A chance to sort (and director disappointment)

Our landlord put a heat pump in our living room, which makes it a lot more liveable. We live in a tiny house, but it's the middle of fuckin' winter here, and there are twice as many babies in the house now, so we need some goddamn heat.

While it only took them a couple of hours to set it up, it also took me many more hours to empty the bookcases around the area where the new heater was going in. There were books and DVDs everywhere, and once the hot air started flowing, I had to strap the new kid into the frontpack, and sort it all out.

This is not a complaint. Sorting out my bookshelves is the most zen I ever get. I never, ever get tired of doing it, and am never, ever completely satisfied. It's a job that never ends.

I've got a few hundred DVDs which I'm holding onto in the age of streaming because I don't trust those fuckers who hold the rights one little bit, and I think a bookcase full of them is more interesting that empty space. 

They're a bit more under control, a lot have been boxed up into storage, leaving the best couple of hundred. And they've been in alphabetical order ever since it all got a bit out of control in the mid 2000s - apart from one lamentable and short-termed attempt to colour code things - but this time I decided to get clever and organise them all by director.

Which was all well and good until I discovered that I had no idea who directed a lot of my favourite films, and I spent a lot of time trying to read the tiny credits on the back of the DVD.

Most of the collection is devoted to all the usual suspects - there are a lot of Tarantino and Coen and Jarmusch and Meadows films and it's always obvious, but then I get to things like Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires or Zulu or Sister Streetfighter and I have no fucking idea who directed them. The name almost always rings a bell when I look it up, but recalling them cold off the top of my head is impossible.

This created some deep disappointment in myself. If I couldn't keep up with the basic facts of the films I genuinely considered some of my favourites, what sort of movie person am I anyway?

I could argue that it's nice that I lose myself in the movie, and don't buy into any bullshit auteur theory, but that's just an excuse for a shitty memory. It might be that none of us retain this information anymore, because we can just look it all up on our phones, but that doesn't cancel out the sheer disrespect to the directing craft.

Still, I got there after a while and they're all loaded up on the shelves again, by director (in alphabetical order from Aldrich to Zwigoff). Maybe that'll help me remember poor Kazuhiko Yamaguchi next time.