Our love of great visual art is almost equal to our love of music, and that is saying a lot. Over the last ten years, our DVD section has grown by leaps and bounds… both at the store and at our homes.

Don’t get me started on my favorite movies (a couple of them are above), or the subtleties of various actors, or God help you if I start doing lines from So I Married An Ax Murderer or The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Anyway, the Movie and DVD pages are just like our Music pages – they are here to inform you about our favorite new releases, relevant re-releases (cause those darn DVDs are always in and out of print), and of course, used DVDs, used Movies, and used TV shows.

Click on the link to go to the page you want.  If you scroll down on this page, we’ve listed a couple of excellent links to take you into the Phoenix film scene, along with a few basic theories that guide our decisions in our DVD section.

The best sites for DVD and Movie information

VideoETA. This DVD new release page is awesome… and trust me, when you have to update a DVD NR board in the store for ten years, you learn.  It allows you to search forward or backward by release week, and it covers every type of genre: from the good little indie films to the over-hyped corporate baloney.

IMBD. The Internet Movie Data Base is great.  You probably knew that.  The DVD NR list isn’t as good as Video ETA, but the movie info is really fantastic.  The actor/director/gaffer directory is even better.

AllMovie. We use AllMusic a lot, so naturally we switch to the movie side quite a bit too.  Mainly I use it to answer “Who the the guy who played…” customer questions – and it almost never fails.

Video Detective. This site claims to have more movie trailers than anyone else.  I have been getting their email (although I am finding these RSS feeds pretty nifty these days) and it’s pretty amusing, but with three kids at home I don’t get much “trailer” time.  However, if you want a trailer of an upcoming DVD, these guys have a bunch.

Used DVDs and Movies

The DVD section is very important to us.  We buy, sell, trade, and talk movies and music.

The Phoenix Film Scene

Now that we are on the street, we are trying to learn more about the Phoenix film scene.  In the process of doing so, we have found some great resource tools online.  We’ve saved you the time, and provided a few links to the great information we have found.

Phoenix Film Foundation.  The Phoenix Film Foundation is the largest non-profit film organization in the state of Arizona. Its organizations include the Phoenix Film Festival, Independent Feature Project-Phoenix, Arizona Student Film Festival, International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival, and the Phoenix Film Society.  Like the site says, the opportunities to be part of film in Arizona are limitless all year long.

Hoodlums’ Basic Theories on DVDs

If you believe like we do – that great movies never get old – you gotta have the classics.

Even hoodlums have to have some sort of rules.  Let’s not call them rules, lets just say we have our standards.

A solid selection isn’t about new releases.

Sure, we bring in the new releases, but our real passion is making sure we have the classics.  We’ve noticed that your average DVD store carries ninety copies of every new release, and zero copies of Citizen Kane.  Our goal is to make sure we have a great selection of the classic movies, regardless of which era they were released.

Bonus Link: If you want to talk, think, study, or get lost in movies – it’s always a good idea to start at the American Film Institute.  The AFI link has more discussion starters than you could cover in a month.  Just click on the logo and have some fun.

The lower the list price the better.

New release movies are too expensive.  However, just like with CDs, we don’t control the list prices on DVD.  Although the movie studios reduce the list prices much sooner into the life of the product than the record labels, their pricing strategy (propped up by corporate loss-leading) further cements our decision to focus on classics.

Above all, when it comes to value, used DVDs are the way to go.  Consequently, we work hard to have a great used DVD selection (bring your used DVDs, please).  However, we can’t have the  selection we want without some new product, so we always search high and low for those hidden new gems that are priced to sell.

We are willing to pay extra if the DVD is worth it

OK, so you know we prefer low prices, but sometimes it is worth it to pay more.  On some DVDs, the special features, packaging, and content are worth it. The best example of this is movies from the Criterion Collection.  Tremendous films, stunning packaging, and a wealth of special material make these DVDs worth the high price.  There are lots more like that too.  If we think it’s worth it; we’ll stock it.

We won’t buy the “collector’s version” if it isn’t worth it.

Of course it can be a fine line between “worth it” and “customer manipulation”.  Movie studios are just like record labels in the sense that they are always trying to repackage a title and sell it to the consumer again.  If the new version is that much better (see the philosophy above), no problem – we’ll have it.  If it is a second discs full of trailers for the film, we’ll skip it.

Customer feedback is a big part of our selection

This is the one “philosophy” that I copied direct from the music philosophies… because it is true.  We love it when you weigh in.  Good input from customers has been one of the foundations of how most of these philosophies were formed.  Come down to the store and engage in the movie discussion. Even if you want to weigh in from where you are sitting, between this site, our page on Facebook, and our MySpace, there are plenty of ways for you to engage us online too.

Comedy comes in all shapes and sizes.  Hoodlums has what you need to have a laugh.