A glance in any retailer’s entertainment section will show that the average price of a DVD is steadily dropping. Ten years ago, it wouldn’t be uncommon to spend $35 on a single-disk DVD whose extra features consisted only of a theatrical trailer and an “innovative animated menu.”
Nowadays, though, consumers can dive Scrooge McDuck-style into the various DVD bargain bins that litter the landscape of every big box retailer, doing the breaststroke in a sea of $5 copies of last year’s summer blockbuster.
With the increased affordability of DVDs, it shouldn’t be a surprise that people own more and more movies. As the size of America’s DVD library continues to increase, there comes a very important question: How does one organize their movies?
While sorting your DVDs alphabetically may seem like a safe and easy choice, it’s also really, really boring.
Just like one’s movie collection is an extension of their personality, the way a person organizes their DVDs says as much about who they are as the way they pronounce “caramel.”
Instead of just arranging your movies from Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid to Zorba the Greek, here are a few organizational choices that can spice up your collection and offer a glimpse into your inner film geek’s soul.
Chronological
There are two ways to sort your movies chronologically.
The first way, organizing your movies by the year they were released, isn’t much better then sorting them alphabetically. The second method of chronologically sorting films is a little trickier then just looking up the film’s release date on IMDB — it involves sorting films by the year they take place.
From The Flintstones to Jetsons: the Movie, your collection would track mankind’s mastery of dinosaurs to its mastery of flying cars.
The only problem with sorting your DVDs by their place in history is reconciling conflicting views of the past and future. Which version of dinosaurs are you going to begin with: the happy-go-lucky antics of The Land Before Time or the Married with Children-esque lifestyle that was described in the first season of Jim Henson’s Dinosaurs?
Do you include Disney’s reassuringly quaint version of Pocahontas or do you go with Terrance Malick’s complex interpretation of the events in The New World? Or do you forgo both versions for the 1995 film, Pocahontas: The Legend?
Even more difficult of a question to answer, though, is what apocalyptic future you will choose to give your DVD collection. Will the world be overrun by monkeys, robots or road warring Australians?
The best way to settle these lingering questions is simple: parallel DVD collection universes.
Genre
Sorting your DVD by genre can make it easy when it comes time to choose what film you are going to watch on a Friday night. In the mood for a non-stop, pulse-pounding adrenaline ride? Stick with the action genre in your collection.
For increased effect, you can even narrow down your genres into tinier sub-genres. Instead of having an action film section in your collection, you can have a whole smorgasbord of sub-sections that each includes a particular type of action film.
In the mood for a non-stop, pulse-pounding adrenaline ride that has nudity? Try the “TNT and T&A” section.
When organizing your collection into subgenres, the possibilities are limitless. You can have an entire section dedicated to “Films That Feature Nazi Monkeys” — (population: Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Other possible subgenres to sort movies into include “Mobster Films that Steal Shamelessly from The Godfather,” “Cop Movies that Feature Multiethnic Partners Who Just Don’t Understand Each Other,” “Horror Movies that Use Credence Clearwater Revival Songs in an Ironic Way” and “Murder Mysteries Where the Husband Did It.”
Appropriateness for Children
This method of organization is perfect for those movie fans who have recently had children. It involves buying a really, really tall bookshelf and sorting your movies from the ground up by their suitability for children.
The bottom shelf would house the tamest of children’s movies — those that encourage either education or respecting parents. As you went further up the bookshelf, the movies would become less and less appropriate for showing your children (probably eventually ending with Todd Solondz’s ode to sexual deviants, Happiness). As the child developed and grew in size, the films that you did not want your kid to watch would always be a shelf out of reach.
This plan is an almost flawless way of regulating and maintaining your children’s innocence. In fact, the plan has only has one weakness: stepstools.
Bad Movie of the Week — I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
Tucker Max is not a good person.
Or at least that’s what the Internet blogger turned celebrity/date rapist tries his hardest to make you think — why else would he glorify his lifestyle as a womanizing, misogynistic, drunken adolescent on his internet site, in his best-selling book and now in a autobiographical movie?
Well … audiences can only assume it’s autobiographical because that’s what Tucker Max tells us. In reality, my James Frey-sense is tingling — telling me Tucker Max is actuality a million little pieces of bullshit.
That, though, is not important when watching I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, the surprisingly theatrically released motion picture adaptation of Tucker Max’s book — a collection of short stories including the one the movie is based on, an account of a bachelor party gone wrong.
I say surprisingly because Beer in Hell has all the markings of a straight-to-DVD dump — coincidentally, the film is scheduled to hit DVD on January 26.
Low production quality, questionable acting and a truly unfortunate script mar the biggest vanity project since Antwone Fisher. The difference between Tucker Max’s cinematic self-fellatio and Antwone Fisher, though, can be summed up in one word: Quality.
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell answers the question: “What would The Hangover be like if it was cast with unlikable asses?”
In the movie, Matt Czuchry plays Tucker Max, reenacting the purported shenanigans Max indulged in during his heyday as a grad student party animal.
The movie follows Max and his friends as they cut loose with an excess of alcohol, hateful insults and sexual escapades with the disabled.
Coming clean, at one time I would have considered myself a fan of Tucker Max. Discovering his book (also titled I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell) during my late adolescence, I was enamored by the ribald tales of an alpha male who represented everything I thought I should be as a college male — a booze-guzzling, bromantic, philandering smart ass with enough charm to make being a douche attractive.
His book’s stories were wildly elaborate yarns in which Max would jump back and forth between being a complete and utter asshole and having wild, passionate sex with any woman he so desired.
And then I grew up.
I realized that I had absolutely no desire to be the kind of unrepentant jackass that Tucker Max prided himself as.
That being said, I fully realize that I am no longer Tucker Max’s target audience. While I could appreciate some of the wit behind a few jokes in the script (of which Max co-wrote), I swallowed up any potential laughs that may have emerged with grit teeth and flared nostrils.
While a few jokes were kind of funny, the script was mostly a mess of mixed tones. It tried to be deep and sentimental in places but was weighed down by its inability to say anything new or deliver fully fleshed-out characters (ironic due to the fact that the film’s characters are supposedly based on real people in real situations).
Jessie Bradford, as Tucker’s misanthropic friend Dru, was pretty funny — in a shockingly obscene sort of way. He could at least deliver some truly nasty lines in a humorous way — something I can’t say about the rest of the cast who appeared to be acting as if under heavy medication.
When I watched the film in theaters, other members of the four-person audience seemed to enjoy the movie enough. As they sipped the cans of beer they had smuggled into the movie theater, these trucker-hat wearing, popped collar sporting fratmen snorted, guffawed and belly-laughed their way through each and every banal unrepentantly politically incorrect comedy misfire the same way they probably get a kick out of their weekly Klan rallies.
Watching the film again on DVD, though, I was even more bored. Being a guy who is as much a fan of gross-out humor as the next emotionally-stunted man-cub, I was shocked to find I didn’t even crack a smile during a scene that sees Max running through a hotel as he shits himself uncontrollably.
The DVD comes with a collection of about 25 minutes of deleted scenes and outtakes that are just as unfunny as the film.
Don’t think me a prude.
I can appreciate controversial, in-your-face humor as much as the next guy my age. In fact, I love edgy comics that push the boundaries of taste with their humor. The difference between Max and these other comics, though, is that Max seems to be laughing with the under-educated hate-spewing hoard rather then laughing at them.
Eventually, I had to face the fact that Tucker Max is no longer a guy I can enjoy.
As a man who has built a career out of glorifying his own self-image at the expense of others, he has become exactly the type of person I loathe most in this world.
I had hoped that watching I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, a condensed adaption of some of his funnier stories would help me regain that adolescent respect for the man — even for a little bit — but, if anything, it just reinforced my disdain for the jackass.
Robert Saucedo suffers from OCDVD. Visit him on the web at www.robsaucedo.com.
