It is time I let you in on a little secret, Gossip wasn’t the movie I originally intended to review for this week. What I had wanted to review was a small film from the Czech Republic called Sílení (Lunacy). It was described as a mixture of live action and stop-motion animation that was based on the works of the Marquis de Sade but also borrows from several short stories by Edgar Allen Poe. I know, it sounds like all manner of awesome. But there were some … complications.

Now we lucked out and received the film from Netflix over a week ago, ensuring us plenty of time to screen the film and review it. Both Anna and I were looking forward to the film, and the DVD certainly had us intrigued, what with an image of a cow’s tongue inching along as if it was a worm for the cover art. Then, when the film opened with a disclaimer that the film would disgust and revile all those who watched it, our interests was definitely piqued. But something funny happened on the way to the film’s ending, it didn’t disgust us, it bored us.

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I bet you think running this site is all fun and games. Oh sure, I have an unhealthy addiction for Mahjong that I have been trying to pass off on Anna, but that is besides the point. I don’t get to just lay around all day, watching whatever I want whenever I want. I have, like, a system. A rigorous, temperamental system.

When I first started this column it was meant to be an excuse for me to finally watch certain films I had always wanted to watch when I was younger, but for whatever reason, had simply never gotten around to doing so. But while that selfishly worked well as an initial idea, that wasn’t going to be enough to fuel a column, let alone an entire site. So thus my initial idea inevitably began to expand.

Soon I began to look for films that would push me out of my comfort zone, as well as those that would have appealed to me when I was a youth. From there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to include reviews of true independent films and hard to find foreign films as well. Finally, I began to track down movies that were out of print or simply never released in the US. And as I added on each new group of films, the list of movies I planned to watch and review grew increasingly larger and more daunting.

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Anna tends to head home to Brainerd, MN about once a month to visit her family. While I enjoy visiting her family, my job doesn’t afford the me the luxury of weekends off so I rarely can adjust my schedule to make these trips. And while I miss spending time with her on these weekends, I am afforded one small luxury. I get to watch movies for this site that she has absolutely no interest in.

Now, over the years we have both forced the other to watch movies that we knew the other didn’t want to watch. But in fairness to both of us, typically these are films that we were passionate about and simply wanted to share something we loved with the other person. Unfortunately, both of us have wildly different tastes. She is fiercely pretentious and very selective in what she will spend her time on. I am more of a buffet styled viewer, slopping anything and everything on the Netfix queue in the hopes I find a gem within the mountain of crap. She became a fan of Bill Murray after watching Lost in Translation, and refuses to watch any of his films previous to it. I am a fan of all Bill Murray films except Lost in Translation, because it sucks. She is a fan of Lars von Trier films like Dogville and Dancer in the Dark. I may have called her stupid for liking those movies. And so on and so forth.

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Last week was a bit crazy. Like seemingly most of Netflix’s subscribers, my shipments were interrupted for several days. Unlike most subscriber’s my movies were delayed for an entire week, which lead me to a slight problem, in that I had no way of watching The Devil’s Rain. Thus putting me in a bit of a bind with what to write this week. Luckily here in Minneapolis there is an outstanding video store that would come to my aid, a video store by the name of Cinema Revolution.

Now Cinema Revolution is not your average ordinary video rental store. You won’t find any video games, or used DVD’s for sale, or even candy and soda carefully distributed near the counter to spur impulse buys. No, Cinema Revolution simply has movies to rent, and what great movies they are. Dedicated to carrying only foreign and independent films, Cinema Revolution is a cinephile’s dream store. Organized by country with subcategories for directors, Cinema Revolution is designed for those who both know and love film and I was confident I would find a suitable replacement to watch and review for Monday’s column.

Then I went and joined Andrew and Kurt from Row Three on their podcast Monday night.

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Due to a system wide Netflix issue our regularly scheduled program, The Devil’s Rain, will be delayed until next week. In its place I will review an obscure 1995 Austrian documentary entitled Animal Love. A trailer has never been made for the film, so instead I will just post a still from the film to give you and idea of what I was forced to experience for your entertainment. Please be advised that no animals were hurt during the making of this movie, although I’m pretty sure I was during the watching of this movie. Also the still is NSFW.

I would also like to state that I apologize  in advance for this.

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Growing up during the Eighties I was a first hand witness to the bitter battle between VHS and Betamax for supremacy of the budding home video market. My family carefully avoided this format war for years, predominantly because of my father’s educated unease with buying anything during the early adoption phase. You see my father is an engineer and he has taken the rational, methodical and utterly boorish position that new technologies should be avoided on early release, to allow the engineers ample time to work the kinks out.

So it was several years after VHS had scored a decisive victory before we finally owned our very own VCR. It was so long after the Beta/VS battle had been decided that not soon after acquiring our VCR that Laserdisc became the new leap forward in technology for home theater enthusiasts. Needless to say, Laserdisc never wrestled away a big enough foothold from VHS for us to ever purchase a player. (more…)