In his column the other day Mr. Jeffrey Wells bid farewell to the DVDJournal, and did so with his usual lack of real news and with a surfeit of inexplicable bile and vitriol. Despite his reputation as a reporter, Mr. Wells didn’t reveal anything that readers couldn’t have learned from the DVDJ site itself, though like a real reporter he got a lot of facts wrong. Mr. Wells wrote that the reviews at the DVDJournal, one of the most popular DVD review forums on the Internet, were anonymous, and they were … until 2002, perhaps the last time he visited. One of the reasons I know this is because I have been a contributor to the site since about 1999, and was privy to aspects of the internal debate over signed versus unsigned reviews.

Mr. Wells also affects that the “nameless editor”’s final editorial is vague on the reason for signing off. I happen to know why the DVDJournal is closing shop and it is for the exact reason the editorial gives, that “Our own world has changed in the past decade as well, with marriages, children, new homes, career changes, and various other things that happen to sensible people when the subtle business of adulthood creeps up on them unawares.” People are moving on. I’m not sure how the editorial could be any clearer than that. Should there be some secret, scandalous cause that Mr. Wells can salivate over?

I can still recall my debut reviews. The first was Bringing Out the Dead. I got the disc (slipped through my mail slot by the “nameless editor” whom I still hope to see in the flesh sometime) the same day I returned home with my first DVD player, which I couldn’t figure out how to turn on until another (future) contributor came over and showed me how … by pushing a single button. My second disc was American Movie, and the third was Fight Club. Off to a good start, I’d say. And I still have those three discs, plus the … at least … 200 more I’ve reviewed for the site since.

If Mr. Wells did a WHOIS search for the registration of DVDJournal.com, he would have been confused, as WHOIS gives Laredo, Texas as the home location. Home base is actually Portland, Oregon, and one of the peculiarities of Portland is that numerous DVD websites originate there. Two others are DVDTalk, now a mini-empire, and Binaryflix, seemingly inactive since January, but still up. I’ve written for all of them at one time or another, but my loyalty has always remained with the DVDJ.

On Wednesday, August 29, the DVDJournal announced its closure. In an touching, finely-crafted final editorial, the owner combined a history of the DVD format with the saddening announcement that, though the site would remain up for the time being, no new reviews would be added to the 4000-plus already accumulated.

The operator of DVDJournal likes privacy and I won’t violate that wish here. I will say only that the DVDJournal deserves its reputation as the New Yorker of DVD review sites, thanks to the consistently informed and elegant prose of its contributors, which include Kim Morgan, Betsy Bozdech , Clarence Beaks, the ever alluring Alexandra du Pont, Greg Dorr, J. Jordan Burke, Damon Houx, David Walker, Joe Barlow, Dawn Taylor, and Mark Bourne, among others. These writers didn’t just give you a review of the DVD and its supplements; they attempted to write the definitive review of that movie. A perfect example is Mark Bourne’s reviews of the two Time Machine movies, both the 1960 and 2002. Both are exhaustive in their attention to history and detail. And all he was paid were the DVDs themselves.

Its popularity was boosted by the fact that the DVDJournal was one of the best designed and most attractive websites on the ‘net, easy to read and easily navigable. The editor introduced the phrase “yak track” for audio commentaries, which I’ve been stealing ever since, and another contributor came up with the idea of offering up excerpts from said commentary tracks in text form (a practice too laborious and time consuming to maintain for long). The DVDJournal also had the best release calendar of all similar sites, proved by the fact that others piggybacked on it.

The reader learns of none of these qualities from Mr. Wells’s mysteriously motivated and hostile summary, which goes on to say that, “I read the nameless editor’s statement (posted yesterday) about what’s going on, only he doesn’t really say anything. There’s an acknowledgment that the DVD market share is going down and that this may have something to do with ad revenues or the moon’s orbit or whatever, but he definitely has trouble with the concept of just spitting it out. Real men put their cards on the table.” As obits go, this is yet another grave-pisser.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.