Let's Get Physical

Five killer movies you can only see on DVD 📀

A few weeks ago, I set out to solve a mystery:

Cocoon, Ron Howard’s delightfully cornball sci-fi - an Oscar-winning hit - is long out of print on home media and unavailable to stream. How does a beloved boomer classic just… disappear?

To my surprise, the post made quite a splash. An army of Redditors rose up to investigate, and confirmed my hunch: music rights.

Due to the deaths of composer James Horner and crooner-actor Don Ameche, plus the Byzantine nightmare that is streaming rights negotiations, Cocoon is now wasting away in limbo.

And it’s not alone. Hundreds of movie fans cried out in the comments for their lost faves: Kevin Smith’s Dogma, Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask, The Flamingo Kid starring young Matt Dillon, on and on. I hadn’t merely “hit a nerve” - I’d nicked an artery.

Question now is: how do we stop the bleeding?

Answer: We get physical.

Here are three reasons to hold onto those dusty DVDs and BluRays - and maybe even add more to the shelf:

Disappearing Acts

New Line Cinema, Source

Profit pressures are pushing streamers to hack down their libraries to avoid paying residuals and licensing fees. As a result, entire swathes of beloved films and TV shows have gone missing, possibly forever. Many now exist only on disc or VHS.

As for the films that do remain on streaming platforms, those can be altered and censored without warning. We saw this in 2023, when streaming versions of The French Connection chopped out a scene with a racial epithet. Disney scrubbed Daryl Hannah’s derrière out of Splash. Offending episodes of The Simpsons and Community were effectively erased. What will current and future regimes erase next?

Physical media is the only way to guarantee a film stays un-redacted.

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Slipped Discs

Target, Walmart, and Best Buy have scaled back or stopped selling discs altogether. It’s understandable, considering that US DVD sales dropped by 86% between 2006 and 2019.

But as ever more “content” is managed out of existence, people are reevaluating the importance of owning physical media. After nearly going extinct, vinyl album sales have been rising steadily for 17 years straight. Kodak filed for bankruptcy a few years back. Now, it says it “cannot keep up with demand” for film. Every time a format gets declared dead, collectors swoop in to dig it up. Your media library isn’t a dusty eyesore, it’s an investment that will only gain value - yes, even that scratched-up Shrek DVD you haven’t touched in decades. Hold onto it.

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Patronage, Baby

Source

In 2023, Orange Is the New Black actress Kimiko Glenn revealed her Netflix residual check: a pitiful $27.30. That was for 45 episodes of a show that helped put Netflix on the map.

Residuals, once a safety net for working actors, have been gutted by streaming revenue distribution models that favor shareholders and executives, while filmmakers and actors are left with pennies. Buying a disc still kicks real money back to the people who made the work.

Streaming might be “the future.” But if you actually care about preserving movies, the future’s partly in your hands. Actually, it’s on your shelf. Guard it bravely.

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Claudia Cardinale in The Pink Panther

News Reel

• Claudia Cardinale, the Tunisian-born beauty who died last week at 87, was far more than “Italy’s girlfriend.” Over a career spanning six decades and more than 150 films, she became the luminous center of world cinema - appearing in Fellini’s 8½, Visconti’s The Leopard, Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Of her career, Cardinale once remarked: “It’s fantastic because I’ve been living thousands of lives, not only my life.” RIP.

• Are we witnessing the dawn of the post-literate society?

  James Marriott
  thinks so: “On average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens. If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.”

• From The Hollywood Reporter: Filmmakers cite rising attacks on culture, shrinking space for political documentaries, and the struggle to secure U.S. distribution for films like The 6 Billion Dollar Man and The Voice of Hind Rajab. “The film industry is fundamentally, as a business and as an ecosystem, risk-averse and scared and cowardly. [It] needs agitators, because if we don’t actively do things, the industry acts in horrible ways,” warns

  Stephen Follows
  .

• “Originals Win the Long Game. Warners’ Slate Just Showed Us How,” writes

  Richard Rushfield
  in
  The Ankler.
  “We’ve lived the accountant’s dream in the last decade of slates that take zero big swings, and it has brought us to the brink of ruin. Maybe those of us who care about the survival of this medium need to do a little less speaking up for the accountants’ side and a little more celebrating every time someone in this business takes a big chance.”

• Now in theaters: I really enjoyed The Summer Book, a slow, tender drama starring Glenn Close and Anders Danielsen Lie, as well as Dead of Winter, a Nordic ice fishing thriller starring Emma Thompson.

“No one knows who’s allowed to sign off on this [movie] being allowed back into the world. Sometimes it’s easier not to have that conversation.” - Travis Weir, digital packaging coordinator for movie releases

📀 Spin Zone: Five Killer Movies You Can Only See on DVD, BluRay, and/or VHS

Twentieth Century Fox

French Kiss (1995, Lawrence Kasdan)

I saw French Kiss for the first time a few months ago, when my wife insisted we track it down on DVD. I’m so happy she did. Kate (Meg Ryan) jets off to Paris to win back her runaway fiancé (Timothy Hutton), who’s ditched her for a younger French woman. She meets Luc (Kevin Kline), a scrappy crook who ropes Kate into smuggling a stolen necklace.

When Meg Ryan contracted Adam Brooks’s script as a vehicle for herself, the role of Luc was intended for an actual Frenchman - Gerard Depardieu, in fact. When he became unavailable, Kevin Kline stepped in. Kline often collaborated with director Lawrence Kasdan (they made four movies together), but for my money, French Kiss captures the always-great Kline at his best - a sly scoundrel touched with unexpected grace, wit, and easy charm. And speaking of charming, Meg Ryan is at her fizzy, neurotic peak. While playing Kate, she drew on her actual fear of flying (at the time, she was married to Dennis Quaid, a licensed jet pilot). Ryan collaborated closely with Kasdan on the production and editing of the film, something she’d never done before.

It’s a crime French Kiss isn’t easier to find, because this kind of breezy, big-hearted studio rom-com is basically extinct now. If you stumble on a DVD in a thrift bin, snatch that jewel. Treasure it.

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