The Unnecessary Complications of a Simple Task

Couldn't think of a picture, so we default to Hitch

My brain can be a little methodical. Not to mention that as I've gotten older, I've developed this tendency to over think things. I used to not be this way, I used to be a somewhat impulsive person who would quickly make his mind up. The most notorious example of this, in my family, is the time I bought a full sized pinball machine at a yard sale. This was back when I was a young lad of 17, and requested help from my family in hauling it. My mother came very close to ending my life.

The reason why I bring this up is that I recently underwent a task that I've only done two other times in my life, thinning out my home video library. For the majority of my life on this planet, I've always had something of a sizable movie collection. I'm a film geek, and if there's anything a film geek likes more than talking about movies, it's talking about their home collections. Even as a kid, I owned several films on VHS tape. The shelves of my bedroom were full of movies, one shelf devoted entirely to The Three Stooges.

I thought it was perfectly normal to want to own, and curate, a nice movie collection. It's why I always felt strange visiting the homes of friends, and finding that outside of their home movies, they maybe only owned about 10 movies. I would stare at the tiny shelf, usually to the side of the TV, or in the TV entertainment cabinet, and think to myself “10? That's not possibly enough? Who owns only 10?”

Then as I became a teenager into a young adult, I realized that it was not quite the norm in most homes to have large quantities of movies sitting around the place. As the VHS tapes were packed away and replaced with DVDs, and now Blu-Ray discs, there comes a time, usually every few years, when you suddenly wake up one morning and think “I should do some thinning out.”

The seed for this idea was planted when last Fall, I was cleaning out my basement and forgot that I had some boxes of DVDs and VHS tapes in storage. Taking a break from clearing out enough wreaths to stock a Michael's, I opened the boxes and looked. There were titles I forgot I owned, sorta thought I had, thought I had thinned out once before, and ones that I literally had not watched since I was in high school.

This is where my methodical mind kicks in and it becomes a task that takes days, uses flow charts, and a log book of every title. First you just dive into the boxes and see what exactly is there. You know some of these titles were placed into storage for a reason. Then you find some things that you simply can't get rid of for sentimental reasons. Granted, I'm something of a sentimental person to begin with, but all those Three Stooges VHS tapes I was talking about? I still have them all, in a box. Why? Because my late grandparents bought me those. Y'know, reasons.

I like to thin out by the rule of the threes: yes, no, and maybe. The yes pile is the pile where my instincts immediately click in and tell me to keep it. “Why I forgot I owned the complete run of the beloved British sitcom Blackadder, we're keeping that!” The same works for the no pile, “Oh, a copy of Julie & Julia that I was given as a Christmas gift. That was the movie I saw on that really horrible date. I can get rid of that.”

The maybe pile is where the real hell begins. The maybe pile is where I have 20 minute conversations with myself trying to determine if I want to keep something or not. The titles that fall into here include the ones that I'm considering upgrading to blu-ray, or the ones that I've partially upgraded to blu-ray. An example of this is the David Suchet Poirot series. I've owned episodes of that on almost every format it was released on. VHS, then DVD, and now Blu-Ray.

The Blu-Rays are amazingly clear new masters made from the 16mm negatives. The show looks the best it ever has, but I've only gotten two of the seasons on that format. “I mean, at some point I'm gonna get the other titles, but what if I want to watch the ones I don't have? It is on Netflix, but still...” that type of thing. That's what goes on my brain, and after the use of vein digram, I put my DVDs of the show aside.

  For some this wouldn't be the labor intensive task, but for me, thinning out my library of my beloved movies and TV series is not a simple yes and no affair. It gets done, and whatever I thin out will soon be replaced with some new titles. It's a cycle, but I am a film geek, and I love my movies, so it's always gonna be a sizable amount.