Somewhere about 17 years ago I used to have to go to the video store to find movies to rent and bring home for a short period. I could go to the local Blockbuster Video, which was one block away from my apartment, or I could make the trek about 20 minutes to the local independent video rental store, which aside from the walk was slightly more expensive but also had a much more nuanced catalogue to choose from. Given these factors I often split rentals between the two. One night after a long day at work I felt that I could only manage to move roughly one block or less so I sucked it up and went to Blockbuster and found a really weird looking Japanese movie I never heard of before, perfect! I rented Sukiyaki Western Django by Takashi Miike (who at that point was an unknown film-maker to me) and absolutely loved it! Great characters spectacular villains and a completely bonkers final fight sequence/set piece It is entirely possible that before or since then I was never so happy to take a chance on a completely unknown movie and have not managed to equal that kind of response since.

The days of video stores and picking up that VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray and reading the back to see if this could be the movie for you are mostly relegated to a past era, rentals are still an option in many areas to be sure, but it is not the same as it once was. These days streaming has taken over and almost all blockbusters and many independent video rental stores are no more (sadly Video Difference pictured above, the independent store in question permanently shuddered it’s doors a few years back). Instead of trekking to a store 1-20 minutes away I can now pay for the privilege to peruse movie catalogues from my couch and choose the one(s) I want to watch. I mean, obviously this is much more convenient, and no late fees, so possibly cheaper too (especially when you factor in free services like Tubi and Hoopla, which ironically largely have more interesting catalogues to me)! The advantage of video/streaming is that not everything is going to come to my eastern Canadian town for screening (not much will in fact) so I need those other methods to find the movies I would like to watch.

No matter what the format I will always look for those new movies, the diamonds in the rough, cinematic inspiration, the filmatically obscure or alternatively in a lot of cases something I have never heard of before but the cover looks cool. With the spirit of discovery in mind today’s prompt: What is the best, most fun, or most surprising find you have ever had from either streaming or video store?

Epilogue: In the years since I took that chance Takashi Miike has easily become one of my favourite film-makers. While I don’t love all of his work, and there is some that I don’t like, when one of his movies hits with me, it hits really hard and I usually love it. Taking that chance that evening proved to give me a ton of good watching down the road.