At the risk of showing my age a bit, the loss of the neighbourhood video rental store is a sad by-product of the world shifting to streaming-based content delivery systems.
Being able to physically browse shelves and take home an armful of flicks – the 2 new releases plus 5 weeklies for sweet-fuck-all deals used to help fill many a cold, bitter Tasmanian winter in my more formative years – introduced me to a massive range of film across many different genres. Some of it was good. Some of it was incredible. Some of it was piss-awful. That was half the fun of it.
The physical act of picking tapes, DVDs or Blu Rays based on their cover-art and blurb – taking a punt on a movie purely for the sake of it – was what made video libraries treasure troves of entertainment; you’re in a place about to physically drop a handful of coins, it made sense to try something new. You didn’t have much to lose. By contrast the shift to in-home streaming services, with nominal automatic payments so small you tend to forget you’re actually paying for the dang thing, make the act of browsing the library a far more complacent one; the amount of times I, without so much as a skerrick of a shit to give, have spent ages scrolling through a Netflix content list only to give up and watch ‘Wedding Crashers‘ for the 1,000th time is truly staggering.
Still, far away from the warm embrace of inner-city suburbs, where internet connections are spotty and chilly Friday nights still need to be occupied, video libraries cling on for dear life. In my home town of Launceston for example, the best video library I’ve ever set foot in still does a reasonable trade. At one time in their heyday they inexplicably carried 5 copies of ‘Eraserhead‘ on DVD and it absolutely ruled. Shout out to Video City.
But one-by-one they too are falling by the wayside, and in deep western Sydney Blockbuster, often the punchline for the failed industry and for all intents and purposes a relic of the past, is set to finally give up its last remaining foothold in the city.
The Mount Annan Blockbuster store, some 60-odd kilometres south-west of the centre of Sydney, will close its doors for good this coming Friday, bringing to an end 16 years of trade in the area for owners Adrian and Helen Smith.
Sunrise this morning filed a report on the store’s impending closure which, despite the piece’s inexplicably hammy acting, also carries a certain sadness about the whole thing.
The last Blockbuster video store in Sydney is shutting its doors this week! Take a trip down memory lane with this nostalgic report. #sun7 pic.twitter.com/JnTzz7uOYu
— Sunrise (@sunriseon7) August 6, 2017
The good (if you can call it that) news is that all the titles in the store have gotta find new homes, so if you’re in the market for a few weird-o titles you’ve got until the end of the week to trek out there and pick yourself up a couple of bags of bargains, should the calming hum of a disc tray opening and closing still be a regular feature in your house. A fair whack of them you can’t find on streaming services, meaning this might be your best bet to get ahold of that shoddily put-together gem you vaguely remember watching a few years back.
Mainly, though, the thought that out there somewhere one other last Blockbuster is still raging against the dying of the light is enough to keep even the most bitter of cinephile smiling.
Keep rewinding the good fight, bud. Wherever you are.
