Last days of the undifferentiated stacks

While we were in Bali, my kids fell in love with Night at the Museum.

It was one of a half-dozen shiny new distractions brought over by my sister-in-law, who was looking after them while we were out of the country alongside my mother-in-law. Others included Rise of the Guardians, Fantastic Mr. Fox and a few others I'm not thinking of right now. But the clear winner of the bunch was the 2006 Ben Stiller vehicle. They've watched it at least three times, maybe four, which is a lot for just a few weeks' time.

When I told them there were two other movies in that series, well, acquiring the next one became priority #1.

But I figured this would probably be an owner, not a renter. Yeah, we could have seen if they had it at the library (I can't imagine they didn't), and we could have borrowed it for multiple periods of three weeks, but purchasing seemed to be the way to go.

However, you kind of have to be lucky to find a movie like this at a decent price. You might well find it in the two for $5 bin somewhere, but you're just as likely not to. And if it's filed properly on the shelf, it's going to be at least $10, possibly even $15. Australia hasn't fully caught on to discounting physical media to the level that the public actually values it, which is close to zilch.

So I decided to try a different kind of luck and go to the wacky used DVD store in nearby Moonee Ponds.

What's wacky about this store? Well, a lot. For one, it is both a cinephile's dream (it has tons of movies) and a cinephile's nightmare (it's almost impossible to find the one you're actually looking for).

I should start by saying that DVDs are not the only thing sold here. They also sell CDs, books, and video games I think. CDs and books anyway.

The thing they all have in common is that they are in undifferentiated stacks that clog and spill out the shelves, in no order whatsoever.

This store might have literally 5,000 DVDs. I would not be surprised if you told me it was twice that. But the only way to go through them is to scan their spines until you find the title you're looking for. Or really, to not look for a title at all, but to scan them until you find something you want.

So going in looking for a specific movie was set to be a treasure hunt indeed.

The older child can read, so I sent him off to one section of shelves. The younger one can't, but he seemed dutifully committed to the search as well. I handled the higher shelves that they couldn't reach.

It was slow going. Not only are the shelves full, but the shelves are deep enough to contain an outer later of stacked DVDs as well as an inner layer hiding behind them. No effort has been made to put the more attractive titles on the outside and bury the lesser titles behind. The owner and proprietor and sole worker at the store -- a bald man in his early 60s who looked cantankerous as hell -- had just acquired them however he acquired them and threw them up there wherever he could find a crevice large enough.

So I was picking up stacks of maybe 20 DVDs at a time, accordion-style, and reviewing their contents as well as the hidden stack behind them, before sticking them carefully back in place, sure to knock back any corners that stuck out and prevented the stack from sliding surgically back into its vacated opening. This went on for upwards of ten minutes, maybe closer to 15.

I'd figured the kids would be getting annoyed and bored, and would start creating havoc, and more to the point, that the grumpy bald man would be getting annoyed with them. But none of these things happened, so the search continued.

At one point I asked him if he has a way of knowing whether he has something or not, phrasing the question so it didn't seem like a judgment. He gave me kind of a pained look of hopelessness but asked for the title anyway. I gave it. Same look. "Even if I knew, you'd still have to go digging for it."

As it turned out, in the end, it was less a case of digging and more a case of ascending. I finally found Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian at the very top of a stack that was above my head but still within my reach.

It had a BluRay logo on it, but it was not in a BluRay-sized package. It also had Chinese writing all over the front. But it did not look patently fake. I did ask the guy if it was definitely in English, and he nodded in a kind of resigned but definitive fashion. (It ended up being almost certainly pirated, but decent enough quality that only adults would have known the difference.)

The kids were overjoyed, and I must admit I felt pretty satisfied to have gone into a haystack and actually found the needle. As we were checking out, I was still feeling the rush of victory and was in a generous frame of mind. So I said to them in a voice that was obviously intended for the owner to hear that it was wonderful to be able to still find a place like this at all in this day and age.

"And this one's only just hanging on," the man said. Now his previous hopeless misery was a bit more clear. "We just don't have the customers anymore."

I commiserated with him for a moment and felt the urge to extend the search and pick out maybe three more titles that I had seen in passing and would have been glad to own. I knew neither the $5 Battle of the Smithsonian cost me nor the $20 I might have given him for three more was going to save his business, but at least it'd make his day a little better.

But we were on something of a schedule, as we had a few more errands to run and still needed to get home in time to watch the movie during "quiet time," the hour-plus that precedes dinner on a weekend night. So we left with only the one purchase.

To give some indication of how much the man has already given up, he inexplicably charged me less than the price on the sticker. Knowing it was $5.50, I'd gotten out a $20 to pay with. But when he charged me only $5, I exchanged bills and gave him exact change.

I've purchased from this place before on a handful of occasions, and really don't want it to go by the wayside. But like all others of its ilk, its days are numbered. It's kind of a miracle it's still open at all, though maybe the used books help prop the business up. I doubt the CDs are doing much in that regard.

And even though you have to dive in without any idea if you'll find what you're looking for, it's amazing to have this many movies available in one location these days. It makes for a great last resort if you're having trouble sourcing something you need to see. You don't know if you'll find the movie, but you know that you can go for a long, long swim in those titles, holding out hope the whole time that maybe it'll be in the next stack behind the one you're looking at.

I couldn't help but wonder whether some quick and dirty alphabetization might -- well, not save his business, but at least extend it a bit longer. And I'm not talking about making sure that About a Boy and About Time appear next to each other and go on from there. All you really need is a shelf of A, a shelf of B, and so on. I even had a wild thought about going in there and volunteering to take 12 hours and do it for him.

But if that had been the kind of business this guy wanted to run, he would have done that a long time ago. No, he wanted to be surrounded by stacks and stacks of DVDs, CDs and books, like some hoarder trying to live among the detritus of a well-spent life.

And God bless him for being one of the last stubborn holdouts in an era that has moved on. Here's hoping he holds out a lot longer -- or at least, until the next time I want to take a deep, desperate dive for some title I can't otherwise source.

Wish we'd seen this a month ago

Last night my wife and I watched Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Of all the movies we've never seen, we considered this to be the most pressing.

Actually, we'd seen the original in the theater as a necessary break from a frantic Christmas season back east, and found it quite charming as the movie went on -- the rare case of a movie that got better as it progressed in the act structure. We'd had Battle of the Smithsonian on our radar as a good candidate for some mindless fun when our minds needed it. I don't know that our minds needed it especially last night, but I borrowed it from the library on Friday, so circumstance put it in our path.

But I really wish we'd watched it sometime in early June.

See, in mid June, we visited the Smithsonian. That's right, we allotted about two hours on our last day, after which we needed to leave for the airport, to take in the whole Smithsonian.

I will pause for a second while you finish laughing.

See, the way the Smithsonian is referred to, it makes it sounds like it's one museum. One building that has everything from Fonzie's jacket to dinosaur bones. Definitely a museum worth checking out if you're in D.C., right?

Ha. "The" Smithsonian is actually 19 separate museums, a fact we would have realized if we'd seen Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian before our trip to D.C. At about the 15-minute mark of the movie, it's spelled out in no uncertain terms. And then of course becomes a major part of the narrative.

Now, I knew there were a lot of museums in D.C. This was on my radar from when I was a child, when I visited a number of them, and my family always made a big deal out of the fact that they were free. (They're not free anymore, but we happened to be there on a "Free Tuesday," so we lucked out -- which also explains why the place was packed.) But I thought one of them was called The Smithsonian, and the rest were their own other things. And in fact, my delusion lasted all the way up until we arrived, since our GPS also gave us a single address for "The Smithsonian."

It was only once we'd gotten there, circled for awhile and then shelled out a ridiculous amount for parking (something like $18) that we realized "The" Smithsonian was a massive campus of buildings stretched down the mall. Our parking fiasco had already eaten up a good 45 minutes, leaving us only about 90 minutes to consume the entirety of this place, to somehow find Fonzie's jacket.

My wife's interest was in the Natural History portion of the Smithsonian, since that's where Bones works. She watches Bones, and the forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) has an office on campus. (I guess the true massive scale of the Smithsonian was not made clear by the TV show either.) So that's where we made a bee-line.

And actually saw a decent amount of stuff in what had basically become a condensed hour. We saw the Hope Diamond and a statue from Easter Island and some spiders and some animal skeletons. However, the real coup was stumbling across an exhibit devoted specifically to forensic anthropology. It was a pretty interesting exhibit, tracing the lives and deaths of the earliest settlers of the Chesapeake Bay by where their bones were found. There was even a mockup forensic lab to study bones. I'd say we got our money's worth, especially since it was free.

Fonzie's jacket will have to wait for next trip.

As for the movie? It was cute. Neither Night at the Museum is great, and I think I like the first one slightly better, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I laughed a number of times during this film. The character overload didn't bother me quite as much as I expected it to, and there were some interesting visual things done here, such as the characters jumping into moving paintings, and the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial (which we spent the first part of our Smithsonian day seeing) coming to life in a way that looked pretty darn good. Oh, and a giant octopus.

So what's next for Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) and his crew -- the Louvre?

Already been there, at least.

Subtraction by multiplication

There's a billboard around town in LA -- and as much as I searched for it on google images, I couldn't find it -- that shows no less than 27 characters from Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian standing alongside each other.

Uh oh.

Okay, that's not nearly the only reason to say "uh oh" about this movie. But it's the one I'm choosing to focus on today.

The sequel to Night at the Museum follows exactly the formula followed by hundreds of its sequel predecessors: Bigger! Better! More!

And, a Heckuva Lot More Characters!

The 27 characters appearing on these billboards are meant to show you exactly how much comedy bang you'll get for your buck. If you're not a big Ben Stiller fan, well, there's Owen Wilson. If you're not so into him, try Hank Azaria. Or what about Bill Hader? If you're old-fashioned and you like impersonations of celebrities who reached their creative peaks in the 1980s, there's even Robin Williams to turn to.

But this kind of thing is a problem, especially in a comedy. Each actor will need his 5-10 minutes of screen time to peddle his (or in some cases her) shtick. What does that do to your script? Yep, it bends and buckles and threatens to pop the brads right out of the pages. (I wish I could let that reference go without further explanation, but the brad is the small brass thingamamabob that holds a script together, requiring three of them to do the job completely. See, now you know how clever that previous comment was).

I could name numerous other films where the sequels have been sunk by a delirious excess of characters, but you probably don't need me to. Most ensemble superhero movies tend to have this problem, not to mention Shrek movies and Harry Potterses. And it's not always that the movie goes from passable to terrible, just that you walk away from it wondering what the point was to even include certain characters, because there was never a possibililty the plot would give them enough to do to justify their presence.

I shouldn't -- and really don't -- care one way or another how many characters there are in a Night of the Museum sequel, except the movie holds a somewhat unique place in my filmgoing history. It's one of the few movies I've seen that actually saved itself in the end.

Almost every halfway decent movie you see has an excellent first half, then falls apart at the end. Strangely, the opposite occurred for me when I watched Night at the Museum. I rolled my eyeballs for the first 45 minutes of that movie, then somehow got into the groove of it in the third act. I still ranked it somewhere in the bottom half of the movies I saw that year, but for that unusual late improvement, I will always remember it.

Can Night at the Museum 2 do the same thing? I doubt I'll ever find out. If I'd ever really wanted to see it, any desire would have been killed by a character they don't show on the poster, but are showing like crazy on the ads. Any of you heard the following line of dialogue maybe once -- or 132 times -- in the last few weeks?

"Hey, check out the gun show over here! Boom! Boom! Fiyah-powahhh!"

'Nuff said.

Tune in some other time for my rant against using the voices of delusional blowhard New Yorkers for characters in kids movies.