This is quite sad. Bear Stearns was one thing. Russell Simmons is another [that was supposed to be funny, but perhaps only to me?]. Kim’s Video (AKA Mondo Kim) is quite another thing. Where else in the world would you be able to go when you’re feeling like watching some obscure movie from anywhere in the world (or any mainstream movie from Hollywood), rent it, watch it, and return it the same day for a mere $1.50? As far as I know, NOWHERE. I know that there are those who feel it’s just part of the grand scheme of technological evolution, in which movies just get downloaded, implanted at birth, perhaps just there in the air to be viewed with special glasses (woah!), but…
Please read the NY Post article for the full scoop, and while you’re doing that, can you imagine that we got a bunch of people together to form a co-op and take this collection over? OMG! Let’s talk.
I’m glad you highlighted this. It is the end of an era. Maybe we should pool our resources and get the collection for Richard, the other great champion of obscure films after Kim, and the most idiosyncratic curator of film series in NYC. How much does he want?
Suzette! This makes me feel like a proper authority… hugely undeservedly, but your comment is also inspirational, on multiple levels. Can you imagine? MovieNight could morph into a full time career. Just movies, movies, movies… how splendid! It would be great to have a dialogue with a few folks about this, but, in the meantime, I think it’s important to focus on the word that struck a particularly harmonic chord with me: “obscure”.
Watch this space.
Yeah! I was near Columbia and I noticed it wasn’t there anymore! As the young kids would say, WTF! Not only did they have a great selection of movies, but I bought a lot of crazy cheap books on various music genres from there…. New York is starting to suck big time!
I still think there’s an opportunity here. We’d only need to raise about a million dollars to get this thing going. We should do a Lotto ticket pool and buy 218 tickets (one for each person on the MovieNight email list). We’d be bound to win something!