Cut & Run Film Reviews

Blockbuster 

For a considerable portion of my adolescence, my father lived within walking distance of a Blockbuster Video. When I would stay with him every other weekend, I would make the 20 minute pilgrimage to and from the blue and yellow hallowed ground, sometimes twice a day, to get my hands on every movie I could. This habit started young, but really took off when I turned 13. I had been given a copy of the 5th Anniversary Edition of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and I became obsessed with watching them all, as fast as possible. Armed with my holy text, I would set off to see what I could check off my list.

I was in that Blockbuster every other Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoon like clockwork and it didn’t take long for the employees to recognize me as a bi-weekly regular. We would chat about movies whenever I was there and they began to recommend new films for me to watch. It made me feel special and grown up, like they could tell I was mature enough to appreciate movies made for people much older than me. Looking back as an adult, I’m sure they were just entertained by a 13-year-old with braces and butterfly hair clips asking where to find a copy of Fight Club. I will always have so much gratitude for these college kids who were willing to share their love of movies with me. To this day, I believe my most formative film education came from them. They introduced me to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Royal Tenenbaums, Alien, and countless others. Blockbuster was my oasis. I was encouraged to broaden my perspectives and was able to explore the world through film. But one day, everything changed. My sanctuary had been disrupted. I met the manager.

It started out like every other trip to Blockbuster. I spent about an hour walking up and down the aisles assessing the DVD boxes to decide which films would come home with me. I made my selection and made my way to the front of the store. I didn’t recognize the person behind the register and was slightly disappointed I wouldn’t be able to talk about my movie choice with my usual companions. I put my movie on the counter and looked up at the woman standing behind it. She seemed older and more serious than the people I usually saw working there. The word “Manager” was stamped across the bottom of her name tag in yellow block letters. Before I could reach into my pocket for the few dollars I brought with me, she looked at me and said, “I’m not renting this to you.” I was so stunned that I didn’t know how to respond, so I just stared at her trying to make sense of what was happening. “You’re too young to rent an R rated movie.” This was news to me. 

I left empty-handed and reeling. It had never occurred to me that a child might not be able to waltz up to the counter with some twizzlers and a copy of Pulp Fiction without an issue. Until that day, I had walked around like I owned the place, with the bravado and unbridled confidence of someone who didn’t know they were breaking any rules. I was mortified. I never would have attempted something like that if I had known it wasn’t allowed. Nobody else at Blockbuster had ever tried to stop me from renting R rated movies. In fact, they had actively encouraged it. Looking back, I still don’t know how the other employees were able to get away with renting R rated movies to someone underage, but the early 2000’s were a lawless wasteland. In all likelihood, they probably just couldn’t be bothered to even pretend to check IDs. I was crushed. In a single afternoon, over half of the store had suddenly become inaccessible to me. I still came back two weekends later, but I had less spring in my step. I took even more time than usual picking out a movie now that I needed to sift through all of the titles that were newly off-limits. I eventually settled for Flightplan, a mild looking PG-13 thriller starring Jodie Foster. I walked up to the register, staffed by one of my favorite of the usual employees, and put the DVD case on the counter. “Ah, Jodie Foster,” she said. “Have you seen Silence of the Lambs yet? If not, you should go grab it.” I don’t know if she wasn’t aware of my encounter with her boss or just didn’t care, but I was thrilled. She had single-handedly reinstated Blockbuster as my happy place. I could continue broadening my horizons unobstructed. I just had to remember to check who was working the counter. 

Hollywood Video

When I was growing up, my mom and I would frequent Hollywood Video. Roaming the aisles of Hollywood Video wasn’t a spiritual experience in the way it was in Blockbuster. As far as video stores go, it was fairly unremarkable, but it was close to my mom’s house and easy for us to pop in to grab a stack of movies and as many boxes of candy as we could carry. These are some of my favorite childhood memories, but Hollywood Video itself didn’t become important in my origin story until they were going out of business. By the time I was in high school, my obsession with watching movies had turned into an obsession with buying movies. My timing has always been a little funny, but I still cannot explain why this was the moment in time that I decided to build a DVD collection. Just a few years prior, Netflix had expanded their exclusively rent-by-mail business structure to include streaming and there was a Redbox kiosk on practically every corner. In short, being able to watch any movie you could think of, immediately, had never been easier. You no longer needed to set foot in a video store to watch whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted and with so many alternatives, buying and owning DVDs was no longer as popular as it once was. Nevertheless, I persisted. Up to this point, I had been slowly building up my collection the old fashioned way; by 1) asking for DVDs for any and all gift-giving holidays and 2) buying used DVDs off of Ebay and hoping they weren’t scratched up to the point of being unplayable. Then in 2009, I found out that Hollywood Video was going out of business, and that could only mean one thing. Firesale. 

It would still be a few more years before Blockbuster closed for good, but the closing of Hollywood Video signified the beginning of the end. At the time I didn’t recognize this portend for what it was because I had one singular goal in mind, and that was to buy any and every movie I could get my hands on before Hollywood Video disappeared completely. I picked up everything from Old School to Sex, Lies, and Videotape. If it was on sale for a dollar or less, it was coming home with me. I went back to Hollywood Video over and over again to see what new treasures they would put out each day. As it became a shell of the store it once was, my collection grew. By the time Hollywood Video closed for good, I had amassed over a hundred new DVDs. I archived and proudly displayed every DVD I had. I had been elevated from a mere movie watcher to a movie collector. Maybe there was some part of me that knew this collection would become meaningful in some distant future, or maybe I was just a teenager who liked buying stuff. Whatever it was that drove me to accumulate movies with such urgency, I’m thankful that my past self followed her heart and made the poor financial decision to indiscriminately purchase every Hollywood Video DVD within line of sight. 

Scarecrow Video 

The summer before I started college, I found my way into the warm embrace of Scarecrow Video. I had gone to Scarecrow periodically throughout my childhood, but it didn’t become a staple for me until I was 18. By that time, I was a full-on film buff. I had familiarized myself with different directors and started reading books on film theory and critical analysis. In the fall I would be starting an art program with an emphasis on film photography and wanted to learn everything I could about the more technical aspects of cinematography. When I was younger, I had been intimidated by Scarecrow Video’s system of cataloging movies by director and I could never find anything I was looking for. Now that I felt more confident in my film knowledge, I wanted to see if I could more easily navigate Scarecrow’s labyrinthine layout. It was also one of the few video rental stores in the area still standing. Most of the people I spent my time with were gone for the summer, I didn’t have a job, and I had very little to do. I was going stir crazy and needed to get out of the house. 

As I continued to spend summer afternoons walking through Scarecrow’s overcrowded shelves, I began to feel the same excitement I had felt walking through Blockbuster years ago. I was (technically) an adult now and my video rentals looked very different than they did in my blockbuster era (less Boondock Saints and When Harry Met Sally and more Plan 9 From Outer Space and Rocky Horror Picture Show), but I still felt a sense of wonder each time I opened Scarecrow’s big front door and walked inside. This was a whole new world of films that I got to explore, and this time, nobody would try to stop me. 

That September I moved away for college, but I never forgot Scarecrow. Even though I had spent a short time there, I was moved by their mission of preserving culture and increasing access to diverse perspectives through film. I was so moved that I packed up my entire DVD collection that had now almost doubled in size, and dragged it to college with me. This was an especially bold choice considering I would be spending my first year living in a 180 square foot dorm room with another person. For that year, my DVD collection lived in my tiny closet stacked in cardboard boxes that my roommate and I would drag out whenever we wanted to watch something on our little television. It wasn’t glamorous, but we made it work and made new friends by inviting others to come watch movies with us. On November 5th, we hosted an open-invitation V for Vendetta watch party and crammed a comical number of 18-year-olds into our tiny room. Bringing my DVD collection to college with me might not have been a practical decision, but it helped me build community and I probably wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t spent that summer going to Scarecrow Video. 

Film is Truth

As soon as I moved out of the dorms and into an apartment, I bought a cheap plywood bookshelf to house my DVD collection. My roommates graciously let me set it up in the living room with the understanding that the DVDs were up for grabs for anyone who wanted to watch something. There was almost always a movie playing in our living room at any given moment and I had gotten back into the habit of buying DVDs off of Ebay. There was a very specific type of post that would show up in the DVD sales that we began referring to as DVD Roulette. Someone would post a picture of a massive collection of DVDs and for anywhere between 50 cents and 3 dollars, they would send you one at random. You almost never got anything good, but I loved the chaos of it. Playing DVD Roulette is how I became the proud owner of classics like Blood Out, Color me Kubrick, The Midnight Meat Train, and Sin City. Whether I wanted them or not, they were mine now. Scouring Ebay for unusual movies was a fun activity and my roommate and I would always get a kick out of unboxing my mystery movie deliveries, but I missed the experience of walking through a physical store to find a movie I had never heard of and taking it home to watch. I also had an ever-expanding list of movies that I wanted to watch but couldn’t find streaming, at the library, or online for a reasonable price. I thought of Scarecrow and wondered if I could find anything similar in my area. It was 2015 and I didn’t have high hopes of finding a video rental store, let alone one that would carry obscure titles, but as luck would have it, there was exactly one video store in the city that fit that description and it was 8 minutes away from my apartment. I walked into Film is Truth for the first time and knew I would be able to find what I was looking for. I went up to the front counter to ask if they carried Todd Haynes’s 1995 suburban horror Safe and was met with a warm and enthusiastic, “Of course!”  

That was the first time I had ever had to put down a refundable deposit to rent a movie, a practice that I would grow accustomed to at Film is Truth. If memory serves, I had to leave a 50 dollar deposit, an almost unthinkable amount of money for me at that time, but I was assured I would get it back as long as I returned the DVD in one piece. It was exciting and nerve wracking leaving with a film that precious and it felt like an important moment in my life as a movie lover. Film is Truth moved locations a few different times during the 10 years I lived in that city. I imagine it was hard to stay afloat as an indie video rental store in a small college town, but I continued to rent from them at each new location. I liked being able to support a socially-conscious, local business and thanks to Film is Truth, I have carried that mentality with me through adulthood. 

Scarecrow Video (Again)

I moved back to Seattle in 2021, very much still in the height of the pandemic. In many ways, the last five years have felt like a blur. When I moved back, I packed up my DVD collection into one giant box where it remained collecting dust for almost 5 years. It was taking up valuable storage space but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. I didn’t even have a way to play DVDs anymore, but something inside of me told me to hang on to them. I moved the DVD collection with me seven more times after I packed them all up and brought them with me to my freshman dorm all those years ago. With each move, I wondered if it was time to let them go, but I could never bring myself to do it. 

For our anniversary this year, my spouse and I bought a DVD player and moved the hundreds of DVDs out of their boxes and into a CD binder that lives on our coffee table. Call me sentimental, but I now understand why I kept them with me all those years. Whenever we have people over, they usually want to flip through the binder. The DVDs on the coffee table spark conversation, nostalgia, and community. We bond over movies we agree on and bicker about ones we don’t. We get to learn more about each other through film. Who knew all of this could come from a 45 dollar DVD player? Getting the DVD player is what prompted me to start reflecting on the impact physical DVDs have had on me. I had never consciously made the connection of video stores as a through line in my life, but looking back I can see how formative they have been. My journey has been punctuated by movie rental stores and no matter where I am in life, I can never resist their siren songs for very long. I’m sure you can guess how this story ends.

When I walked into Scarecrow for the first time in almost 15 years, it was as if nothing had changed. The same feeling of giddiness. The same sense of belonging. I took my time weaving through the endless shelves. I found four movies that I had been wanting to see for years and took them up to the counter. Right away, the person behind the counter started gushing about one of the films I got and was genuinely excited for me to get to experience it for the first time. We chatted for a while and he asked if I was new to the area or just new to the store. I told him I’d been in before, but it had been a long time. We chatted through the rest of the transaction and I gathered my things to go. As I turned to leave he stopped me and with a warm smile said, “Hey. Welcome back to Scarecrow.” It was a simple exchange, but in that moment something clicked into place for me. I had finally come back home.