New Blog - A Collection Reviewed

   

 

   For anyone not following me on Facebook, I've been posting a series of movie reviews since last Christmastime. You can see many of them (they'll all be there eventually) at A Collection Reviewed. My wife, the luminous Mrs. V., came up with the idea to watch and potentially cull our overly large DVD collection. We're always buying new movies and rarely sitting down to watch them. What if, she asked, we watched everything we own, 1) simply to watch it, and 2) decide whether we should actually keep it? I said it seemed like a great idea and we started at once.

   We keep our movies organized into several broad groups, breaking out musicals, Biblical, Hitchcock, espionage, horror, Hitchcock, Westerns, war and sci-fi from the larger "general" category. Trailing after the fiction, there's a small documentary section and a music section, which includes concerts and video collections. To keep from getting too bored by having to watch nothing but Westerns at some point, we decided to watch things in sequence; 5 general films, then 1 from each of the genres followed by a documentary and a music disc. We decided to skip horror until Halloween and kids films altogether. As long as we have young nieces and nephews, we're just going to hold onto all of them. 

   I set up the new blog, A Collection Review, because I got a lot more feedback on the Facebook posts than I anticipated. People I rarely speak with online crept out of the woodwork to debate certain movies and while some cult movies just brought out all sorts to voice their huzzahs! for them (I'm thinking of Big Trouble in Little China in particular). There have been several great conversations on some really interesting movies and I thought it would be cool to preserve them and bring them all together in a easier to use place than Facebook.

   In 1997, a friend came up with the idea for a competition over who could see the most movies in the theater. To the best of my recollection I came in third or fourth (of about seven or eight players) with 108 movies. When someone questioned one of the competitors about why'd we were doing this, he said explained we all watched movies like other guys watched sports. For me, WABC's 4:30 Movie, WOR's The Million Dollar Movie, and assorted late-night programs on all the networks were more important to me than any sports ball game ever.

   I grew up watching anything and everything with my parents. We didn't have a color-TV when I was little, so it didn't matter if a movie was in black and white. I pity today's kids who are constitutionally unable to watch anything not in color. I saw so many great and cheesy movies as a kid. I got scared by the Creature from the Black Lagoon and hunted along with Glenn Ford for The Green Glove. Even before I started reading history books, I had a basic sense of who fought WWII and why - all from movies like The Bridge at Remagen, Anzio, and To Hell and Back.

   I hope I can convey a little of my enthusiasm (or vitriol or boredom) with the movies I write about here. I also hope if you have anything to add or, more importantly, correct about my essays, you'll comment.