Physical Media Lives

A never-ending parade of dorks (almost uniformly chubby white dudes) sitting in front of their massive movie collections ALL REPEATING THE SAME THINGS. Seriously, they all say "it's about nostalgia, it's about holding something in your hands, it's about streaming services taking away movies, it's about censorship!" OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

There was maybe 30 minutes of content stretched out into 2 hours 10 minutes and there were so many insufferable people droning on and on to their selfie cams that it made me want to puke at times.

So if you want to watch a bunch of youtubers bragging about their "almost always horror movie collections" for WAY TOO LONG, then watch this and feel better about whatever bad choices you may have made in your life to not end up surrounded by tens of thousands of dollars worth of physical media.

Many interesting collectors are keeping these visual memories alive. As a minimal collector myself I can appreciate this content.

I have been collecting older game consoles, Laserdisc players CED Videodisc, VHS and in the future Beta. Having a Plex sever to share with my family and friends via VHS movies from 1982 with trailers and scenes after the ending to the Plex server has been a conversation piece bringing people closer through nostalgia.

From vintage and retro media formats to physical games, the infrastructure translates across countries, genders, cultures.

Those who create and share this piece of history, thank you.

Since I am avid movie collector, I almost purchased this movie for my collection. But after reading the reviews, I decided to just rent it to see if it was worth collecting it. It is not worth adding to my collection or anyone else's. I expected that there would be interviews with other collectors and there would be views of their collection and clips of their favorite movies. There are interviews, but each collector just blathers on and on about how much better it is to own the physical copy. OK, we know that! That is why you bought the movie on DVD, Blu-ray, VHS, Laserdisc, or even D-VHS (that's digital VHS for the uninitiated, I have about a dozen of those!). As I said, I wanted to see them watch at least a clip or two of their favorite movies and comment on them. And it would have been nice to see some actors or directors of consequence, rather than a bunch of obscure nobodies. Avoid unless you need something to fall asleep to.

This was a long 2 hours and 10 minutes. It gets real redundant. Really, only a handful of subjects are discussed. AND I don't think there's a conflicting opinion in this entire thing. Some people are interesting, some not. Some people are clearly not hoarders. It appeared Cinema Sickness had the largest collection, then again, he was the one guy walking around. Most people were sitting in front of a case or two.

I was really hoping people would get to showcase their collections more. Lots of horror collectors. I would be curious to see what kind of stuff they collect (a couple people get to pull out a few things). There was one guy who had a large horror collection, and had them divided by subject matter! That was fun to see. This movie needed more of that kind of stuff.

Way too much focus on VHS, they spent what seemed like 45 minutes on "nostalgia" (today's buzzword that I detest), another 45 on how much streaming sucks, the good old days of Blockbuster, how you have to be able to physically hold a movie in your hands, and that boutique labels are keeping media alive. I think that about covers it.

The people appearing in this movie were obviously given only a handful of subjects to discuss. Collecting a large number of movies was not one of them. Movie Hoarders was formerly titled Physical Media Lives (as it's listed on imdb), which is more accurate.

I was disappointingly mistaken about watching this; as a movie collector myself I thought that I'd be seeing some interesting ideas and opinions on the subject. All I got was about a dozen schlemiels all saying the same things ad nauseam about being able to own their movies (meaning, of course, owning COPIES of the movies; the movies themselves are owned by the companies or corporations who produced them) and being able actually to hold these movies in their hands. If you watch the first 10 - 15 minutes of this drivel, you've watched the whole two hours of it.

No in-depth discussions about any of the movies themselves, though - and all of them seemed only to be interested in horror, zombies, schlock stuff. Don't waste your time.