Another round of thoughts about DVDs

With all that's been going on here lately, I haven't been able to do many full-length posts about new movies. I haven't been helped by the fact that there haven't been too many movies on recently that I've been interested in doing a full-length post on and have not already done so. So I figured that I would finally get around today to doing a post on You Were Never Lovelier, a pleasant if predictable movie starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. However, I was quite surprised to see that it's out of print on DVD. I really don't like recommending movies that have gone out of print if they're not going to be on TV any time soon for you to watch.

And then there are movies like The Manitou that showed up on TCM a couple of days ago. This is one that's definitely worth a watch, if only because the plot is so bizarre and it's got an all-star cast. It too is out of print, but it's a movie that I'm not certain I'd want to blog about until it was about to sho up on TV again. There are a lot of movies out there -- the tentpoles like Casablanca or stuff like Fred Astaire or Alfred Hitchcock movies where you can probably assume that the movie is good enough that you're going to enjoy it if you plonk down $15 or $20 for a DVD even if you haven't seen it. Well, some of the films might not be in your genre, but that too is something that's easy enough to spot ahead of time. Something like The Manitou, however, is one of those movies that is enjoyably bad. There's a lot about it that's just off, and unintentionally laugh-inducing, which makes it fun but not necessarily to everybody's taste. A movie like that is something I'd rather watch first before spending the money on the DVD.

There are also the B movies. Warner Bros. has done a pretty good job of at least making the movies available courtesy of the Warner Archive, but I know there are a lot of people who don't like the idea of the MOD paradigm. It means the movies probably aren't going to get another release, and also means that the DVDs are pricey. I think I've mentioned before that many of these B movies would probably never see the light of day any other way, or possibly only in some overpriced box set. But such B movies are also definitely a genre that I would want to see first before deciding whether to buy them on DVD at normal prices.

On the bright side, nobody famous enough has died that I need to do a bigger post on, and it's beginning to look like activity is finally going to pick up this week.