Blockbuster

I do like my movies.

 

There are some movies that I have seen many, many times and there are others that I regret wasting even twenty minutes of my life on. Movies like “The Sixth Sense”; although very good is only a one time watch for me. The ending is what makes the movie and knowing it in advance kind of takes away from watching the movie more than once. I’ve tried. Interesting enough, “The Sixth Sense” was the second DVD we bought, the first DVD was “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” which was one of those movies that I wished that I had the time wasted watching it back. I still have those DVD’s to remind myself that I need to know what I am buying before I buy it.

 

Before the DVD came into existence, we watched VHS movies. Sometimes the movies we watched we recorded from the television, and other times we went to the video store to rent whatever struck our fancy. We, like millions of other people would go to the video store on Friday and Saturday nights looking for a movie that we could watch together as a family. Sometimes we were lucky, but sometimes we waited too long and all of the best movies had been taken already. Sometimes if you were lucky, a tape would be dropped off while you were in the store and you could get it before it was shelved. That was pretty rare though.

A few times we would get the movie home, pop up some popcorn and the movie would be so damaged that we wouldn’t be able to make heads nor tails of it. That’s the luck of the draw I suppose. I generally got my videos from the Rogers Video store. It was large and had a huge selection of movies. Louise and I don’t go to the theatre very often, so that meant there were a lot of movies that we had never seen that everyone else had. It worked for us.

 

Sometimes, they would offer deals that were hard to turn down. They offered seven tapes for seven days for seven dollars. Lucky 777! Unfortunately, even though it was a great deal, we would be hard pressed to watch seven movies in a row, so we wouldn’t take advantage of the deal. Well, until I was on holidays by myself and I would start the day off with a rental movie. It was fun and I sometimes miss those winter holidays.

 

There were other Rental stores of course, the biggest being Blockbuster Video. I think it was bigger than the Rogers store, but for some reason that I can’t remember now, I never went there even though I was a card carrying member. My son-in-law had his card taken away from him and was banned from the store for life. We never found out if he was banned from every store across Canada and the US, but I like to think that there was a photo of Chris by the cash register at every Blockbuster in the world. One of Blockbuster’s ten most wanted.

The reason he was banned was a disagreement with the mouth breathing, pimple covered employee who took the side of the computer rather than trust his own eyes. I don’t know how long ago that happened, but Louise and I both laughed tonight when we remembered it.

 

I don’t even know if there are still Blockbusters around, but if there are, I wonder if there is a faded, tattered photo of Chris beside the cash register that some 30 something mouth breather looks at first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, cocking his thumb, pointing his snot covered index finger right between Chris’s eyes and shooting.