Allow me to explain why I constantly try to set goals for myself that we all know I will never be able to maintain.

It’s because I’m a fucking idiot.

Oh, I’m a bright guy in conversation, and I’m well-read, and I think I have a fair sense of sentence structure and rhythm and decent taste, but when it comes to things like “realistic workload” and “time management,” I find that I am frequently optimistic to a moronic degree.

If you’ve been reading me for the last nine years or so, you know that I am capable of missing deadlines in a way that redefines missing them. And they’re always self-imposed, which is what makes it ridiculous. I always worry that people are going to think it’s because I just don’t give a shit, or because I’m lazy, or because I lose interest in something, but that’s never the case. My problem is always that I try to take on too much to do well, and I desperately hate doing something poorly. I’d rather not finish something than half-ass the effort.

It’s a problem. I acknowledge that.

So I’m not going to tell you that I’m going to do better with the DVD blog in 2007. I’m certainly going to try, but there are professional artistic opportunities looming that may take my attention away again at some point this year, and if that happens, then all my promises and intentions here will be for naught.

That’d be a shame, too.

Even with two new formats battling it out in the marketplace right now, there’s plenty of life left in the DVD format, and plenty of releases worth watching and discussing every week.

Now, I’m not going to be doing a new release column this year. Harry says he’s got that covered with his monthly picks and previews piece.

Instead, I’m going to be focusing on my ongoing efforts to review every single title in my collection. Eventually, I want there to be an archive as deep as my shelf that you’ll be able to browse. I’ll be moving over the content from my DVD blog that ran elsewhere so they’ll be part of the AICN archives, and I’ll be publishing as much new content as I can. There are stacks of discs everywhere in my office right now that I’ve been watching, stuff I’m dying to write about. All part of the collection.

Crazy. The notion of my movies being a “collection.” When I was a kid, you didn’t own movies. It just wasn’t done. Movies were things that were randomly scheduled on TV. Or that you went to see in the theater. Maybe sometimes occasionally at a drive-in. But not in someone’s home. Not at someone’s whim. You didn’t just throw on your favorite film. Ever.

I dreamed of owning movies. Or maybe I dreamt of it. I always forget which I’m supposed to use. So, to be specific, I dreamted of owning STAR WARS.

I’m sure I wasn’t alone. That’s why you bought the STORY OF albums. It was the soundtrack plus dialogue plus sound effects. And you could look at the photos. It was almost like watching the movie. Sort of.

I remember the first time I saw a videotape in a home. It was my uncle’s house. He worked for RCA. And he was talking about how this thing was the future. He had a giant table-sized VCR that top-loaded. It sounded like an airplane taking off. And he had a few movies. There were so few to choose from. He picked JAILHOUSE ROCK for his first film.

I was so excited to be watching a movie. Any movie. It seemed like such a great idea. Videotape. And looking at one of those tapes, and the box it came in. It was huge. Gigantic. The size of a hardback book. All packaging.

He put the movie in. Started it up. That same grim parade of FBI Warnings went by. But it was new, so it was actually a little scary.

The movie starts. My uncle watches a moment. Gets up, fools with the TV. The credits end, the movie starts. He’s still messing with it. Adjusting it.

The picture’s getting weirder and fuzzier. It was fine. We tell him it was fine.

“Noooo... it’s not working. It’s not coming in color.”

My dad’s a fan of the film. Knows it well. Can’t resist. “Ummmm... Marshall, it’s a black and white film.”

“Yeah. But it’s a color TV.”

So you see. Home video had an uphill battle from the start. People have wanted the impossible from it all along. And they didn’t know what they really wanted.

You remember all the fuss about letterboxing? Remember how long people refused to watch something if it was letterboxed? I know it’s still a bit of an issue with “fullscreen” and “widescreen” releases, but it used to be nearly impossible to find a letterboxed version of anything.

The whole reason I was first drawn to laserdisc in the early days of the format was because of how many titles were announced letterboxed. Including STAR WARS.

Keep in mind, I hadn’t seen STAR WARS in the proper aspect ratio in about fifteen years at that point. They weren’t in constant theatrical re-release, and they weren’t available anywhere in the proper 2.35:1 image. In fact, I didn’t quite know what the proper image was. I didn’t understand aspect ratio until I really got into laserdisc, where I finally had a chance to see films archived in the right way. It blew me away, and I got addicted.

I got my job at Dave’s Video in large part so I could afford to feed my laserdisc buying habit. My employee discount just barely made it possible for me to accumulate a diverse selection of stuff. My roommates were both laserdisc collectors, too, so they bought stuff like mad, and we ended up with a pretty broad assortment of titles in the house for a while. And just so you don’t think I’m being obstinate about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for the sake of being obstinate, I was the same way about DVD at first. I took my time before I got into the format. I thought it had crazy compression issues at first, and the whole DIVX debacle muddied the waters a bit.

But then one day I was browsing the DVD section just to see what was available, content that anything for sale was also for sale on laserdisc, when I happened across a copy of VIDEODROME.

I flipped it over to check the back. Sure enough. Letterboxed. Which it never had been on laserdisc. So before I left the store, I bought a player, and I bought that movie and a few others, movies I thought would really demo the picture quality. New releases at the time like FEAR & LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and KUNDUN, and a letterboxed version of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.

And I never looked back. My DVD shelf is up to the mid-4000 title range, and it’s pretty varied. What impresses me is just how deep you can get into certain filmographies, and how consistent certain companies have been about putting out catalog titles. You can really sample film history in depth now. Of course, what’s been released so far is just a fraction of what’s possible, but at least you can make a legitimate start of things.

That’s what a library is for me. A way to keep film history on hand. A way to be able to pull everything I might reference, everything I think is worthwhile. Film is like any other language that we share as human beings... it grows from the use of it. The more filmmakers exchange ideas and try out different styles and experiment with the vocabulary of action or comedy or romance, the richer film language becomes.

This has been a long piece about why I think writing about what’s available on home video is worth a real focus this year. Prices are coming down in DVD now, so these titles are more available than ever. For a film freak, this is a good time. This is when you build your library, and this is when it’s worth discussing what’s worth adding to a potential library.

I’m going to be reviewing every title in my library with the intent of either keeping or purging it. There are going to be discs that get cut. But the goal is to hold onto everything that is worth holding onto. The main purpose of this DVD blog this year is going to be narrowing things down to what I really want to have in the house.

After all, these are the films that my son’s going to grow up with. I’m never going to push him to watch anything. But I like the idea of him growing up with a dense and varied film library in the house, so that he can follow his interests and discover things at his own speed. For his sake, I want to keep the good stuff in the house and get ride of the things not worth his time.

I’ve also started renting again for the first time in ten years, and I’m still not sure what I think. A few weeks ago, Blockbuster Online got in touch with me and asked me if I’d like to try out their service. Keep in mind, I don’t have Netflix. I know what it is. I have many, many friends who use it constantly. They talk about it sort of like I talk about my Tivo... with an almost unhealthy level of affection. It’s fairly obvious from Blockbuster’s ad campaign that they’re looking to push Netflix back out of the market lead, and that they’re taking their leads from the competition.

They’ve offered me a year free. I can use the service as much as I’d like for the full year. More importantly, my family can use it for that year, and I can see how they enjoy it overall. I get a lot of DVDs sent to the house already, but there are inevitable titles that I don’t get that my wife or my mother in law or my sister in law are interested in. There are also titles that I’m curious about, but that I don’t want to buy like THE COVENANT or the OMEN remake or SEE NO EVIL. I’m not sure how much I’ll use the service, but I’ve certainly loaded up my queue. I’ll be including my use of this as part of the blog. So far I’ve rented IDLEWILD (it started strong, but it loses its way and drowns in style by the end), STREET FIGHT (great documentary that made my runners-up list this year), ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN (Toshi seemed indifferent to it, and he’s the only reason I rented it), CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN (clever and affecting in a low-key way, and the gimmick of telling the whole film in split screen isn’t nearly as annoying as I expected it to be), INSIDE HIS DARK MATERIALS (a vaguely shoddy documentary that I watched so I could see a Philip Pullman interview before my London trip to the GOLDEN COMPASS set), YOU ME & DUPREE (which I can’t review since my managers produced it), QUINCEANERA (my wife and my mother in law watched it without me) and, at the moment, BEERFEST and JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE. That’s since January 10th, so I’d say the accounts getting its fair share of activity.

I’ll be posting my reviews here, but you’ll be able to follow the progress of the blog in The Zone. It’s going to be a fairly interactive process between the message boards and the front page, moreso than anything I’ve done so far. We’ll see how it goes. Remember... I’m not promising daily content, but sometimes there will be more than one thing in a day. Sometimes there will be one thing in a week. We’ll try to keep it moving somewhere in-between. I’ll also have guest reviewers popping in to help me work through all the titles here in the house.

For now, though, the clock is ticking, and the DVD Blog is finally up and running for 2007.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles