I'd Buy That DVD for...Somewhere in the Neighborhood of $5

The half-dozen places I monitor don't seem to change their stock much these days, so this is two months' worth.

$5 -- Save the Tiger, It, Animal House (2 discs), The Poseidon Adventure (2 discs), Village of the Damned/Children of the Damned, The Bible, Patton (2 discs), Ray (2 discs), Bellissima, Satan Never Sleeps, Terminator 2: Judgement Day (2 discs), Alexander (2 discs), Film Socialisme, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, Shoot the Moon, Poetry, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2 discs). (For someone who hardly ever looks at extras, I'll buy just about anything if it's two discs.)

$4 -- Rain Man

$3 -- Laurel Canyon, Wild Things (for shame)

4/$10 -- Four Friends, The Door in the Floor, Bull Durham, The Robe, Curse of the Golden Flower, The Stranger Wore a Gun, War of the Worlds (Spielberg), The Sure Thing, Nurse Betty, The Great Ziegfeld, House of Wax/Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Philadelphia Story, Ocean's 11 (Sinatra), Sweet Bird of Youth, The Plainsman.

$2 -- Fruit of the Vine (skateboarders).

So far I've watched It, The Door in the Floor (weird--reminded me a bit of The Squid and the Whale, though not nearly as good), and, for the 900th time, Save the Tiger (a test case for how much early-'70s pretension you can stand). Started and abandoned Four Friends and Alexander.

(10,000th post. I was hoping that when I looked up from the computer, there'd be a receiving line of wiseguys telling me I'd broke my cherry.)

ooh - anything good on the second disk of animal house? i have the original special edition from years back, on one disk

Seeing this revive reminded me I hadn't even busted the shrinkwrap on Passion Play nearly three months after posting about buying it upthread.

So I took the plunge tonight and as I predicted it sadly falls into the "Thundering Mediocrity" category, despite odd moments hinting at "Best Worst Thing Ever".

Fun Facts: It was shot by Christopher Doyle. Bill Murray stepped in for an actor who had to drop out. Solomon Burke has a cameo as himself. While watching, I was questioning the plausibility of some minor details, but then realized that I was questioning logic regarding a film where Megan Fox plays a girl born with bird wings who has sex with Mickey Rourke which grossed $3600 total in the US.--boy was my face red!

They probably just stuck the same Animal House extras onto a second disc to lure people like me, but listed on the cover: "Where Are They Now?", "The Yearbook: An Animal House Reunion," and, the real prize, "Scene It?".

The search for Passion Play begins.

ah... thanks clemenza. i think your instincts are correct.

Blu-ray:

The New World (Extended Edition)
Evil Dead 2
$7 each

One of my local "$1 stores" has a spinning rack full of newish flicks for $6. Picked up the the latest "Star Trek" reboot and "Empire Of The Sun". Still...wish they were cheaper : )

Big Lots, $3 each:

River's Edge
Stardust Memories
A Serious Man
All That Jazz "Special Music Edition"

I was cashing out at a Goodwill today, happy with all these British post-war big band albums I had found, and this was sitting underneath the counter for $15:

http://www.myshoptoday.com.au/system/files/imagecache/product_image/0753356_0.jpg

I think it's a slightly later version of the box Amazon sells, this one including 49 Up. Easily one of the best things I've ever found in a lifetime of pack-ratting.

The other day, at Ross the clothing store:

A Star Is Born "Deluxe Edition" two-discer of the Cukor version (first disc is a flipper--why were they still doing this in 2010?) reduced to $3.49.

Yesterday, Big Lots, all $3:

Broncho Billy
Bright Lights, Big City "Special Edition"*
Snow Angels
Grand Prix (already had it, turned it over as a donated door prize at the auto-related event I went to later in the afternoon)

Then a few doors down @ Half-Price Books:

Election/You Can Count On Me "Double Feature" (sealed, $5)
"The Dana Carvey Show" complete series (sealed, $3 "Super Buy")

*Which right now is actually cheaper on Amazon than the earlier pan'n'scan/no extras disc with Fox/Cates/Kiefer on the cover.

whats the best way to sell a lot of dvds / blurays

dudes i have a billion dvds i want to get rid of, would anyone want me to list them here? lots in their original packaging too. was trying to figure out how to unload them
― the jazz zinger (s1ocki), Sunday, November 6, 2011 11:55 PM (9 months ago)

We're still waiting...

ha!!
okay. i will list them i promise.

2/$10:

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (Japanese and U.S. versions--I can study the differences)
Rendition
Lassie Come Home/Son of Lassie/Courage of Lassie (no Abbott & Costello Meet Lassie, unfortunately)
Broken Silence (five Holocaust documentaries, Spielberg connection)
Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop (with music by...Nirvana?)
Curse of the Demon/Night of the Demon (jackpot!)

Election/You Can Count On Me "Double Feature" (sealed, $5)
― Hut Stricklin at Lake Speed (C. Grisso/McCain), Sunday, August 19, 2012 4:00 PM (3 days ago)

Love both those films. (Took me a second to get the connection, duh.)

Big Lots, $3 each:

Excalibur
Melvin and Howard

4/$10 (used):

Cyrus
Man on the Moon
The Thin Red Line
Crash (two discs--the stodgy one nobody likes)

2/$10

Sunset Boulevard
Battle of the Bulge
Taxi to the Dark Side
Christmas in Connecticut/A Christmas Carol/The Shop Around the Corner/It Happened on 5th Avenue (TCM)

Barnes & Noble, $5:

Reds (2-disc)

They've got a bunch of vintage Paramount stuff in their $5 bin now: the 70s Great Gatsby, collector's edition Chinatown, Ordinary People, Murder on the Orient Express...

Big Lots, normally $3 each except I broke down and "Buzz Club Rewards" card for 20% off, so now they are $2.40 apiece:

The Devil's Rejects "Two-Disc Director's Cut"
Ronin "Collector's Edition" (2-disc)
King Rat
Midnight Cowboy "Collector's Edition" (2-disc)
The Crook "English Subtitles"
Invasion of The Body Snatchers (Kaufman) "Collector's Edition" (2-disc)
The Major and The Minor
The Stranger (Welles) Non-PD edition from MGM/Fox
National Lampoon's Vacation new edition from a couple years ago
Amazon Women on The Moon

I've got the Midnight Cowboy two-disc; didn't know there was one for Body Snatchers. What does "non-PD edition" mean?

$3: Hidden Agenda and Oldboy.
$5: One False Move, A Small Circle of Friends, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Criterion). I doubt I'll ever watch the latter--had zero interest for me when it came out.

It probably means public domain.

Yeah, Public Domain. On the back cover the original copyright is credited not to a studio but to "The Haig Corp." Welles' The Stranger used to pop up in bargain sets with other PD titles like the original DOA, ...Martha Ivers etc., but apparently MGM re-copywrited it in 2007 and put out a bare-bones disc under the "Film Noir" banner.

As for the Invasion... CE, it came out about 10 years after the original disc to grease the wheels for the Kidman/Craig remake. It ports over the Kaufman commentary and adds some technical featurettes ("The Special Effects Pod", "The Cinematography Pod" etc.) plus a new anamorphic widesceen transfer (the old disc was a Pan & Scan/4:3 Letterbox Widescreen flipper).

Well, as part of my shopping experience yesterday, I received a "one-day only" 20% voucher whose one good day was today. So once again I suckle at Big Lot's proverbial teat/crack pipe of cheap dvds. (different location tho)

$2.40 each:

Me & Orson Welles
A Little Help (starring Jenna "Pam from The Office" Fischer and...Dion DiMucci?!)
The Front Page (Billy Wilder version)
Strange Brew
Greenberg
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
I Know Who Killed Me (films like this single-handily justify the existence of bargain bins everywhere) (also includes the special feature "Extended Strip Dance Scene"--did Sony know their audience or what?)

$4:

Wild Things trilogy (that there are two more of these films--albeit barely related direct to dvd jobs--is as much news to me as you)

Saw your post and decided to take my 20% off coupon to my local BL (didn't need it, they were ringing up everybody's stuff at %20 off). Got:

Reno 911: Miami
It's All True (Orson Welles' "lost" movie)
Oleana
Greenburg
Orgazmo

$2.40 each. Had Hostel in hand for $4, but decided I didn't need to see it again.

For some reason, this one discount store in the area that's usually a wasted trip had some good stuff from Universal:

$3: Slaughterhouse-Five, Trick Baby, Your Friends & Neighbors
$5: This Gun for Hire, Black Angel (never heard of it, but there's a quote from Sarris on the back), Marnie, and the American The Man Who Knew Too Much

Also, in the interest of full disclosure, a two-disc Memoirs of a Geisha for $5.

3/$5: American Buffalo, Addicted to Plastic, Alfie (remake)

$3: Light Sleeper, The Lost Room, High Roller, Best Seller. Got through 15 minutes of High Roller before shutting it off. I remembered Best Seller as passable junk--same guy who directed Tarantino favourites Rolling Thunder and The Outfit--but it wasn't all that passable.

$5: Fort Apache, They Were Expendable, The Howling

I only buy DVDs for my kids these days, because they're the only ones who are going to watch them enough to make them worth owning. $5 is my cut-off for them, too, with occasional exceptions. Some recent $5-and-under scores: Coraline, The Iron Giant, The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal.

I remembered Best Seller as passable junk--same guy who directed Tarantino favourites Rolling Thunder and The Outfit--but it wasn't all that passable.

I think John Fylnn might have been a two-film wonder. Those two films both deserve the high praise tho.

Big Lots, where I combed the picked over racks to seemingly no avail. "Is this the end of me and cheap dvds?"* I thought, before finally landing on the following:

$5: Eight Men Out "20th Anniversary Edition"

$2.88: Charley Varrick (which is full-frame, and probably the only way I'll get to see it until both the film and I go blu someday)

*I found a copy of Jesus' Son for $9. I've never seen a single film that expensive there. It's only about 90 cents more direct from Amazon.

At my local swap meet last Sunday, for $37 (didn't try to bargain):

I'm Not There (that Bob Dylan thing, 2 discs)
The Shiver of the Vampires (Jean Rollin film from 1970)
Altman's Nashville
Helter Skelter (apparently a director's cut of a TV production)
A History Lesson (doc on LA punk in 1984 - Meat Puppets, Redd Kros, Minutemen, Twisted Roots)
The Tomorrow Show Punk and New Wave (2 disc comp of shows from 1977-81)
National Geographic's Taboo season 1

Jesus' Son is a wonderful movie.

That A History Lesson, though... was really disappointed by that.

H-E-B (for the unhip, a Texas grocery store chain) $3.99 each:

The Quiller Memorandum
Halls of Montezuma
The Magus
The Seven-Ups
No Way Out (the Poitier/Widmark/Darnell noir)
The Omen "Collector's Edition" (2 discs in a steelbook)

The price sticker's claim that these are all "previously viewed", but methinks these are really remainders offloaded by Fox and mixed by the store in a dumpbin with a bunch of genuine retired rentals.

BTW if anyone cares, I watched that Charley Varrick disc that evening, and I wonder if it's just open-matte instead of pan'n'scan. IMDB sez it was shot 1.37:1 but protected for 1.85:1 which was the projection AR. It didn't seen very pan'n'scanny with some scenes having major head room.

Something excellent for $5 yesterday: a new copy of Payday, the '72 film with Rip Torn as a washed-up country singer. "36 hours in the life of a madman," according to the cover.

Also, $7 each for new copies: two-disc Howl and Hour of the Wolf.

Payday's a good'un. There's a passage in Guralnick's I Feel Like Going Home wehere he mentions that on separate occasions Waylon Jennings, Johnny Paycheck, and IIRC, either David Allen Coe or Merle Haggard assured him that the film was based on their life and no others.

Over the last several months, at several different Big Lots, pretty much because of this thread:

$5
There Will Be Blood - feature only
A Fish Called Wanda - 2-Disc Collector's Edition

$3
The Graduate
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Brick
Ronin - 2-Disc Collector's Edition
The Big Red One - 2-Disc Special Edition
Wolf Creek
Get Shorty - 2-Disc Collector's Edition
National Lampoon's Vacation
Sweet and Lowdown
Roxanne
True Stories
Species - 2-Disc Collector's Edition
Strange Brew (first thing I saw when I got to the kiosk…)
A Mighty Wind (…last thing I found after twice digging through the dross)
King Kong (Peter Jackson) - 3-Disc Deluxe Extended Edition (<<<< LOL)
AC/DC: Let There Be Rock
Burn After Reading
Do The Right Thing
The Right Stuff
10

$5: An American in Paris, Fort Worth/Colt .45/Tall Man Riding (Randolph Scott), Lost in a Harem/Abbott & Costello in Hollywood

$3: A World Apart, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Sentinel, Antony and Cleopatra (1972)

$2: Dangerous Liaisons, Barton Fink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CNyzdmXhe0

$3

After Hours
Casualties of War
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Carrie - "1970s Decades Collection" (includes a CD with eight 70s tunes on it wtf???)
The Incredible Mr. Limpet (!!!!!)

Thanksgiving-

Big Lots, $3.75 each (that day's sale price/promotion):

Mad Max "Special Edition"
All The Right Moves

Toys R Us, $1.00:

Funny Bones

Black Friday evening @ a different Big Lots-

$1.88:

Experiment In Terror (perhaps the find of the evening--disc must have been sitting in some wherehouse, has been OOP for ages and goes for $25+ on Amazon)
Heartbeeps
La Chamade ("Heartbeat") (late 60s Francoise Sagan adaptation w/Deneuve & Piccoli)
The Long Goodbye (already have, will be stocking stuffer for friend tbd)
Kiss Me, Stupid
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Rebecca
"Don Knotts: Reluctant Hero Pack" (bundle of The Love God?, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, The Reluctant Astronaut and his sought after Bresson collaboration The Shakiest Gun In The West)

$3:

Raggedy Man (fullframe--boo!)
Volver
When Did You Last See Your Father?
"Mission Hill: The Complete Series" (animated series w/Wallace Langham, Brian Posehn, and Jane Wiedlin that ran for 5 minutes on the WB back in '99-2000. been meaning to pick it up for yoinks, so this was the other find of the night)

$5:

Alice (Woody Allen)

Between this, my HEB trip the other week, and the B & N Criterion sale, I finally may have crossed the threshold of having too many fucking movies.

A Don Knotts box set for $1.88: truly a Thanksgiving to remember. (Absence of The Incredible Mr. Limpet notwithstanding.)

Saw a couple at a thrift store on Sunday but didn't get em - Sick (the Bob Flanagan doc), and God Told me To... which is about a serial killer and has Andy Kaufman and the late Deborah Raffin in it. Anyone know if these are any good?

Both of those are amazing

Will have to stop by again soon, they were 3 or 4 bucks each.

A Don Knotts box set for $1.88: truly a Thanksgiving to remember. (Absence of The Incredible Mr. Limpet notwithstanding.)

They actually had several copies of that one separately for $3 (It's a WB title, while the box is from Universal), so I passed for the time being. But Knottsfever may lead me back...

"Don Knotts: Reluctant Hero Pack" amazing

Sick (the Bob Flanagan doc) is p amazing but keep the blindfold handy for the hammer scene.

Saw a couple at a thrift store on Sunday but didn't get em - Sick (the Bob Flanagan doc), and God Told Me To... which is about a serial killer and has Andy Kaufman and the late Deborah Raffin in it. Anyone know if these are any good?

― nickn, Monday, November 26, 2012

Finally went back last Sunday, Sick was gone but I did get the other one for $3.

I rolled the dice on the Mayan thing and have been stocking up on cheap DVDs. Well played, me.

$5: Cujo, Purple Noon, Joyride, The Host, Dead Man, Crash (the comatose one film critics like...some, anyway)

3/$10: North by Northwest, The Agronomist, Adoration, Dead Alive, Naked Lunch

$3: Joe, Capricorn One, The End of Violence, Paraíso Travel, Dr T and the Women, Thirst, Back to Bataan, Extract, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Born into Brothels, Volver, Candyman, Horsemen (watched this--HOF awful performance from Dennis Quaid), Monkey Shines, Airplane, Fun with Dick & Jane ('70s), Deep Cover, The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show.

Also a Bob Hope box with seven films for $15. I'm occasionally seeing Big Lots stickers on some of this stuff, so, as suspected, it all comes from the same warehouse.

we are in a golden age of cheap, overwhelmingly plentiful entertainment. some good finds in there.

Momus Man of Letters for $1. It's actually a 36-minute VHS tape, but I'm including it cause it's Momus.

I picked up Mel Brooks's "To Be or Not To Be" at a flea market for about $5 this summer. Good fun.

Heartbeeps is weird, like in a "This must have been greenlit between regimes" way.