Splurges

"Well, tha's somethin' we shall have to remedy, i'n't it?"

-- Braveheart

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Yes, I'm quoting Braveheart. Just watched it tonight with my girlfriend, christening the new DVDs. Between the double-clearance deals at a Target in Mason, OH, and a forgotten Blockbuster off I-471 in northern KY, I have almost doubled my personal movie collection.

New to the family are: Smart People, Apollo 13, Braveheart, Crash, Traffic, Cast Away, No Country for Old Men, and Road to Perdition. Many movies I like have one-word titles--oddly enough, that goes for plays, too. This brings my total to twenty-three films on my shelf, not counting TV show collections or my two-disc Led Zeppelin concert edition. It's a modest collection, not nearly as stacked or buff as I'd like, but it has some good stuff. (Don't know what I was thinking when I nabbed About Julia and Atonement at Big Lots, but at least I have American Psycho, the South Park movie, and Raging Bull. Gotta have your bull.) I could easily make a list for the next ten or so I'll buy, but you can imagine that I want many, many more; hence, my decision to limit next month's DVD purchases to pre-2000 films.

That means Jurassic Park, always in my top three when I'm asked the question, is ripe for the picking. (No one since has captured better dinosaurs on screen, despite sixteen years of Hollywood indulging its CGI fantasy fetish.)

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It's something that happens to me in bookshops and movie stores: I splurge. I could give fewer shits about clothes shopping or scanning shelves for shampoo, but when it comes to books and movies, I become an instant shopaholic, grabbing whatever merchandise the signs are pointing at. I wander aisles, gasping at titles like a twelve-year-old gasps at new Nintendo games, and before I know it, I'm standing at the cash register with new media filling the crook of my arm.

I am always simultaneously reassured and worried at the response these purchases merit. Today, a ditsy bip booped the DVDs past the laser reader and set them in a plastic bag, and when she saw Crash, she exclaimed: "Oh wow, this is such a good movie. I, like, cried."

And then, when the co-workers who obsess over Twilight, "American Idol" and the new Britney Spears album peer at my new stack with approval, something inside me wants to run back to the store's returns table, screaming about regrets.

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But I don't. Instead, I keep quiet about the movies I like until I get home, and I watch them with awe. I wonder sometimes whether the Hollywood movers and shakers think more about the initial rush of chuckleheads who see the thing five times in theatres, or about the geeks who watch it on laptops, film nerds reclining in their hovels.

There's a difference between the person who has to see a movie three times to be satisfied, and the person who is only satisfied by one out of every three movies they see.

For that matter, there's a huge gap between the movies you can easily handle three times over, and the ones you can only stomach once every three years.