I SAW IT ON TAPE - In Country

While this series will often allow me to sing the praises of the great video stores of yesteryear, it will also present plenty of opportunities for Blockbuster bashing. Seriously, it never gets old. Not that I thrive on grudges, but every time the slightly younger generations champion it as a cornerstone of their own nostalgia I feel that much more glee that it finally met its pitiful demise - so much so that they're actually not even a part of this story, but I'm still going to use their name in vain to prove a point. 

I've mentioned it many times over the years but it will always be most pertinent to this specific tale: beyond corporate takeovers and cutting movies based on their conservative views, my big takeaway from Blockbuster's general stupidity will forever be the plain white boxes in which they lent out their movies. I mean what a cruel way to further drive home the concept that Cinema is basically just a cookie cutter commodity to be consumed as a weekend time-waster. Not that they necessarily invented this method; back in the early 80s our first regular video store had a wall of laminated pictures of video covers on hooks that you'd bring to the counter and they'd hand you a copy of your choice in a clear plastic shell. But my family's eventual #1 go-to video store (before Blockbuster moved into its location) was Empire Video, and amongst the long list of things they got right was the idea that you could bring the movie home in the beautiful box in which it was distributed. At a glance, one could say this is just an example of me being picky: oh the pretentious cinephile likes his box art. Yeah that's part of it and I'm sure you partly agree or else you probably wouldn't be here. But apart from the joy of physically holding a picture of Johnny 5 in your hands as you watch Short Circuit, the box also came with information: a brief synopsis, runtime, and MPAA ratings could be found on Blockbuster's bullshit, but stuff like critic blurbs and the marquee cast & crew were only ever on the original cover. And that proved to be useful to nerds like me (and my parents). 

In Country was released on Home Video in May of 1990 after its theater run at the end of '89. Though it wasn't until the near-end of 1990 that my parents decided to rent it as part of a "don't know what to watch" last minute panic grab. I rarely had a say in these decisions, I just watched whatever they watched, and they typically had good taste. In Country is a low-key, country-fried character study that follows 17-year-old Samantha (Emily Lloyd) as she attempts to learn more about her father who was killed in Vietnam shortly before she was born. An extremely paced movie that relies mostly on atmosphere and performance (Bruce Willis giving one of the best of his career) it probably wouldn't have otherwise held my attention at 7 years old, but it ended up being a turning point in my ability to appreciate Film.

There's a quiet moment about 20 minutes into the movie where the score takes over for a minute, and at that moment my father exclaimed, "is that James Horner?!" You have to understand that Glory had just come out on video in September and it was very much the movie of the moment for us - so much so that my father bought the soundtrack on cassette tape and so he was probably playing it in his car everyday on his commute to and from work. He was trained for this. Though in all fairness this specific music cue was unmistakably the James Horner sound, and we immediately validated his suspicion by simply looking at the box. Blockbuster would've never helped us with that, there weren't a ton of reference books that held that kinda information, and none of us were gonna pull out our device and IMDb it. Short of waiting till the end credits to solve the mystery, the only other means of research was the video cover (or I suppose if you had the theatrical poster hanging in your living room you could take a glance). This may all seem like barely-a-story, but the biggest thing that came out of this minor moment was that it made me that much more aware of movie scores and that I could recognize differences and similarities in styles. I wasn't yet able to do that with directors or writers or any other art form really; I didn't have the wherewithal to look beyond the art and consider the artist. It was also around this time that I received the Edward Scissorhands soundtrack as a birthday present - my first soundtrack consisting almost entirely of score. And so cumulatively these elements suddenly made Cinema even more interesting and exciting for me than it had already been. It was a good time to get into movies -- thank god Blockbuster was nowhere to be found. 

- Paul