of movie collecting for me would be marked by the wrap up of The Great DVD Purge, which began in 2005 and ended a short year later in 2006. For the record, the First Era would be everything before DVD technology, so all those VHS movies I bought and movies that were crudely recorded off television. It could also be marked by a shift in the rules of buying. I developed a DVD Counting Standard before, but the rules of acquisition were never clearly defined, nor would they be. But there would be – and has been – a value in placing, at least, some loose guidelines to my own buying habits. I wouldn’t say that I was out of control with DVDs. Financially, it was difficult to do so. Today, with a decent amount of disposable income, combined with easier access and an abundance of special editions create a perfect recipe to get carried away. I tried putting some limitations on myself. Don’t buy a movie that is less than one year old. This may seem…

Movie Collection part 5: Current DVDs

Now that a bit of the history of my collecting has been recounted, I want to share with you the collection itself. I’ll start with the DVDs – the last remaining greats of the Great DVD Purge. ALIEN and ALIENS represent two top ten movies, that are also incredible special editions. I believe they were my introduction to the Fox collector’s series, numbered 10 and 11. I’m pretty sure ALIENS has been played a few dozen times throughout the past decade, until the Blu-ray hit. BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES was avidly watched when I was a child and would shape my interest and expectation for what Batman should be. I never picked up the fourth volume, one reason being that the show changed a bit and the edition was relatively difficult to find. It didn’t help that I wasn’t exactly going back to watch all of them, although I did for a brief stint when I would “do the treadmill” for a few weeks. I saw BLACK HAWK DOWN in an old theatre when I was going to university, with…

Movie Collection part 4: High Definition

Many of you may remember the high definition format war that occured between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. It was a confusing time that I would equate to Betamax and VHS (although my family had plenty of both) back in the eighties but not something that I had to deal with directly; I was a child, after all. The high definition wars had me at my prime: I had money, I had knowledge, and I had a love for movies. So which one do I go with? It came down to dollars, initially. Since I had an Xbox 360 it was cheapest for me to get the HD-DVD add on, and with it, I bought a slew of movies. Many of them were upgrades of DVDs, so I was able to continue to get rid of the original DVD collection. One of the first movies I recall playing was TRAINING DAY. The scene I remember as a standout of high definition was an interior shot of a car driving in the rain; the rain drops collected on the window, while the actors…