{"id":11318,"date":"2025-08-24T04:59:42","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T09:59:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=11318"},"modified":"2025-08-24T04:59:42","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T09:59:42","slug":"videostore-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2025\/08\/24\/videostore-nostalgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Videostore Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nAt the end of an article in Vulture<\/cite> about the restoration and rerelease of a whole host of Hong Kong cinema classics<\/a>, Bilge Ebiri engages in a bit of nostalgia for the time when he first discovered them:\n<\/p>\n

\nRewatching these films today, in all their restored glory, I can\u2019t help but get nostalgic twinges about this period. It was an intoxicating time to be a young cinephile. While kung-fu films and other genre movies from Hong Kong had for decades fed the grind-house circuit and the growing network of Chinatown cinemas in North America catering to the diaspora community, the work of directors like Woo, Tsui, Ringo Lam, Sammo Hung, Ching Siu-tung, and others broke through among audiences, especially young film buffs, in dramatic fashion during the late \u201980s and early \u201990s.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nA nostalgia I share, having been in my early twenties when these movies started hitting my local video store in the early nineties. I grew up in a sleepy provincial town in the Netherlands; if there was the kind of grind house circuit he mentions anywhere here, it was in cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam. My own town for years didn’t even have a cinema, and when it did it showed worthy ‘eat your spinach’ documentaries and arty films, not kung fu. As for television, there were only two over the air channels, no cable, until the late eighties. Dutch television did show movies, but again rarely the sort of cult fare talked about here. It was either the usual sort of family friendly blockbuster like The Sound of Music<\/cite> or kiddie friendly olden Age of Hollywood fare we got on a Sunday morning, Burt Lancaster pirate movies and the like. Which means I wasn’t much of a movie watcher until we finally got a video recorder, again sometimes in the late eighties.\n<\/p>\n

\nLuckily we had a very good video store nearby, one that still exists though it now only sells tobacco. An independent store, at first I mostly rented all the big science fiction movies I’d read about but never seen, or only seen once on tv: the Star Wars<\/cite> Trilogy, Alien<\/cite>\/Aliens<\/cite>, Terminator<\/cite>, Predator<\/cite> etc. But it also had a cult section where I found some of the weirder movies like Videodrome<\/cite>, Kevin Smith’s Clerks<\/cite> and Mallrats<\/cite> and documentaries about cyberpunk. And at some point it started an anime section, using Manga UK imports which is how I first watched Akira<\/cite> and Bubblegum Crisis<\/cite>.\n<\/p>\n

\nThen, as Quentin Tarantino had made crime movies stylish again with Reservoir Dogs<\/cite>, the store also started carrying some Hong Kong action thrillers, again imported from the UK. The ones I remember are all by John Woo: The Killer<\/cite> and Hard Boiled<\/cite>, movies Tarantino referred to in interviews. That whole period, from roughly 1988 to 1996 or so was really formative for my tastes in movies, even though I spent years not watching much. I’ve never been a cinema goer, preferring to watch them on video and later DVD\/bluray. It’s now easier than ever to do so, but I still sometimes miss heading out on a Friday night to select the movies to watch for the weekend, three for five from the bargain bucket and deciding whether it’ll all be Star Wars<\/cite> again or gambling on some weird looking cult offering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the end of an article in Vulture about the restoration and rerelease of a whole host of Hong Kong cinema classics, Bilge Ebiri engages in a bit of nostalgia for the time when he first discovered them: Rewatching these films today, in all their restored glory, I can\u2019t help but get nostalgic twinges about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[305,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekdom","category-posts-interesting-only-to-me"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11318"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11319,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11318\/revisions\/11319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}