criterionforum.org

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:Just don't recommend movies

As "the movie guy" at my job, I've learned this lesson too. The only movie I've felt comfortable recommending to anyone recently is Casino Royale. I figure it pleases all types.

Matt wrote:

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:Just don't recommend movies

As "the movie guy" at my job, I've learned this lesson too. The only movie I've felt comfortable recommending to anyone recently is Casino Royale. I figure it pleases all types.

Pardon my ignorance Matt, but how much do you regularly charge for renting/lending movies at your job? You see, here in my country we don't have such things as libraries.

Gigi M. wrote:

Matt wrote:As "the movie guy" at my job, I've learned this lesson too. The only movie I've felt comfortable recommending to anyone recently is Casino Royale. I figure it pleases all types.

Pardon my ignorance Matt, but how much do you regularly charge for renting/lending movies at your job? You see, here in my country we don't have such things as libraries.

Libraries are free, that's the beauty of them.

Mr_sausage wrote:

Gigi M. wrote:

Matt wrote:As "the movie guy" at my job, I've learned this lesson too. The only movie I've felt comfortable recommending to anyone recently is Casino Royale. I figure it pleases all types.

Pardon my ignorance Matt, but how much do you regularly charge for renting/lending movies at your job? You see, here in my country we don't have such things as libraries.

Libraries are free, that's the beauty of them.

My library charges $1 per day for DVDs.

tavernier wrote:

Mr_sausage wrote:Libraries are free, that's the beauty of them.

My library charges $1 per day for DVDs.

That's ridiculous. I get them free for a week. This is the first I've ever heard of a library charging people for something other than late fines and missing materials.

Yeah, that's bullshit. If it's a public library, your taxes should be covering that. If it's a privately-owned library (how many of these are there?), they can do whatever they please, I guess. If it's an institutional library, you may need to be a student or faculty or staff to get a card, or else they may charge you (and that's fair enough). But for god's sake don't let your public library take your money when taxes are already being allocated for that (in the US, at least).

Yeah, libraries charging to borrow materials is absolutely antithetical to the whole idea of a library, as far as I'm concerned (and I am not alone in this). The reality is, though, that most public libraries are underfunded and so this is an easy way to make some money. Movies are popular items at libraries and $1 is a pretty cheap price to rent one for a few days.

Some libraries charge small fees to borrow the newest, most popular titles. So, for example, if you're willing to wait several months to read Harry Potter 7, you can get it for free. If you need to read it right now, you might have to pay a couple dollars and only get to borrow it for a week. I still don't really like this, but I see how it can be rationalized.

Andre Jurieu wrote:

Matt wrote:

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:Just don't recommend movies

As "the movie guy" at my job, I've learned this lesson too. The only movie I've felt comfortable recommending to anyone recently is Casino Royale. I figure it pleases all types.

Sadly, recommending movies isn't even my job, yet I still think it's a useless activity for the most part. I guess my friends have deemed me to be the "movie guy," but even when they ask for recommendations I generally try to avoid suggesting movies to them.

Wow, I feel sorry for you guys. I try as much as possible to tailor my recommendations to my friends' tastes, but even so it seems like I have better luck. I mean, I've recommended Alphaville and Schizopolis and received positive feedback.

Matt wrote:Movies are popular items at libraries and $1 is a pretty cheap price to rent one for a few days.

For a few days, yes; but this guy said a dollar a day, which makes borrowing multiple movies too expensive to be worthwhile, and leaves you constantly running back and forth from the library.

Yep, it's $1 per day, even for old-fashioned VHS tapes!

I've never "rented" anything from the place myself, but I'm amazed that I see people taking out 4 or 5 DVDs at a time....

tavernier wrote:Yep, it's $1 per day, even for old-fashioned VHS tapes!

Sorry I misread you. That is indeed outrageous.

I just recommend Evil Dead II to everyone.

If they've already seen it, they wouldn't be asking for a recommendation from me, the video store guy, in the first place.

the library here in toronto is across the street from my house, and the beauty is, if they dont have it they order in for you. you can have 10 out at a time, all for a week. plenty of criterions and films that arent available at blockbuster type stores. just checked the planet earth dvds out today. needless to say, im all for it.

I don't use the university library for DVDs but it's amazing for using ILL to get rare VHS copies of movies, and for no cost naturally.

My local - in the northeastern suburbs - has a huge collection: 8 at any time, no charge and for two weeks. I use it to catch up on Aussie classics & BBC TV programs which do not from part of my personal collection. Hence, for no charge and can see SHOOTING THE PAST, TALKING HEADS or YES PRIME MINISTER. At least I get something back from the council rates I pay.

In NZ it's $5 a disc for DVDs. I haven't determined why anyone bothers. Video stores are cheaper. Holds even cost money.

I miss Multnomah County Library, which was my lo-fi Netflix.

Perkins Cobb wrote: I wasn't a regular there, but a few years ago when I wanted to see The Heartbreak Kid, that was the only place in town that still had the OOP Anchor Bay DVD of it (still going for nearly $50 on Amazon).

A bit OT, but I'm amazed how some libraries in suburban towns will stock spectacular DVD collections. I forgot where, but I used to know someone who grew up just outside of NYC - I think in Westchester - and their library's DVD section would try to stock every Criterion title, etc. I bring this up because the one time I saw Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid on DVD was when the same person checked it out of the same library.

One librarian with taste + high property taxes = suburban libraries with great media collections. The Morton Grove and Skokie main-branch libraries, in the Chicago suburbs, both had remarkable music and film collections in the '90s and early '00s (I haven't been to either in a decade).

If you don't have the former, you usually end up with a collection that's been outsourced to a jobber, in which case you get a lot of popular comedies and fitness videos. Some metropolitan libraries are very good, too. Columbus (OH) Metropolitan Library was essential to my early film education as was the Cuyahoga County Public Library system.

There is of course also the reverse situation. I had a library acquisitions lady lament once that they couldn't afford to buy one copy of Milestone's Early Russian Cinema set because too much of the budget had already been earmarked to ensure that the people of Salt Lake City will never be without free access to an Avatar DVD.

I dislike my local library system's practice of frequently buying about 100 DVDs (no exaggeration) of whatever the Hot New Thing is, for example The Hunger Games (at full retail price, I'm pretty sure, so 100 copies of Hunger Games cost the system four grand, plus all the staff resources to process them all), only to then weed the vast majority out of circulation as soon as demand dies down -- which they need to do to make more space for all the copies of newer Hot New Things. A really short-sighted use of library funds. I wish they'd favor variety and longevity of use, generally, by buying a somewhat smaller number of the behemoth titles, even if there are a thousand holds on them. If people want to see the Hot New Thing without paying to rent it, let them just patiently wait. That's what I do when the library has two copies of something I want but there are 20 holds on it. Of course, they have to try to keep the bulk of their patrons happy, and I'm admittedly biased against people's apparent interest in Hot New Things ipso facto.

My local library, about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City, has a surprisingly great selection of silent, foreign, and documentary titles - including a good majority of Criterion's releases and a lot from other specialty labels like Kino, Flicker Alley, and New Yorker (they even randomly got two copies of the BFI edition of The Cloud Capped Star a few months ago.)

The catch, however, is that they charge $1 per DVD. I can hardly begrudge it though, since apparently all of the money goes toward their DVD-buying budget and I seriously doubt they’d be able to justify a lot of their purchases without the fee.

Our library wound up getting the local video stores entire collection after it closed down, which the town had a fundraising drive to pay for- and it was one of those video stores that had everything, at least up through about 2011. So now the library has an amazing selection, though I kind of wish the video store hadn't died (and when they did, I selfishly wanted to get my own hands on their stock.)

The NYPL is pretty schizo. They have a lot of good stuff but there's no rhyme or reason to what they get and what they skip. Whoever does the purchasing (and I work there and can't figure out who it is) doesn't know much about movies, clearly. They seem to have relationships with some independent companies (Criterion, Olive) and not others, but that doesn't explain why they have 10 copies of one AnimEigo title and zilch for another that came out on the same date. They do buy a zillion copies of new releases, but not quite as whorishly as they do with bestselling novels. They're terribly poor at gauging patron interest in the new stuff: I'll have a hold on Tabloid for a year before I get it but Friends With Benefits is gathering dust on the shelf a week after it's released. I feel like the patrons are a hipper crowd than the buyers!

Budget cuts in recent years have really hurt. Originally they got multiple copies of every Eclipse set, but then they abruptly stopped buying them (and even new Criterions) around the same time as Netflix -- a really inconvenient confluence of events. NYPL even got a lot of the first wave of Warner Archive discs, but that's slowed to a trickle (which includes a few Sony and MGM MODs too). Plus they haven't bought any Blu-rays at all.

Like most libraries, it's become a good source for OOP DVDs, except that (probably like everywhere) people abuse them mercilessly, so a lot of DVDs that I reserve for myself turn out to be scratched so badly they're unplayable. Sometimes there will be a movie with four copies on the shelf and I'll check out all 4 and return 3, taking home the one that's the least beaten up.

Edit: Also, the NYPL lends DVDs for free but the late fees are draconian: $3 per day after 7 days. Of course, people are such boneheads that I sometimes wander by the desk and hear someone arguing over a $57 late fee, just like the old days of Blockbuster.

I work in a small-ish but bustling public library and we have a decent and slowly growing selection. I'm loath to admit how much I have to push to get my manager to catalog older films that get donated, but on the other hand when we get to actually place large orders I'm permitted enough influence that we now stock several Buster Keatons, a few Warner Archive titles, etc.

My major protest is the way that the movies are organized, which is in acquisition order, meaning that it's impossible for the patrons to find anything without using the catalog, copying down the number, and locating the box on the shelf. Has anyone seen this anywhere else? Most libraries I visit recreationally have genre divisions, then alphabetization and the like. I've never seen such a bizarre system in place anywhere except my workplace.

Meanwhile, I'm extremely lucky in that I'm very close to UNCW, which has a magnificent collection of older and foreign titles, and the local library in my own town, which gets most of the esoteric newer discs I'd want to see. My dream is to be permitted to actually create and maintain a large A/V collection at my own branch, but that's sort of a pipe dream given our budget.