You’re in the mood for a quiet night at home with a DVD, only you don’t know what to watch. You log into your Netflix queue and look at the recommendations. Honestly, are they any help? Or, do they push every Gerard Butler movie on you because you rented 300 four years ago?
Next time, head straight for the DVD section of the Mount Pleasant Public Library in Pleasantville. The Jacob Burns Film Center recently curated a permanent DVD collection for the library. The 200 (and growing) titles on the list—which includes Blue Velvet, The Lives of Others, The Muppet Movie, The Red Shoes, and Slumdog Millionaire—have been chosen carefully and thus all are worthy of a viewing.
“The questions that Christopher Funderburg and I asked ourselves when putting this collection together were: what’s great, what holds up against time, what is less seen than it should be—or unseen altogether—and what did audiences here at the JBFC get excited about?” says Programming Director Brian Ackerman. “We tried to steer clear of the notion of ‘essential cinema’ and sought something more dynamic and fresh and accessible.” Best of all: it costs no money to borrow movies from the library. Stick a bag of popcorn in the microwave and visit mount pleasantlibrary.org to see the list of films included in the collection.
