I just walked back to the computer when I heard some strange voices in the room.
“Hel-LO there! Remember me?”
“You promised to look at me when you got home, but Noooooo, you were too tired!”
“You nearly ripped off someone’s arm to take me out of the store.”
“So much for calling me a bargain!”
“I’m choking on the layer of dust here.”
“Yo, don’t you like us?”
Voices from the past. From my DVD cabinet.
Apart from the fact that my movies are talking to me ( :eek: ), pulling the guilt trip, I realized that there are quite a few movies in my collection that I just haven’t watched yet. Some get played over and over and soon meet their demise (“Lilo and Stitch” has a scratch and freezes up now) while others were a “watched once and qualify as ‘eh’ on the screech-owl scale” (“The Towering Inferno” - it was $5 at Wal*Mart).
Others were just abandoned:
Jurassic Park III
Terminator III
The Dirty Dozen
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Great Escape
The Lion in Winter
Much Ado About Nothing
The Magnificant Seven
All that Jazz (the Bob Fosse bio-pic) Comedy Classics (collection of Abbott & Costello and W.C. Fields)
Some got cursory viewing, but never finished for one reason or another:
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
The Last of the Mohicans
8 Hilarious Red Skelton Episodes (quite dated now, and didn’t keep my attention) This Is Spinal Tap
And, funnilly, I just finished playing Chicago for the 4th time, but this time with the French soundtrack, just for grins and giggles.
I’m sure I am not the only one with AMS (Abandoned Movie Syndrome). So, just curious: what movies (DVD or video) do you own, but haven’t just yet quite gotten around eventually to watching (for whatever reason)?
In my defense, I get a fair number of free movies at work (I work for a major internet retailer, and we get free samples of stuff given to the buyers, who I hang around with). So I haven’t paid for them, but they still hang out and give me guilt about not watching them.
I estimate I have more than a hundred DVDs worth of anime alone that’s waiting for me to take some time off from playing games and watch it. Of course, I have to fight with **Dangerosa ** for the TV, as she’s playing *Kingdom Hearts * again.
Ugh, I am SO bad about this. Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrells Mona Lisa Smile Good Will Hunting Matchstick Men Training Day Big Fish
In all fairness, they’re all movies other people have bought and given me on the assumption I will love them. I probably will. But, JEEZ!! I have movies the way other people have cockroaches. I’m gonna need an extra lifetime just to watch them all.
Cocaine Fiends
Joshua - The Black Rider & Kid Vengeance (AAFES double feature picked up cheap) The Black Six & The Black Gestapo (see above) Colorful (haven’t made it all the way through)
Sadly, RogueRacer, not even the combination of Johnny Depp, Antonio Banderas and Selma Hayek could save this flick. I was horribly disappointed, and I have a pretty high “cheese” tolerance when it comes to movies. I liked The Mexican, fercryinoutloud. But, it just seemed like Roberto Rodriguez said “Eh. I’m bored with the series. I’ll just throw something together.”
:eek: If you don’t want this, I’ll happily take it off your hands. One of my favorite movies ever.
The DVD that fills me with guilt is the collector’s edition of Once Upon a Time in America. I picked it up a few months ago and still haven’t gotten around to it. I know I need to see it, and I definitely keep meaning to, but… hey, look what’s on the TiVo!
I do the same thing. I think of it as my rainy day fund. It’s also nice to have a bank of unwatched movies when friends come over to visit.
Just off the top of my head…Stephen King’s It, Carnival of Souls/Horror Hotel, the Dracula box set, a buttload of Roger Corman movies, the second Thief of Baghdad (the color/talkie that came out in the 40’s, not the silent, which I also have, or the one that came out in the 60’s, which I’m afraid of), Earth vs The Flying Saucers, 12 Monkeys…the list goes on and on…gets longer every week, in fact.
Currently abandoned movies (off the top of my ehad, anyway) include True Lies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Oh God!, and An Officer and a Gentleman. The plus side of having abandoned discs is that it gives me an excuse not to buy more, at least until I can get around to watching the stuff I already have…
The only one I have that falls into this category is the original Thomas Crowne Affair. I bought it after seeing the latest, but never got around to watching
Frailty
The Exorcist special edition
Office Space (but I saw it on cable)
The Edge (but I’ve seen it a million times on cable)
Some biopic about the Battle of Culloden Moor with Brian Blessed
But I have a great excuse! We’re working our way through Ken Burns’ Baseball!
I literally have dozens of unwatched DVDs sitting unopened at home. Part of the problem is that, up until recently, I was working insane hours and then, when the work rush was just letting up, the Hockey playoffs started.
Another contributing factor is that my tastes can be rather eclectic and therefore poorly served by the mundane selection at the local rental outlets. I’m not in Netflix terrority so I end up stockpiling DVDs from Amazon and its ilk until I can catch up on my viewing.
Off the top of my head, here are some on my to watch stack:
Once Upon A Time In The West
Ikiru
Tokyo Godfathers
Les Regles Du Jeu
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Kagemusha
Amarcord
Master & Commander
Catch Me If You Can
Dirty, Pretty Things
Anatomy of a Murder
I think I’m going to blow an entire weekend after the playoffs and do some catching up.
I have no unwatched DVD’s. I managed to get through even the once abandoned ones after a couple recent illnesses. I do however, have a lot of abandoned VHS tapes, including some X-Files episodes that I never even removed the shrink wrap.
I do have one movie on both VHS and DVD, I’ve watched this movie so much I’ve lost count after 15, and if it comes on TV I still watch it. It’s a beloved classic. It’s Young Frankenstein.
The only one I’ve had for a long while and haven’t gotten around to watching yet is ** The Chaos Factor**. It’ll probably suck, but it was a dollar plus shipping and Kelly Rutherford is in it, so I had to buy it last summer. You see, a friend “uses” her as a character in her fics Hurricane Shelter , so I’ve become a fan.
In the past month, however, I’ve bought three movies and just haven’t had the time to watch them yet, since in the past three weeks I’ve been averaging more than 50 hours a week at work to finish a project (which, thank god, was put to bed today) but I will watch them. Soon even. Those movies- that I’ve seen all of before- are Ever After, The Forsaken and In Dreams. Chick Flick, Horror Flick, Horror Flick, a lovely trio. Now that all the tv seasons are ending, I’m sure we’ll all get around to our neglected movies, right?
Damnit! I was going to post that!! The Lion in Winter is one of my favourites ever too!
As for my list - these are movies that I’ve seen, maybe even multiple times, but not since I got them (cheap, which means $5 or under) on DVD:
Pump up the Volume
Singles
Diner
Reefer Madness
Heathers
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Lon Chaney verision)*
*I’m actually reluctant to view this at home. The first (and only) time I saw it was on the big screen, complete with an organist playing on a huge organ in this old theatre in Berkeley or Oakland.
We’ve got something like 1100 DVDs, and probably 200-300 of those I haven’t wached/seen ever yet.
Some of them are Hong Kong DVDs (we went through a phase, bought a bunch, then lost interest) and smaller indie films that were cheap on ebay (they sounded interesting). Some are big-league movies that I thought I should have in my collection, but I never made it to see them when they were in the theater and it’s hard to get up the fortitude to watch them now (Schindler’s List and Braveheart, for example). They’re movies I’m supposed to watch, therefore I rebel against watching them. It’s very immature, I know.
That’s scary. I’d be afraid to subject friends to a movie that I hadn’t already seen and liked. What if it ends up being a stinker?
One of the few times it’s happened was when a fellow Doper came over to watch my just-received Korean DVD of Dogville several months before it was released to the theaters here. Luckily, we both loved it.
Mauvaise! Heathers is one of my favorite movies ever. Where did you ever find it for so cheap? I need to get me a copy.
As for me, I’ve got Dancer in the Dark still in the package. I lust after Björk, love all her music, and liked her in the movie when I saw it in the theater…but the movie’s so damn depressing I just can’t bring myself to watch it.
