Movie Purgatory

The past couple days Nicole and I have watched some movies from the early 90's- Powder, Soapdish, and Howard's End. They were bad, surprisingly good, and shockingly bland respectively. The last got 9 Oscar nominations yet couldn't be more forgotten, or forgettable. I asked around about these three movies and most people hadn't heard of them or only heard of them but not seen them with a few exceptions.

There are some movies that stand the test of time. Movies that are remembered and re-watched, that find their way into the cultural lexicon. But many others fade away due to their own mediocrity and simple time's passing. For a while the video store was the place where these forgotten films would be, if not remembered at least preserved. And browsing the shelves and watching a swath of moderate to bad movies you might find something cool. I still remember fondly Legend of the White Horse, a 1987 movie with Christopher Llyod, and Josh Kirby...Time Warrior! both of which I don't think anyone I've ever met has seen. With the advent of streaming and the extensive accessibility of mainstream entertainment the video store has gone the way of the buffalo. And so to the ability, and pleasure, of finding relatively unknown films.

But time has passed, streaming services are now the watchword and with their popularity they have all focused, almost primarily, on original content. With the majority of their money being spent on their own shows and films streaming services don't have the money to continually buy rights for all new releases. In order to keep their catalogs full they've begun digging deeper for content, acquiring rights for little known, little seen, or forgotten films. Which brings us to Powder, Soapdish, and Howard's End.

Of the three only Soapdish I would actually recommend but its nice to have the access, to have the ability to go back and watch these 20+ year old films that can, if not necessarily entertain, evoke a time period, a style, and a culture temperature. Films are not only entertainment they are time capsules and, good or bad, can teach us, can have value. With the bankruptcy of Blockbuster and the extinction of the video store as we know it something was lost, not the access to the new releases but access to the breadth of film history, we still have Taxi Driver and Titanic but hundreds of thousands of movies fade into obscurity. With Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon all pushing hard into original programming we are getting that breadth of access back. And that's a good thing.