(Winter) Wonderland
In which Norm goes to the store.
I had planned to write about the best movies and discs of 2023 this week – and I will! – but right now I want to take a moment and tell you about finding a happy place on a gloomy day.
Earlier this summer, I'd heard the U.S. label Vinegar Syndrome was planning to open a brick-and-mortar store in Toronto's Roncesvalles neighborhood – just as Kate and I moved across town in the wrong direction. Chris Colohan reached out with a friendly heads-up when the place opened in October, but I didn’t get the chance to visit until this week.
I’m really glad I did. Going into the Vinegar Syndrome shop felt like stepping back into the glory days of Toronto’s Suspect Video, a cult specialty shop that took pride in stocking movies from all regions, in every format available. At its zenith there were three Suspects in town; the last one closed in the fall of 2016, a victim of declining video rentals in general and the redevelopment of the Annex neighborhood in particular. (I knew Chris from Suspect, and when we ran into each other in the summer he knew I’d want to know about the Vinegar Syndrome store.)
Now, before I praise the new place I must point out that Bay Street Video has never stopped renting and selling discs in Toronto, surviving both the streaming boom and the pandemic to offer the city’s widest selection of movies on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K. But they’ve been set up as a rental operation since the ’80s, and that’s a different vibe than what Suspect did, and what Vinegar Syndrome’s store offers now.
The Vinegar Syndrome store, like Suspect before it, is set up for collectors. It’s got the feel of a comic-book shop, with discs organized by label rather than theme and a couple of cabinets of out-of-print discs priced for people who absolutely-positively need to own that OOP Warner twofer Blu-ray of Dr. Giggles and Otis. (And, if I may ask: Why? Seriously, why?)
So, as much as I love Bay Street Video, wandering into the VS space – a modest storefront directly opposite the Revue Cinema, another place that knows the value of a good cult picture – made me feel like I’d stumbled into a land of misfit toys. I’d gone in to pick up the new 4K edition of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, which Vinegar Syndrome announced as one of its Black Friday surprises last month, but there were so many Blu-rays I wanted to bring back home with it: Kristoffer Borgli’s first feature Sick of Myself, Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day and Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (from VS partner labels The Film Desk and Utopia Distribution, respectively), the complete line of Canadian International Pictures restorations, treasures from Shout and Arrow and Severin and Indicator and Umbrella and many, many more. Seriously, zoom in on the pictures and see what wonders you find.
They deal in used discs too, and the nature of the VS customer base means the stock skews weird: Steelbooks of The Fly and The Thing from Fox and Shout, dozens of Kino Lorber restorations, most of the Craig-era Bond films for some reason and a dozen Criterion discs; I grabbed the BD of Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World, which I’d somehow never managed to acquire before now. There’s an entire shelf of Region B rarities, too. A newly opened basement is crammed with vinyl and CDs; the soundtrack section is particularly nerdy, and I would expect nothing less. The store also carries VHS, which seems especially perverse when one of those same titles is available right there in 1080p, but the analog heart wants what the analog heart wants.
What my heart wanted, it turns out, was to feel the thrill of browsing again; I can flip through the used discs at various BMV locations for hours, and finding a title I wanted at an appealing price is always a pleasure, but it doesn’t surprise me the way stumbling across the Spanish release of The Straight Story did yesterday. This was a different sort of fun, and chatting with Chris about what they plan to do with the store in the months ahead was a reminder that I’m not the only person who cares about discs in this town. Physical media hasn’t gone away – not at all – and now we’re in a place where niche labels can thrive on limited runs of cult titles, drawing people in to see what else they might find.
All of us have that one place where every time we go in, we come out with something we didn’t even know existed; for me, it’s Academy Records on West 18th in Manhattan, where the Blu-ray bin burps up something magnificent every single time. And for a lot of people in Toronto, it’s about to be the Vinegar Syndrome shop. Swing by if you get the chance, and tell them I said hi.
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