January 24, 2003
VCR
We bought a new VCR earlier this week. Our old 'Luma'-brand model - which had been just about the cheapest we could find on our arrival in Sweden, had just stopped and died one night last week, part-way through Kill Me Later. We were only watching the movie on tape in the first place as it was an advance distribution copy that the nice video store people had lent to us. I wasn't convinced that it was worth our while to buy a new one, what with the advent of recordable-DVD, and these newfangled hard-drive-based recorder whatnots. It struck me as a bit of a backward step, seeing as how we've been a DVD-owning household for three years or so now. My wife disagreed, however, and we picked up a regular VHS VCR, a heavily-discounted former-demo JVC model, from On/Off.
Wednesday night we perched it on the bedroom TV, wiring it up to my old JVC micro hi-fi, to which we connected a pair of Canton mini-speakers left over after last year's home cinema upgrade. We went out to the Co-op & picked up a handful of tapes along with our groceries: Vampires 2, Almost Famous, O Brother Where Art Thou?, conspiracy.com and one other I forget. We watched Vampires 2 that same night. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, given that Vampires 1 had been nothing special, and the last John Carpenter movie we saw, Ghosts of Mars was worse.
I was a relative latecomer to the VHS experience: I don't think my folks bought one until '86, or maybe even '87. I recall that the first tape I rented was Blade Runner, which was closely followed by The Emerald Forest and Romancing the Stone...
