The following is part two of a multi-part series chronicling the trials of an aspiring (and not yet there) film snob. Please see part one of this series to see how it all began.

DVD changed the way I look at film. Not because film got better with DVD, or because film was unwatchable through other media, or any other such reason. None of that. It was simply a combination of wonderful quality, great convenience, and impeccable timing.

You see, by the time I was ready to immerse myself in the world of film, when the longing to explore this world I had neglected for so long had finally struck – much to late in many ways – DVD was already in full swing. But I had not yet adopted the new media.

I had a VHS player, a box of VHS tapes, and that was it.

I tried, though. I made an honest effort to begin exploring film before DVDs entered my life. Books like Sidney Lumet’s incomparable "Making Movies" taught me about techniques in film I never would have consciously picked up on; soft focus, when to use wide-angle and when to use zoom, editing tricks, playing with lighting, and much more. It offered me a better understanding of the language of film, an understanding I hoped would help me more fully appreciate what I saw on screen. And it would. But first I had to watch some films.

Step one: I rented Citizen Kane. It is, after all, supposed to be the Greatest American Film Ever Made (tm). That’s what they all say on those big long movie lists, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t want to know what the fuss was all about. Off to the Hollywood Video I went, into the Classics section. Got home and I popped in the grainy old VHS tape, was forced to rewind it because the last dolt who rented the film failed to do so, and watched with an open mind and as discerning an eye as I could muster. Was I impressed? Yes. It’s a fantastic film and serves as a landmark for scores of cinematic techniques now considered standard.

But damn VHS tapes are a pain in the ass. I’m lazy and don’t like inconvenience, so my exploration of the classics, my self-induced education, my mission to conquer this new (to me) art, would be slow. I pushed through this, slogged through that, seeing some of the landmarks of cinema, but the media clashed so badly with the way I live my
life ...

Yeah, excuses, excuses.

Bullshit excuses, yes. Can I deny that? I can’t. But I was an amateur flailing in the wind (still am in a lot of ways), looking, searching for something to make things click for me. At this point I wanted to know film, to love it, but I didn’t know how.

That all changed when Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy came along. The film scholars and true film snobs scoff, but for me they were the film realization of a novel that changed my life. I make a living through writing – editing it, writing it, assigning it, reading it – and I credit that fact to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s work had a profound effect on me. My love of the written word, my desire to move people, to tell stories, to conjure images and emotion with little more than imagination, all stemmed from his classic tale. So yeah, when Peter Jackson came along and created a film that looked and felt and lived and breathed like the world I had lived in for most of my life, I was right there, ready, begging to be drawn in, wishing to god it captured me. Like the written word, I studied every frame. Every camera shot. Every angle. Every story decision.

And when the day came that The Fellowship of the Ring was finally released on DVD, well, I finally bought a DVD player. The rest is history.

I bought a DVD player that day. And the DVD. And Goodfellas. And who knows what else. The most important thing was, the ball had started rolling.

See, the Fellowship DVD was a revelation. Oh, the movie was fine enough, but these days it doesn’t even make my top movies list. It was all that other stuff that opened my eyes. I devoured the commentaries; they taught me a little something about how story decisions are made and how writers slash up a script and what drives a film plot forward. The documentaries were even more comprehensive, showing me the most ridiculously behind-the-scenes scenes imaginable. In fine detail, the film’s creation was outlined from idea to script to set creation to release. What it takes to get shots we as a viewer take for granted was laid before me. The fact that films did not just happen, but that people worked to realize a vision became apparent.

A light went on in my head. I understood in a way I hadn’t before the things that went into film. As a writer and hobbyist musician, I had some grasp on those beloved art forms, and can therefore appreciate a wide variety of books and music ... but not yet film until then.

It was a light.

Shining.

And so, after enjoying movies only as popcorn entertainment, after getting interested in cinema but struggling to sit through a few of the classics on VHS, I discovered that DVD could offer me a whole world of film education beyond just the film itself, and in a convenient format that fit my lazy lifestyle, that wouldn’t degrade with time or frequent viewing (I wore out my VHS copy of Goodfellas years ago), and that in the end would prove to be one of the most affordable forms of entertainment this side of a six-pack.

To say that a love affair began would be an understatement. Roughly 400 titles later, I’m not done exploring. And I’m not likely to be for some time.

So with my introduction to DVD, my real exploration of the classics could begin in earnest.

Watch next week for Volume 3 of Diary of an Aspiring Film Snob.