I Enjoy Watching Movies On DVD

I recently heard on a radio news broadcast that the retailer Best Buy was discontinuing the sale of DVDs because more and more people are watching movies via streaming services rather than on DVDs.

My introduction to streaming came about when my upstairs neighbors, Harry and Lilia, would invite me to their apartment numerous times for dinner, conversation, and the use of their laptop computers.

Harry or Lilia, while sitting on the living room couch, remote in hand, would skim through the menu offerings on Netflix, reading the plot summaries before deciding on what to watch.

From what I could see, streaming doesn't offer the kinds of features found on a DVD like audio commentaries, scene selection, behind-the-scenes mini-docs, blooper clips, trailers, etc. (Good reasons not to buy bootleg copies because they lack these important features.)

Being old school, I prefer to have the physical disc in hand. As the novelist Larry Duplechan points out in his memoir/film history book, Movies That Made Me Gay (Team Angelica Publishing, 2023, paperback), the DVD is a good backup because "you can't trust streaming services to keep your favorite old movies posted."

A Film History Book Worth Checking Out

I recently finished reading Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris (Penguin Press, 2008) an Entertainment Weekly writer. I had a hard time putting the book down. It is a behind-the-scenes look at five groundbreaking motion pictures released in 1967 that were nominated for an Academy Award: The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night,Doctor Dolittle, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and Bonnie and Clyde.The only one of the five I've never seen is Doctor Dolittle. The others I've seen on TV and/or VHS. Unfortunately, I never saw any of them when they made their theatrical premiere. (Doctor Dolittle is the only one of the five that was a box office flop.) Perhaps Symphony Space, the performance venue in New York City, will screen these films in a special series based on the book. Then I will get the opportunity to see them the way they were meant to be seen--on a wide screen with an audience. (I've seen several films that I missed the first time around like Boyz N the Hood that way at Symphony Space.)
One small complaint: On the back flap, the author bio states that Harris's husband is the playwright Tony Kushner. With so many smart men in the gay community, you would think that they could come up with a better nomenclature for such an intimate relationship. The words "husband" and "wife" have heterosexual connotations. If, as the late gay activist Harry Hay believed, gays and lesbians are different from their straight counterparts, shouldn't there be marriage rituals and affectional titles befitting that difference? Just asking. Other than that, Pictures at a Revolution is worth checking out by film buffs.
P.S. I would love to see someone do a biography of gay film historianVito Russo, whose Celluloid Closet, is another memorable and hard-to-put-downbook. This classic examines Hollywood's depiction of gays and lesbians since the beginning of the film industry. Mark Harris or William J. Mann would be the perfect ones to take on such a project. I hope one of them will consider it.