COLUMN: The A to Z’s of movie rental hell
I’ve decided there are three places the world seems to converge on at any given time. They are airports around any major holiday, any grocery store on Saturday morning and the video store on Friday nights.
I love movies. I love to watch them, immerse myself in their stories and characters, and completely irritate my wife by entirely over analyzing them. But I hate renting movies.
Now don’t get me wrong, its not that I don’t love stretching out in my living room with some microwave popcorn, some black cherry Shasta fizzing in a glass and my DVD player humming quietly in the distance as the movie I rented is unfolding before me, all while in my underwear and my wife fanning me with a palm leaf. OK I fan her, but it’s actually the renting process that gets me.
So let’s set the scene. It’s Friday night and you’re on your way home from work and you decide you are going to stop and pick up a movie to watch with your significant other that evening. Unfortunately about 93 percent of the population have come to the same conclusion.
After spending one-half hour trying to find parking at the local mega movie rental extravaganza store you walk in the doors to find complete and total chaos, with only the promises of guaranteed-to-be-in-stock and five-day movie rentals keeping you from running for your life.
So you step into the line of habitual movie browsing where you slowly sidestep through the new releases, popular culture’s version of a death march, literally judging each movie by it’s cover and encountering people of all age, ranks and serial numbers along the way.
For convenience sake, I have categorized these individuals into five groups and they are as follows:
The Pseudo Box Reader: These are the individuals who stop every few feet, pick up a movie box and scan the backside. These people might be reading up on the plot to a film they’ve never heard of, or even looking to see who directed it. But I’ll bet my left kidney there’s a sexy, scantily-clad women on the front cover and they want to know more steamy details before they move on.
The Teenager Group: Yes, these individuals really need no explanation. They really don’t want to rent a movie and will probably leave without doing so. They are there for one reason and one reason only, to entertain their sad, meaningless, hormone-driven lives for a few fleeting moments while they drive those around them completely and totally insane. You can also find this group of people on the front row of movie theaters.
The Dosido Person: This is the one person in the store you don’t know when you get there, but as you walk along the movie selections isle, you pass them and then they pass you and you go on like this through most of the store and by the time you leave you’ve exchanged phone numbers and have a date set up the following Friday.
The Anarchist: This is the person who starts at “Z” and moves backwards to “A,” obsessive-compulsive people are their natural enemy.
The Pre-teen/Mother Team: This is the most annoying of them all. Basically you have a screechy-voiced, prepubescent boy and his socially disconnected mother plugging up the flow of traffic while he tries to talk his mother into renting him the latest sexual-innuendo/adult-theme-filled movie so he and his slumber party can see Jennifer Love Hewitt in her bra and panties.
If you survive this procession, which typically has a one in 10 causality rate, you might just get lucky enough to find a movie you’ve heard of, let alone one you actually want to see.
There are those moments though when you walk by while the employee restocking the shelves puts up the very movie you wanted to see and all the pain and suffering is completely worth it and you walk out of the store like the conquering hero of the store.
This only lasts until you get home and the only thing your significant other can say about it is, “You got that movie, I heard it wasn’t very good,” and you ultimately end up watching a movie you own and have seen a million times, using the movie rental as a coaster for your glass of black cherry Shasta soda.