Renter's Paradise: Video Americain & 'Metropolis'

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VIDEO AMERICAIN IS a throwback to the golden age of the corner video store.

As you'd expect of a Takoma Park institution, however, its local acts are backed up by global thinking. There are racks of international movies organized by director, genre and country of origin. The shop stocks DVDs, but also tapes. And the clerks are passionate about films that don't have Wookiees in them. If you want to check out Pieter Kuijpers' "Off Screen," the toast of the 2005 Montreal World Film Festival, the red envelope can't help you, but Video Americain can.

And every week or two, there are free Thursday screenings that have ranged from "Rushmore" to "The Beaver Trilogy" to "Kitten With a Whip." This week, it's Fritz Lang's dystopian 1927 classic "Metropolis" so we spoke with Annie Chabel, Video Americain clerk and programmer of in-store film nights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)

» EXPRESS: Why "Metropolis" now?
» CHABEL: "Blade Runner" was showing at AFI and, I think, also the Uptown earlier in the year. There's been a resurgence of interest in the post-apocalyptic vision of a metropolitan future ... so I wanted to tap into the original movie that really captured that.

» EXPRESS: And what's coming up?
» CHABEL: We're also showing this summer ... "Alien," "Code Unknown" and "Wayne's World." I tried to pick a good amount of ... movies that people would know a little bit better and then still balance it out with a lot of stuff that's been popular right now. I chose "Code Unknown" just because there's been a lot of emphasis on Michael Haneke's movies in the past year with his [English-language] remake of "Funny Games."

» EXPRESS: It's a tough time for video stores. What lies ahead?
» CHABEL: A big problem that I think we're gonna face is that people don't have VHS players anymore, and with the DVD market being the way that it is, a lot of our more rare items have stayed VHS. People just aren't as interested in finding that stuff anymore, because they don't have their players.

» EXPRESS: Is there still room for personal service in the age of Netflix?
» CHABEL: At almost every single shift, I have someone come up with something from our House Favorites shelf and talk to me about it. As long as people still want to have dialogue about movies, we'll be able to hang on.

» EXPRESS: This summer's lineup contains fewer obscure titles than in the past. Why is that?
» CHABEL: I'm sort of surprised that we didn't get more audience at our cult screenings, but I think that people are constantly bombarded with new movies coming out all the time, and so it's really easy for things that they don't know a whole lot about to go under the radar.

» Video Americain, 6937 Laurel Ave., Takoma Park; Thu., 10:30 p.m.; 301-270-4464. (Takoma)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon

Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures