An Education
Over merienda recently Ted mentioned that Helen Chan, the owner of Video Take-Out, died several years ago. I didn’t know Ms Chan personally, but in the early 90s I haunted her laser disc rental shop in the basement of Makati Cinema Square. I practically lived there on weekends. Their collection of films was both broad and specialized, erudite and popular. It was a large chunk of my education. I hope Ms Chan knew how important her shop was to us. Some of the best parts of my 20s were spent flipping through the bins of laser discs, then hurrying home to Blanco Center to watch Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan or the British horror movie Dead Of Night or The Last Temptation of Christ in an unmarked white wrapper. (Whenever some kind of censorship crackdown was expected, the laser discs would be stashed in a secret compartment next door, in a boutique that sold lingerie for exotic dancers.) I still regret not renting Twilight of the Cockroaches.
Good times. Thanks, Ms. Chan.
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April 12th, 2010 at 12:45
Video Take-Out was the best. I’ve spent hours just browsing their foreign and classic movies section every week. My whole world view changed when I discovered auteurs such as Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel, Kurosawa, and Ingmar Bergman. I’ve only heard about these people in books, and only at Video Take-Out can you find them. They even have some silent film classics such as M, Birth of a Nation, Metropolis (with a rock score), and Napoleon. Some of these laserdiscs also contain special features like audio commentary, making-of features, photo galleries, and even movie scripts. I had lots of time in those days, and I tried to absorb it all.
Several years ago, I passed by Video Take-Out and noticed that they were closing the store down in a couple of days and selling most of their inventory. The owners of the store was also there. I didn’t know them personally but I shook their hands and sincerely thanked them for their wonderful store. It felt like I was witnessing the destruction of the Library of Alexandria….
Nowadays, it is sobering to find the whole library of Criterion Collection being peddled on the streets for 70 bucks or less. The amount of ‘rare’ titles you can find on pirated DVD shops is insane. The special features are often taken out to make it fit on a DVD-5 disc, still the amount of stuff you can find is amazing.
Still, it pales in comparison with the preferred mode of watching movies today- torrent downloads. Whatever film you can think of, it probably exists somewhere on the net.
They’re all illegal, of course. But tell me, where else can you find a legal copy of “Twilight of the Cockroaches” locally? You can’t, since Video Take-Out is already gone.