Dollar Tree Blu-rays

I have been on Blu-ray forum for two years now, which I noticed this week made me a “Senior Member” (edit: actually it is because I have 400 posts; has nothing to do with time). Like any online forum, reading about what other people are getting makes everyone spend more money than they would otherwise, just like with flashlights. However, while I have been buying entirely too many movies this year, I am paying a lot less. In January, I read about Dollar Trees around the country getting shipments of Blu-rays (so $1 each) and I wound up buying a few titles including Fargo and Enough Said, the former a classic Coen brothers movie and the latter a mostly overlooked gem which I still haven’t watched (edit: watched it later, B-). I also got the less well reviewed Dom Hemingway which I did watch and wasn’t that crazy about (C-). And in order to get some cheap replacement Blu-ray cases, I bought a few copies of Parental Guidance, a terrible Billy Crystal movie with the key feature being it includes a Blu-ray and DVD version of the movie. This let me get rid of some old Blu-ray cases and gave me homes for bare Blu-ray disks I had bought from Redbox, but I will probably never watch the movie.

In April, there was another release of movies at Dollar Tree which included some Sony titles. That was key because Sony had a rewards program where if you bought 5 Sony or Columbia movies with rewards codes in them, you could earn a free Blu-ray. By buying some marginal Sony movies, I was able to get a free copy of a more acclaimed movie called Elle. One of the movies was Sex Tape with Cameron Diaz which got horrible reviews, but I was just getting it for the case and rewards. In fact, I bought two copies so that I could trade one of the codes with someone else on the forum who couldn’t get Sex Tape, but was able to find another Sony title, Foxcatcher which I couldn’t find. So we both filled out our Sony rewards orders. I haven’t watched Foxcatcher yet, but it is supposed to be a good movie (weird, but pretty good, B+). I also picked up Barney’s Version which got decent reviews as well as 22 Jump Street which got okay reviews. I haven’t watched either of those yet, which is a problem I am having. I have about 80 movies I haven’t watched. I set a goal of watching movies I buy within a year and I have been trying to watch two per week. If I do that, I can watch the entire backlog without any of the movies going over the one year mark. The next movies in the date-based queue are Gravity and Silence of the Lambs which I bought last October.

Lately there were rumblings of a new sale at Dollar Tree. People started seeing new movies. One person asked someone who worked at his store if they had movies and they said they were coming, but the movies brought the crazies out. At Dollar Tree. I see people there with shopping carts full of crap and they’re saying the crazy people are the ones buying movies? As people come across movies, they will post lists or take pictures of the inventory (so maybe they are a little crazy). A lot of these are movies that weren’t that popular from the last five years or so and the Blu-rays didn’t sell that well either. I don’t mind trying something I don’t know much about, but I want there to be a decent chance I like it, so I try to pull the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings ahead of time and have an idea of what I would like to get (my rule of thumb is anything with 60 or higher at Metacritic could be worth watching). On Tuesday I stopped by my two closest stores, but neither of them had new movies out, just some old stock that they put on the bottom shelf in the electronics section. I still bought Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine and a pristine copy of Parental Guidance for the case (which I used to put my Blu-ray and DVD of Fargo into one case and threw away the Fargo DVD case). I didn’t even like Blue Jasmine that much, but it gets good reviews so maybe I will watch it again.

More and more people were seeing the movies out ahead of the official “item of the week” rollout on Friday. So Thursday night I went to the closest store and jackpot! They had some of the new titles out including Steven Soderburgh’s Bubble (71 at Rotten Tomatoes/63 at Metacritic) which some people were having a hard time finding, plus he’s one of my favorite directors), a fairly well reviewed movie written by and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt called Don Jon (81/66), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (51/54, with Ben Stiller, B) and two reasonably well respected teen romance movies called The Fault in Our Stars (80/69) and Paper Towns (56/56). Five movies for five dollars. You have to love Dollar Tree math. I also saw 10 or 15 other titles which were mostly terrible.

The next day I went to another nearby store and they also had the new titles out, including a lot of the best ones from the new list. I actually bought 9 titles:

1. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 3D 52/53 (3D plus Blu-ray plus DVD and I haven’t seen it yet; I don’t have a 3D TV though, B-)
2. Burn After Reading 78/63 (Coen brothers, though not my favorite)
3. City Island 81/66 (sounds interesting, B+)
4. Joy 59/56 (Jennifer Lawrence nominated for an Oscar) B-
5. The King of Comedy (Martin Scorcese)
6. Let’s Be Cops (a terrible 18/30, but I had passed the day before but a friend at work said it was worth watching and lots of people on the forum were getting it) B-
7. Limitless 69/59 (sounds interesting) B+
8. Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 64/51 could be good
9. The Way Way Back 85/68 (sounds interesting, B+)

On Saturday, I visited a third and fourth store. One didn’t have anything I didn’t have already and the other still didn’t have movies out yet. Also, I realized The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was a sequel and I had never seen the original Best Exotic Marigold Hotel so they let me exchange it for Life of Pi (86/79) which had to be a better movie and had eleven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and won 4 including Best Director and Adapted Screenplay.

I think I did really well. I could have been more choosy, but I got 14 movies and 8 of them came with digital copies and I think I will like most of them.

However, now my unwatched queue has jumped up to 103 movies. If I can consistently watch 2 movies a week, I can still make it through that many in a year, but it won’t be easy. However that queue includes Sex Tape and Parental Guidance which I have no intentions of watching. Unfortunately, doing all of that shopping plus research, plus writing this blog entry, gets me through Saturday and I haven’t watched a movie yet this week.