Steadily progressing through my library rentals

The Melbourne Public Library system is the most generous I have ever patronized. Whereas Los Angeles allowed you a maximum of three movies for a maximum of two days -- at least when I lived there seven years ago -- Melbourne is a comparative embarrassment of riches. You can total up to 50 items that can be taken out for three weeks at a time -- and then renewed, and then renewed one more time. Unless there's a reservation for one of them, in which case you have to return it at the end of your current rental period. A near perfect system.

And in the past, I've come close to those 50 items. With a combination of books, CDs and DVDs for myself and my kids, I've probably flown well past 30 items, maybe even up to 40. I've never been cut off, but that kind of makes me happy, because that sort of profligate behavior would seem to be taking advantage of the library's good will.

Unfortunately, when the libraries shut down back in March, I had nowhere near 50 books, movies and CDs out. In fact, I had ten. Four of which were books for my older son.

They're the same ten books and movies I still have out. Every time I check, their due date has been pushed forward, in recognition of the uncertainty of when the library will open again. The last time I checked before writing this post, they were not due back until May 17th. Comically, checking again just now, I see that that due date has been moved forward by exactly one day. However, we would all agree that at the moment, the due date doesn't mean much.

Now under ordinary circumstances, I pick up whatever movie catches my fancy, as I am unconcerned whether I watch it or not. That's both new-to-me movies and those I want to revisit. I like having the choices around. Under ordinary circumstances, I return more than half of them unwatched, not because I run out of time per se, but because I face the reality that the situation to watch them just never arose. As there was no cost to borrowing them, there's no consequence to not watching them.

All Quiet on the Western Front, which I believe is the first best picture winner I ever saw when I watched it during history class back in high school, would ordinarily have been one of those that got returned unwatched. But during the pandemic, it's been easy enough to decide I will, indeed, watch 100% of those I borrowed.

I just wish that number were higher than five.

The three I've watched previously are:

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (for the second time)
Fahrenheit 451 (the new one directed by Ramin Bahrani, which was not good)
Careful, He Might Hear You (an Australian movie from the 1980s, which was also not good)

Which leaves only my second viewing of Life is Beautiful -- intended as a recontextualization of the movie in its recent comparisons to Jojo Rabbit. I have until May 18th, or in reality, probably a lot later.

My tenth item, if you are doing the math, is the graphic novel Watchmen, which I finished about a month ago.

Now, I think I did have more movies out prior to this, but returned some of them that I'd watched, and possibly some I had determined I would not watch. It's starting to feel like ancient history now so I can't really remember. But if I'd known the libraries were about to close their doors -- something I probably could have figured if everything hadn't been so strange at that time -- I would have gone in and started indiscriminately sweeping armloads of DVDs off the shelves.

So as not to squander all of your attention span, let's switch now to discussing All Quiet on the Western Front in particular.

Boredom. That was my memory of watching this film. I remember wondering when this movie would ever end, a reaction that was probably exacerbated by the fact that it likely took nearly a week's worth of high school history classes to watch it all. (It's only 128 minutes, but I doubt we would have watched more than 35 minutes per day.)

My impression of it was that it was some sort of square John Wayne war movie -- well before John Wayne of course, but lacking in grit and realism. I say this without ever actually having seen a John Wayne war movie. But the point is, I remember it being a long slog in which men exchanged thoughts while holed up in a bunker or in the trenches. The 15- or 16-year-old me would have been thinking "Give me some action! I want some action!"

Well, AQOTWF is not at all like I remembered. If it's boring -- and my attention did wander from time to time -- it's not because nothing happens. In fact, quite the contrary. This is a very mobile movie, frequently changing locales and scenarios, such that it becomes a succession of wartime set pieces, each of which is kind of doing something different. Those different things are all a variation on the same thing, which is the theme that there's nothing glamorous about war and that it is not, as the poet Wilfred Owen once wrote (and as quoted here in this movie), dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. ("It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.")

In fact, the movie was so different from my memory of it that it makes me wonder if I actually sat through the whole thing, or whether I was absent for part of the week and just watched one disconnected 35-minute segment of it. Or maybe the movie was on but I was doodling and making paper airplanes in the back of the room.

One thing I had clearly not remembered was that the characters we follow in this movie are German. I would have bet my bottom dollar that they were American, or maybe British, and I can see why the younger me would have remembered that, given that all the German characters speak with the actors' native American accents. (Not Native American accents -- important distinction.) Films intended for American audiences preferred accessibility to realism at that time. The poster above plays no small role in deemphasizing their problematic German identities, as the helmet you see this soldier wearing is not the very easily identifiable World War I helmets worn by German soldiers, called Stahlhelm ("steel helmet"). The characters in the movie wear that helmet, but the character on this poster does not.

In fact, I wonder if All Quiet would have been one of the movies that prompted a move toward greater realism in depictions of characters from other countries. Although the movie was obviously highly acclaimed, I can't help but feel like it makes the characters seem far less German, and far more hokey, that they speak in American accents. You could argue that the point is to make audiences better identify with the characters -- you know, all soldiers are human beings and the like -- but my guess is that the concession to realism was largely commercially inspired.

I was surprised at how intense this movie actually gets. It makes use of a highly sophisticated grasp of editing, especially at that time, to give us chaotic war scenes and scenes of panic among the soldiers. One particular sequence involving rows of attacking soldiers getting mowed down by a machine gun stuck out to me for being simultaneously expressionistic and realistic, a profound combo. You also get a lot of people with amputated limbs, one soldier who is blinded by shrapnel or some other warfare byproduct, and others who go stir crazy inside the bunker. As a matter of fact, it's kind of the opposite of the John Wayne stoicism I attributed to this movie. It gets under your skin.

I still found it distended at times, and with a few exceptions, it wasn't all that easy to always know who was who, even though director Lewis Milestone et al make an effort to differentiate them in the classroom scene that starts the movie, when they are eating up the propaganda fed to them by a military recruiter/teacher. As a few of the characters die off, though, the cast gets winnowed down and the narrative moves toward an affecting finish.

So now I can really say, with absolute certainty, that I have seen all the best picture winners.

Stay tuned for a post about Life is Beautiful, probably next week.

Watching without borrowing

I'm currently recovering from a dislocated shoulder that involved a small fracture.

It happened while I was playing baseball last Saturday. Yes, that's something I'm doing this year but haven't told you about. I'm playing third base for my team, and in an attempt to make a sparkling defensive play for the third consecutive inning (if I do say so myself), I dove for a ball that was hit to my left, between myself and the shortstop. I probably had no business making the dive, considering that I was unlikely to reach the ball in the first place, and then would have to get back on my feet and make a good throw to first to have any chance on the runner. But made the dive I did, and heard a snap or a crackle or a pop when my elbow hit the ground. I couldn't lift my glove arm and writhed in pain.

The shoulder popped back in at the hospital before the doctor had even seen me, and I kind of thought that was that. But it turns out dislocations are no laughing matter, and then it also turns out the bone fractured, which I hadn't thought was a possibility despite the snap-cracking sound. If an actual fracture had occurred, I expected more than the dull pain that I attributed just to the dislocation. Since I'd never previously broken a bone in my whole life, I had nothing to compare it to.

Long story short, I missed work all last week, had my arm in a sling that it will be in for another three weeks, and cannot drive for two more weeks beyond that.

Having set the context for you, I have a story that will probably end up a lot shorter than the setup.

I spent the first few days migrating between the couch and the bed, but a shoulder injury isn't the kind of thing that prevents you from going out, or even needing much additional sleep. So by Tuesday I was eager to get out indeed. After dropping the kids off at school, I took in a 10:20 a.m. screening of All is True, then repaired to the library for a couple hours after lunch.

Spending the afternoon reading would have been idyllic, but I'm really struggling with the book I'm becoming less certain I should be determined to finish, so that was no way to really relax. Besides, I had a funny idea of something to do that I hadn't done before: watch a library movie without actually borrowing it.

I was returning four movies and had considered bringing a fifth I hadn't watched, but could return after watching it that afternoon. I forgot to pack it in the end, but that was just as well, as I had more than a thousand other movies to choose from, and I'd never even need them to leave the building.

So I perused as far as P before choosing Philomena for its under 100-minute running time. It's also one of only three best picture nominees from the past decade I hadn't seen (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Theory of Everything). Plus it just seemed like the right movie for this context.

So I watched it. Then just filed it back in the P section of the shelf and went on my merry way. End of story.

I did quite enjoy Philomena, which has whiffs of what we used to call a "Lifetime movie," only it's done really well. Stephen Frears, Judi Dench and Steve Coogan are no slouches. (And it was a bit of a Dench double feature as she's also in All is True.)

I'd love a repeat of this type of thing this week, but it looks like I'm back to work on Monday. My acting boss actually sounds like she thinks I should take more time to recover, but there's only so much migrating between the couch and bed a man can do.

Pirating = bad, borrowing from the library = perfectly fine

I can't help but notice that almost every time I borrow a movie from the library, it's got some kind of ad beforehand thanking me for not pirating it.

These usually riff in various ways on the theme "By buying this movie, you helped support x number of jobs. Thanks!"

Only I didn't buy it. Somebody did, but now I'm just one of potentially hundreds of people watching it for free.

Which makes it different from pirating how, exactly?

The main objection to piracy, of course, is that you don't pay for it in any way, shape or form. You are contributing nothing to the limited amount of money a movie can make on its video sales. Yeah, it's illegal, and yeah, sometimes it results in movies getting seen even before they've been released to video. But those would be relatively minor considerations for the aggrieved parties if money were exchanging hands.

Money does not exchange hands when I borrow a movie from the library. And nowadays, in the absence of video stores, libraries have far better collections than they ever did. It's getting increasingly rare that I can't find a movie I want through inter-library loan, which basically means not only am I watching this movie for free, but I'm watching pretty much every movie for free.

And that supports x number of jobs how, exactly?

Libraries as institutions cast a sheen of respectability over almost everything, but I can't see how it doesn't annoy studios or distributors to know that more and more people are watching their movies for free through these respectable institutions.

Then again, I don't recall seeing publishing houses getting up in arms about books being available at libraries. What is a library for if not to prevent people from having to purchase books?

Because I don't really feel like taking a deep dive into the internet right now, I'm not going to search for the ways these conflicts were once adjudicated before they were resolved and ultimately relegated to the realm of standard practice. And besides, if you want really aggrieved parties, you need look no further than the music industry, which suffers most in this scenario as it seems always to do. Because most people can easily burn CDs to their computers, borrowing music from the library is basically the equivalent of buying it. Just without money. Which is also called piracy.

Anyway, just something I've been thinking about.

The twice-rented rule

When you rent movies from the library -- you can get up to three for two days at a time -- you end up renting/borrowing a lot of movies that don't end up getting watched. With no cost associated (for an on-time return, that is), there's no real incentive to make sure you watch what you've borrowed. But it also doesn't really make sense to rent fewer than three, even if you know you will only have the chance to watch one. What if you end up getting sick, and your cable is out? You'll be glad for the extra two. Not to mention the fact that it gives you options depending on your mood.

But I do have one rule that I've developed about renting/borrowing from the library, which is that if I don't watch a movie the first time I borrow it, I have to watch it the second time. Or, let's put it this way -- I try especially hard to watch it the second time.

That was part of the reason Lost in Space finally got watched this weekend.

On Saturday afternoon I stocked up for my first few days when my wife and son are out of town. Okay, "few days" is not exactly accurate -- I only have today after work before the movies are due back tomorrow. But since the Los Angeles libraries are no longer open on Mondays (and were never open Sundays), I needed to go Saturday if I wanted to have movies to watch when I get home today. (I've of course got plenty of options on Netflix streaming, but I sometimes like being inspired on what to watch by choosing from a finite selection -- hence the library.)

After sweeping through from A to Z, I was carrying about ten DVDs, which is pretty typical. You can rent only three, but until you've gone all the way through, you don't know which three those will be. I pared it down to two movies I want to revisit -- Moulin Rouge! and Deep Impact -- and I wanted to have the third movie be something I hadn't seen. I don't want to tax my brain too much on my first evening home alone, so I decided to go for something frivolous, and Lost in Space fit the bill just fine.

But after I left the library, I couldn't imagine a scenario arising where I would actually watch Lost in Space before it was due back. The first chunk of my afternoon/evening (I'm working the early shift today and getting off at 2:30) will be consumed by the Celtics-Heat game, and watching two movies after that may be a bit ambitious (as discussed here). If I were to watch two movies tonight, I knew it would probably be the other two, not the 130-minute Lost in Space, which I knew was probably not very good. (It's one of those movies I always knew I'd see eventually, and not being able to imagine any organic reason why that eventuality should arise, I figured I'd force it.)

However, then I thought of my informal "twice-rented rule." This would be the second time out for Lost in Space, which also came home with me over the long weekend last Thanksgiving, if memory serves.

And thank goodness for the twice-rented rule, because without it, I might not have discovered an excellent way to get an extra movie into my weekly viewing schedule.

You see, I'm always trying to figure out ways to get my son out of his mother's hair for a couple hours at a time. The time to do this on the weekdays is fairly short. I get home at 4, and the bedroom routine -- which starts with dinner and goes on to bath time and a story -- begins only 90 minutes later at 5:30. On the weekends, however, I can provide my wife really long blocks of open time. If, that is, I can figure out how to keep my son occupied the entire time.

Errands can cover some of that, but what if I don't want to spend any money? (Almost all errands involve money, don't they?) I realized this past weekend that I can take him in to work. My office has a skeleton crew on Saturday and no crew at all on Sunday. And even on Saturday, the skeleton crew is in other areas of the building, not the area of the building where I sit.

So this past weekend, I watched Lost in Space in two halves, one each day, while sitting at my desk. I wasn't bothering anybody, nobody was bothering me, and my son was just fascinated to be in a new location. Most importantly, my wife got some time at home to wrap up loose ends before leaving the country.

And Lost in Space? Well, I was digging it for the first half. I thought the effects were reasonably special, Gary Oldman was a treat in full-on mustache-twirling villain mode, and even the sci-fi concepts seemed to make a certain amount of sense. However, when the movie became too ambitious -- moving beyond spacial loss to temporal loss and time travel -- it fell apart. I admired almost enough about the movie to give it a thumbs up -- but not quite. Still, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

And if it paves the way to watching an extra movie a week in the comfort of my office, then it'll have been well worth the viewing indeed.

Thanks, twice-rented rule! You're the best!

Documentaries are not entertaining

For years now I've been limited by the maximum three movies at a time you can rent from the library. It's not that I really think I need to watch more than three movies from this one source in the two days you're allowed to have them out, or three or four days if you time it out correctly over a weekend. It's that I have trouble making up my mind. In fact, I'll go through alphabetically, picking up movies as they catch my fancy, and will be struggling to hold them all by the time I start to pick up speed around R or S. In fact, every once in awhile a fellow patron will inform me that I can only take out three, and I'll explain that I pare it down to three after the initial dozen I've chosen as contenders.

Well, I just learned that three is not actually the limit. It's the limit for feature films, but not for documentaries.

Or, as the librarian put it, for "entertainment films" but not for documentaries.

Here's what happened on Tuesday night as I was stocking up to get me through to Saturday (the library being closed on both Thursday and Friday). I came up to the checkout counter with a sort of random selection: Donnie Brasco (which I'd already seen), Lost in Space (which I only vaguely sort of wanted to see, and picked up for the purposes of light escapism) and Angels and Demons (which I didn't want to see that much, but which I thought might interest my wife).

As the librarian was scanning the bar codes on my selections, I noticed the documentary Koyaanisqatsi sitting on the counter next to her, recently returned but not yet shelved. It had been on my radar and I'd been wanting to see it. "Can I take this out instead of one of these others?" I asked.

"You can take it out in addition to the others," she responded.

It was then I discovered that the library observes a distinction between fiction films and documentaries. But "fiction films" was not how she described them. She said I could take out up to three "entertainment films" and up to three documentaries.

It may not be worth making this the basis for an entire post, but I chuckled to myself over the implication that documentaries were not "entertainment" -- in fact, that they were diametrically opposed to being entertainment. Surely it was just a slip of the tongue and she really meant fiction films or feature films. Then again, those categories are kind of inexact as well. A "fiction film" can be about a non-fiction event, and a "feature film" can sometimes refer to documentaries -- a "documentary feature" (as opposed to a short subject).

Anyway.

So Koyaanisqatsi was pretty cool. If you're not familiar with it, it's the 1982 film that juxtaposes images of the purity of nature with images of the busy-ness of modern society and technology, and is actually sometimes known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. New age musician Philip Glass composed the sometimes haunting, sometimes playful score. There's no narrative, per se, but it's certainly nice to look at, all the time-lapse photography utilized perfectly to make meandering clouds and busy freeways seem downright mesmerizing. And the message is not super in-your-face -- there's an implication that man's influence on the planet has been negative, but it's never spelled out in so many words. It was an interesting decision on my part to start watching it at nearly 1 a.m. last night, and it took a Monster energy drink, two candy bars and some ice cream to get me through. But at least I finished it at night -- it's one of those movies that's cooler if you see it in the middle of the night than the next morning, frantically before you have to return it to the library.

So I'll know in the future to throw in at least one doco every time I'm planning to rent some fiction films. If I'm lucky, I will even be entertained by it.

The weekend just got longer

Who says nothing good has come out of California's famous budget crisis?

For me, it means a longer weekend. I'll explain.

One of my biggest sources for getting DVDs is the public library. Every branch in the area has an excellent collection of at least a thousand titles. They'll let you borrow three at a time, and they don't care which branch you return them to. (I really wish Blockbuster would learn this simple little idea.) The only problem with borrowing those three movies is that you have to have them back only two days later.

That is, unless you rent on a Friday. If you rent on a Friday, it's really three days, because the library isn't open on Sunday. It doesn't matter if you watch all three movies, because it didn't cost you anything, but the extra day gives that a more realistic chance of happening.

So for awhile I had a ritual of driving to the branch nearest my work at lunch on Friday to pick out three movies for the weekend. It was always fun not knowing what I might come away with.

But then, in trying to reduce hours for certain free government services -- including closing the DMV an extra day each week -- the city of Los Angeles (facing its own specific budget crisis) limited the library's Friday hours to just four, 1:30 to 5:30. This wasn't so great, as it meant the Friday lunchtime visits weren't really possible -- since my workday runs until only 3:30, I need to be eating lunch a lot earlier than that. And I wasn't that big on visiting the library after work, because then I'd get snarled in Friday night traffic, and tack on an extra 45 minutes to the time I arrived home.

As the budgetary problems have gotten worse -- or at least, not cleared up as quickly as they hoped -- they've tweaked the hours further. Only this time they benefit me, even though the total number of hours are fewer -- in fact, because they are fewer.

Starting this Monday, all branches of the library are now open only five days a week -- those five days being Tuesday through Saturday. So now any movies borrowed on a Friday are not due back until Tuesday -- Tuesday at 8 p.m., at that. Not only that, but the full-day closure on Monday means that Friday can go back to having regular hours. So now when I rent at lunch on a Friday, I'll get the movies for possibly as long as 100 hours, and have it count as just two days on the library calendar.

It's the little things, right?

Well, I can't say that I've made particularly good use of my first four-day library weekend. I returned my previous three movies just before closing on Friday, which means I had to abbreviate my usual sweep through the movie shelves to just a quick two minutes. Trying to fulfill the joint viewing needs of my wife and myself, as well as my own viewing needs, I grabbed The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (for us) and Saw VI (for me). I have no idea if any of them will be good, but I have a pretty good idea Saw VI won't be.

Funny thing is, all three probably won't get watched even with the extra day, since I was out last night and will be out again Sunday night. But just having that possibility is a nice feeling.

I feel for the library employees who have seen their hours cut back. They don't deserve to be the victim of years' worth of poor budgetary decisions by the local and state governments.

But the situation does have its benefits.

An unjust rule

So I did something I'm kind of embarrassed about this past week, because I like to think I'm better than that.

Actually, it was technically last week -- last Saturday. But I just discovered it on Wednesday.

Yep, for what may have been the first time in my life, I returned an empty DVD case to the store. Or in this case, the library. Total rookie move.

Here's how it happened: I finished Georgia Rule, which I reviewed a couple days later, last Thursday night at the gym, and simply forgot to ever remove it from my portable DVD player. The three movies I'd rented from the library -- which also included The Thing (which I watched Friday night) and The History Boys (which I didn't watch) -- were due back on Saturday. I almost always open each case to check for the presence of an actual DVD -- in fact, you could call it a pre-return ritual -- but this time I failed.

And since I didn't use that portable DVD player again until my next trip to the gym, on Wednesday, that's when I discovered my oversight. In fact, I was taken aback to see the credits of a movie rolling when I powered on my DVD player, because I hadn't yet inserted my DVD du jour: Are We Done Yet?, which I'm also reviewing. For half a second I wondered if the last images that had played on this screen had somehow burned into its memory, before recognizing the more obvious answer as what was actually happening. I then slapped my forehead. Metaphorically, anyway.

When I got home from the gym, I discovered I would have found out about my mistake shortly anyway. My wife reported that there was a message on the machine from the library. She volunteered to return it the next day, and I handed over the disc.

But what really perturbed me was their response at the library when my wife came in with the DVD. They told her that I would, in fact, be charged late fees on the movie. Now, I go to great lengths not to be a single day late on my library returns, because they charge $2 per day per movie. At least, I think that's what they charge -- I almost never have to pay it, so I'd have to check. So it was pretty irritating to hear this.

Granted, I'm a dumbass for failing to return the DVD. And if it had been playing in my regular DVD player, rather than the one I use at the gym, I probably would have discovered the mistake the next day. But a combination of factors -- the use of the secondary DVD player, the failure of the library to call me about it for four days after I returned the case -- meant that I might owe the Los Angeles Public Library, whom I have only ever praised on this blog, nearly $10. Nearly $10 for one crappy movie. I get paid only twice that to actually review it.

My argument is that I should get credit for returning the case. It wasn't an instance of me being a lazy slacker who didn't give a shit about the due date -- I just made the equivalent of a mechanical error, which could happen to anyone. Surely I didn't do it intentionally. I guess if the library were offering their rebuttal, they'd say that I could purposefully pull a scam like this if I wanted to extend my rental without fears of an additional charge, and then just tell them "Oops!" later on. But I think the renter deserves the benefit of the doubt in this case. Mistakes like these should be covered under the umbrella of customer service. If they really think a little lenience on their part would open the floodgates to a bunch of customers returning empty DVD cases without penalty, then that qualifies as paranoia on their part.

As I said above, I do have almost nothing but good things to say about the LAPL, and its large collection of DVDs at various branches. Sure, I'd like the rentals to be three days rather than two, but it's a small complaint. If they hold me to this fee, however, I may have to change my tune. Especially since they sat on their knowledge from potentially as early as Saturday, all the way to Wednesday, before notifying me. I could accuse them of intentionally hiking up the late fees that I owed them.

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised. You probably know that every government agency in the state of California wants to bring in as much revenue as it possibly can, to bridge some of the massive budgetary shortfalls. For example, don't bother contesting a traffic ticket in California these days -- you will lose.

But my guess is that the library will capitulate under the slightest pressure from me. If I show even an inclination toward foot stomping, they'll probably waive my fee. As well they should. I think I've got a legit argument.

I especially hope they bend the rules for Georgia Rule, because it really wasn't good.

Just be happy with what they've got

If the Los Angeles Public Library is one of my greatest resources for renting DVDs, then its Venice branch is the mother lode.

It's no exaggeration to say that they have 2,000 DVDs available for borrowing at this branch -- and that may, in fact, be an understatement.

And so the incident I witnessed yesterday was even stranger. I only saw the tail end of it, but I figured out how the rest of it must have gone.

I was checking out my three movies for the weekend (that's the limit) when a little girl walked up next to me holding a DVD whose artwork contained at least one digital chipmunk.

"Did you find it?" the woman checking out my DVDs asked her.

"No, only the first one," said the girl.

"Ask the reference librarian. She may be be to help you."

The girl wandered off in kind of a half daze.

So apparently, this is what had happened: The girl had walked in and asked this woman if they had Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. Which, for the record, was just released on DVD March 30th, a little over two weeks ago. The woman at the front desk had either said she thought they did, and the girl should go look, or she didn't know, and the girl should go look. When the girl did go look and found only the original Alvin and the Chipmunks, she thought the logical thing to do was bring back that movie to show this woman that it was the only one she could find.

I'm usually never in favor of a clerk at a store saying "Everything we have is out on the shelves," or something similarly dismissive, because I always think there's the possibility that my size of shoes is hiding out somewhere "in the back." But in this case, I think that kind of statement would be fully warranted. The movies are alphabetized -- if it's not there, it's not there. There's no back room, and if it's not among the last dozen titles that were returned but not yet re-shelved, you have to move on to Plan B.

Okay, I've gotta fess up here: This girl was probably only 10.

But the fact that I found it so peculiar speaks to an essential truth I think about movies at the library: You should just be thankful they even have them in the first place. You should be thankful that the library receives donations of movies, and in some cases even buys them, so you can use it as an alternative to renting from a video store. There's no part of the mission statement of a library that says they need to help children rot their brains with Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, yet they do it anyway, just to be nice.

I'm so grateful for this resource that I have never, ever thought I had the right to demand that a particular prominent movie be in stock, as I might if it were a novel of equal prominence I was looking for. Yes, they do have these movies logged in in the catalog -- you can even look online to see if they're available before coming in. But I've always thought it was a crapshoot, and I never go to the library expecting to be able to find something -- or to even have the right to expect to find something. I feel guilty enough as it is that I take out only movies from the library, never books. I'll take what I can get. Sure, there are times when I've hoped to find a particular movie because I've seen it there before, so I know they have it. But I would never try to hold some librarian accountable if I couldn't find it.

I guess that's the primary difference between me and a 10-year-old girl.

Remember your history

I mentioned yesterday that my wife was out of town this past weekend, paving the way for one of my patented movie binges.

What I didn't mention was that I did something slightly different this time around. Instead of just voraciously consuming as many previously unseen movies as I could, I consciously sought out movies that I'd loved, but seen too few times. The perpetual compulsion to add to my collection could wait for one weekend, as I deepened my knowledge of some old favorites.

So I took a trip to the library Friday after work, considering only titles that I'd previously seen. At least that's how I started out. But as I swept through the vast collection at the Venice branch of the Los Angeles Public Library -- a collection that I've only recently discovered, which dwarfs the offerings at other branches -- at least five of the 15 or so DVDs I was having an ever-more difficult time holding were previously unseen. Hey, old habits die hard.

But you can only borrow three at a time, so I had some work to do.

I took the unwieldy stack of DVDs and laid them out on a book shelf that came up to around my midsection. When I emerged after a number of very difficult decisions, I'd settled on three titles that I had seen exactly one other time, just as I'd planned.

Here's what I came up with:

1) The Player (1991, Robert Altman). I couldn't believe I'd seen this great film only once, but my list at home said that this was indeed the case. (And even if the list is not 100% historically accurate, over time it takes on the certainty of historical fact.) I know I saw Altman's next film, Short Cuts, at least two times, but apparently my first viewing of The Player was also the lone viewing. This was the perfect example of a title I hoped to find -- something I'd immediately recognize I needed to see again as soon as possible. So this was also the easiest decision, and I started watching soon after I got home. So many brilliant details, so much good stuff in this film.

2) I Am Legend (2007, Francis Lawrence). I wanted one of the movies to be something big and epic, and actually had Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in my mind for this slot. It's the only Lord of the Rings film I've seen only once. But the vast Venice collection came up short in this respect, so I Am Legend jumped to the top. My wife and I loved this film when we saw it in IMAX two years ago -- plus, I'm always drawn to visions of post-apocalypse where they really care about the details of what a world like this would be like. Times Square overrun by tall grass and deer? Yup, I'm in. I watched it late-night Saturday night.

3) The Big Lebowksi (1998, Joel Coen). This cult favorite is also some people's favorite Coen brothers movie, and was probably singularly responsible for significantly raising the profile of the White Russian. However, I was only vaguely positive on it when I saw it a decade ago, so I thought I should definitely revisit it. Only problem is, I didn't. I had it lined up to watch on Sunday night, and was even prepared to have a White Russian or six while watching. (Though I had no plans to watch it wearing a bathrobe.) But I waited too long to start, and then discovered that the thing is 127 minutes long -- not something I wanted to get myself into after 10:30 on a school night. Since it was due back on Monday, I'd have to let this one go by the boards.

Maybe it was the hole left by The Big Lebowski, but I found myself drawn to the local Blockbuster on Monday to pick up something else for my third film revisited. That third something was:

3) The 13th Warrior (1999, John McTiernan). I ranked it during the day on Flickchart, and thought to myself, "Damn -- for the number of times I've pimped this film to somebody, I can't believe I've only watched it once." Blockbuster didn't let me down -- they could have very easily not stocked it -- and I came home with it, watching it in the late afternoon (I get out at 4 on Mondays). In my review of it I referred to it as a "subtle historical epic," and that's pretty much true. While it doesn't have the epic sweep of a Braveheart or a Lord of the Rings, it's got a really interesting cast of characters, comprised mostly of 10th century Vikings, and the Arab diplomat (Antonio Banderas) who travels with them to their homeland to fight cannibalistic mist creatures. A really interesting film.

And you know what?

I didn't like any of the films as much as I'd remembered. Time has a way of coloring your perception of things. Sure, it had only been two years since I'd seen I Am Legend. But the big screen -- especially an IMAX screen -- can really inflate the value of a good film, making it seem like a great one. I think I Am Legend settles in somewhere around "very good." The biggest dropoff of the three was probably The 13th Warrior, which struck me with its originality when I first saw it ten years ago, but yesterday left me with considerably less of a sense of wonder. The least dropoff was The Player, which is still a great film, just not the world-rocking film I remembered it to be.

But you know what else?

Whether I liked the films as much is hardly the point. The point is that all film fans need to remember to take time out of their busy viewing schedules to go back to the same wells again. Those were good wells -- the water was cold and pure and tasted good. And watching these films again really nourished me.

The reality with most films is that they aren't quite as good as you remembered them when you watch them again. This is of course not always true -- there are some films where the more details you spot, the more you fall in love. But my guess is that a lot more films don't have the impact they first had, simply because you already know what will happen, because you no longer have the thrill of first discovery. And that's okay.

I guess it's worth asking whether it wouldn't be better to stop at one viewing, if this is going to be the case. That may be the only way to preserve the unfettered love you have for the film in question.

But I don't have that kind of foreknowledge, and I'll take the risk. Any film I love needs to stand that test of a second viewing. If it's not as good as I thought it was, that's probably worth knowing.

Especially when I'm, you know, ranking all the films I've ever seen ...

Something special

Okay, after a week of snipes and jabs on my blog, how about we end the week (in a matter of speaking) on a positive note?

We were supposed to go to the drive-in last night. It was something we had been looking forward to for weeks, as we've had a great time the other two times we've gone, even when the movies themselves were not great.

But it's a long drive and a late night, so there were a number of factors that conspired to put the kibosh on it. For one, I've been sick all week, and I was still hacking up enough phlegm that I thought it would interfere with the unfettered enjoyment I hope to get from a drive-in double feature. Secondly, my car was actually in the shop yesterday, as a check engine light resulted in a seemingly inevitable $500+ in repairs, God knows whether they were really necessary. And then there was the little problem of a disappointing slate of films at the theater. The most appealing combo we could find would have been Robert Rodriguez' garish-looking kids film Shorts, and G.I. Joe. I actually want to see G.I. Joe, but I could not get over the idea that Shorts looks like it will be terrible.

So we'll try again next weekend, or maybe two weeks after that. Or maybe next year.

I told my wife I still wanted to do something special last night, so a second plan formed. We'd do the good old "pay for the first, sneak in to the second" double feature at a local multiplex. We even had the films chosen, and they timed up perfectly to have almost no gap in between -- The Goods at 5:25, Julie & Julia at 7:10. But when we got within an hour of showtime, my wife revealed she didn't really want to see either. I realized I was kind of forcing it myself, so that plan dropped off the table.

Still looking for that elusive "something special" -- and apparently unable to conceive of anything special that didn't involve movies -- we even momentarily discussed seeing whatever was playing at the local Landmark theater that has several "couch theaters," where you sit comfortably, two to a couch. Unfortunately, "whatever was playing" didn't seem worth the $14 per ticket.

Well, I ended up getting something special after all. It came in the form of a movie I picked up at the library without knowing anything about it.

The movie was called Henry Poole Is Here. It's the fourth feature from director Mark Pellington, who has made two other films I find interesting: Arlington Road and The Mothman Prophecies.

Henry Poole Is Here was only on my radar at all because I composed a list of films I wanted to review from the available inventory at the library branch nearest my office. I sometimes come up with "hit lists" this way -- see what they have, request it, then know I can pick it up easily when the approval comes through. I saw Luke Wilson, Radha Mitchell, Cheryl Hines and George Lopez on the cover, decided these were all people I liked, and added it to the list.

But I didn't hold any specific hope for it, just as I don't hold specific hope for Norbit, Crossover, Catch and Release, Daddy Day Camp, or several other films I requested to review using this method. In fact, I wasn't even sure whether it had a theatrical release. (It did, briefly, last August). Therefore, I had planned to watch it while I was waiting for my car at the Volkswagen dealer. Instead, I watched Ted Kennedy's memorial service (rest in peace) and wrote yesterday's blog post.

Well, fate was favorable to me. For films I like, I want to see them on a regular screen rather than that of a portable DVD player. And Henry Poole Is Here is a movie I like.

A lot.

A real lot.

In fact, I like this movie so much, I told my wife that I didn't know if I'd seen a movie this good "in years." As I was watching it, I felt a rush of revelatory joy equivalent to seeing Donnie Darko for the first time.

Now, before you take me at my word and push Henry Poole Is Here to the top of your Netflix queue -- but I do thank you for having such faith in my recommendations -- I must tell you that there's a controversial element to this film that I believe was a primary factor in it getting a mere 37% on Rotten Tomatoes and an only slightly better 44% on Metactritic.

Namely, this is a movie about the miraculous appearance of the face of Christ in a water stain on a stucco wall of an Orange County ranch house.

If that sends up immediate warning flares, don't let it. Just because a movie does not take a cynical view of Christianity does not mean it's not worth your time.

When you've got a movie about the face of Christ appearing in an everyday object, you've got two ways you can go with it: 1) Make it a broad satire and mercilessly ridicule those who believe, or 2) Treat it with respect and see where the story takes you.

I'm glad to say Henry Poole Is Here did the latter, and the science vs. faith issues that come to the fore are not only engrossing, but genuinely moving. As I've told you before, I'm an atheist. But there's a difference between being an atheist and being closed-minded, and I never want to be the latter. If a movie with religious overtones is made cleanly, tightly, and with terrific writing, acting and directing -- never mind the dynamite soundtrack -- it still has the power to rock my world.

And rock my world Henry Poole Is Here did.

I don't want to discuss the film too much more -- there are a bevy of wonderful surprises to discover in it -- but I do want to offer one more word for those of you who are skeptical. While this film is about religion, it is not preachy. And it is not a Christian film. It's fully in the mainstream, and it smartly keeps things ambiguous enough to satisfy the non-believers.

When it was time to go to sleep last night, my mind was racing, composing the first few sentences of my review in my head. The more I got down, the more I risked losing if I closed my eyes. Plus, it was still too damn hot to go to sleep. So I got up, hauled my laptop outside to where it was cool, and wrote the damn thing.

In about nine minutes.

In other words, plenty fast for the 18-minute life of my laptop battery.

To give you an idea how unusual this is, I typically struggle with what to say about movies I really like. The enormity of the responsibility of giving a good film the perfect endorsement usually weighs on me. It takes me at least 20 minutes to bang out the first draft of a movie I totally hate -- and such films are always easier to write about.

I did tweak the review today when I got up, but its core structure was the same that flew out of me in a flurry of inspired fertility the night before. I also watched the movie again this morning, to make sure, before I went off all half-cocked recommending this movie to everyone and his grandmother, that it held up. In the cold light of day -- well, that's just a figure of speech during our current heat wave -- I did realize that the movie may be merely excellent, not quite in the rarified air of "great." I'll recommend it to people, but probably not to their grandmothers.

And the thing is, you are free to disagree with me. That's fine. Maybe I'm reading this movie wrong. Maybe I'm being manipulated by some kind of pernicious Christian agenda, which is all the more pernicious for its ability to win over skeptics.

But I don't care. It doesn't change the fact that as I was watching, I felt transported. I felt filled to the brim with superlatives. I commented regularly and insistently that this film was blowing my mind. And isn't that the reason we watch movies in the first place, to get into that head space? To feel that sitting through all the dreck was worth it, for these rare moments of transcendence?

And so it is, to extend the religious metaphor, that Henry Poole Is Here has achieved the holy trinity on my blog. At the time of this writing, it's the first to be at the tops of my lists of Most Recently Seen, Most Recently Revisited, and Most Recently Reviewed movies -- all at the same time.

Something special?

I'll say.

Costly rentals

In movies that grapple with the abstract concepts of fate and chance, characters often discuss how such-and-such wouldn't have happened if they'd only been following their normal routine. Or not following their normal routine.

It can be good -- "If I hadn't stopped to tie my shoe, that falling piano would have crushed me" -- or bad -- "If only I hadn't stopped to tie my shoe, I would have missed that falling piano." (This last example would probably come from a movie about the afterlife).

Well, my own personal example of "routine followed/not followed" is bad -- though not "crushed by a piano" bad. And, of course, because it's me, it also directly involves movies themselves.

I was driving home from work Friday afternoon. In the way I'd originally envisioned the day, I planned to go straight home, collect my gym stuff, and stop at the library on the way to the gym. The library was where I needed to return three movies before 6 (or else they'd trigger a $1/day overdue fine), as well as pick up The Four Feathers and two others. The plan was to get started on watching The Four Feathers at the gym. Why The Four Feathers? Well, until my latest request list gets approved, I'm out of movies that I've seen but not yet reviewed. This one was approved for me ages ago, and I knew it would be available at this branch.

Good plan, right?

Until the part where I got reeeaaaalllly tired during the day. And decided that I'd skip the gym. We planned to go for a bike ride on Saturday, then I'd play basketball as usual on Sunday. There would be plenty of exercise in my future.

But I still had to return Gran Torino, Fool's Gold and Flash of Genius (which I did not watch) by 6 p.m. to avoid the $3 fine. So I decided to alter my route home to go by the library, which left me on the 405 North for about three exits longer than usual.

It was during that stretch, of course, that I got into a car accident.

Everybody's fine. The hood of my car is a little messed up, but it too will be fine after some body work. Body work that will probably use up most if not all of my deductible. But hey, money comes and money goes, right?

It was really stupid the way it happened. Somehow, I got the position of my feet screwed up so that my right foot was no longer aligned with the brake. I don't know if it was underneath the row of pedals or what. But when I was floating along at a placid two miles per hour in stop-and-go traffic, and it came time to avoid hitting the Lexus SUV in front of me, all my foot found was floorboard. And before I could even figure out what was happening, my Golf was humping the back of the aforementioned SUV. I say "humping" because it wasn't even a single hit and then the car stalling out. No, I must have made some kind of semi-correction involving the gas pedal, though I honestly can't remember that. At any rate, the end result was two distinct thrusts into his car before the incident ended.

A tall blond Russian kid -- even taller than me -- got out of the car and was immediately reassuring me that it was okay, even clapping me lightly on the shoulder to show his good-natured response to the event. It was the first of many extremely pleasant interactions related to my first car accident in 10 years. In fact, everyone was so pleasant -- from Yaroslav and his girlfriend, to the police officer, to the woman on the phone from the insurance agency -- that I was almost not in a bad mood about it at all. The most important thing was that his car was almost completely undamaged (a little scuffing on the rear bumper), and that they did not seem a) hurt, or b) like the kind of people to make up a fake injury just to screw me.

However, it didn't take long for me to think "If I only didn't have to return those videos ..." or "If I'd only maintained enough energy to go to the gym ..."

Of course, these are the kind of "if only"s we all want to have. If you're in a car accident, and the biggest thing that happens is you need to get some superficial body work done, you've got it a lot better than people who were seriously injured or died as a result of "not following their regular routine." That "movie moment" usually doesn't work out nearly so well for the protagonist.

Yep -- not a single falling piano in sight.

The library steps up its game

I've sung the praises of renting from the library before. Not only is it free, but it exposes you to movies you might not otherwise choose. It refines your selection from the thousands in the video store and the tens of thousands online, down to just a couple hundred. You never know what you might come away with.

But in the old days, getting videos from the library felt a little like going to school. You expected to have to pick up a classic, when all you wanted was a popcorn movie. If you got a movie from the last five years, you'd feel like you hit the jackpot.

Well, this is not your father's library.

I can't speak for your library, wherever you may be, but in Los Angeles, it really is a decent substitute for the video store.

I've been accustomed to getting relatively new releases at the library for some time now, but it wasn't until this week that the Los Angeles Public Library really knocked my socks off. I didn't choose to rent it, but had I, I could have walked away with My Bloody Valentine (or My Bloody Valentine 3D, as it is sometimes listed) -- a movie released in theaters on January 16th, just five months ago. It became available for sale and rental less than a month ago, on May 19th.

What I did walk away with -- as the accompanying artwork probably suggests -- was Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, almost as impressive for having been released in theaters on October 3rd, DVD on February 3rd. That was just one of three movies, of course, the others being Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (4/25/08 theatrical release), and the "old man" of the group, Shutter, which came out way back in March of 2008, and which I'm reviewing.

(To insert an otherwise irrelevant comment about Nick & Norah, which I watched last night: Meh.)

I used to think library movie collections were comprised of the donations of kindly old ladies, and therefore would consist primarily of gentle, inoffensive selections, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins. But the LAPL doesn't discriminate, at least not in any way I can see. Not only did I see the supposedly gruesome My Bloody Valentine available for rental (loaning/borrowing), but in the past I even noticed that execrable exercise in misogyny and torture porn known as Captivity.

So where do these movies come from?

Well, chalk another one up for the library. I went on the website to see if I could find an answer, but quickly decided that this information wouldn't be all that likely to be publicized. But I realized I had the option to "chat with a librarian," and promptly did so. The librarian on-call wasn't an actual Los Angeles librarian -- she's part of some national organization -- but she said that the library usually buys new releases, and fills in the gaps with donations.

Consider me even more amazed. So the library is actually paying to help rot our brains with movies, rather than encouraging us to nourish them with books? I'm being facetious, of course, because movies don't rot our brains nearly as much as TV. But you'd still think they wouldn't put actual budgetary resources into making themselves the best video store alternative they can be. I mean, even with potential discounted prices, someone still had to decide to spend $10 on a copy of My Bloody Valentine.

Well, library, you've done it. You've convinced me of your relevance. And you've made me a very happy customer.

Now, if you can just get me to read, I will be even more impressed.