It’s the last movie rental holdout, a Pandora’s box full of lost treasures.
Burning Paradise Video has outlasted Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, and remains unconquerable terrain for the Redbox and Netflix.
The store, not much bigger than the average classroom, has a surprisingly small number of shelves stuffed to the brim with an unordered catalogue of DVDs. Horror, comedy, drama, foreign films, gay and lesbian interest — owner Kurly Tlapoyawa carries it all.
Why? He said it’s because he didn’t want to be like former England Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who in the 1980s instituted a policy of video nasties, or banned films.
Movies such as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, or other violent or sexually explicit films were banned, but Tlapoyawa said people rented them anyway and were arrested for it.
“In my opinion, good video stores are a place you go to find anything,” he said. “It’s like a free speech zone. I wanted to be part of that legacy of true underground art.”
But he’s been quite visible in the community, running the store since 2004, after he lost his job working at the Albuquerque Publishing Company. He said he was influenced by an older video store that his friend, Wavy Brain, owned. It just seemed the natural step to start his own video rental place.
“I wasn’t going in to work for somebody else again,” Tlapoyawa said.
So instead he has become Albuquerque’s final frontier man for rental outposts and browsing culture. He can find any DVD in his store.
Westerns? He recommends “The Proposition,” what he said is the best Western film since “Unforgiven.” He happily points out rare gems like “Song of the South,” an old Disney tale featuring a happy, singing slave in the South.
Right now, Burning Paradise is the only local video rental store, but that doesn’t mean that Tlapoyawa is not without competition. Because Hollywood and Blockbuster went out of business, Netflix and Redbox have become bigger players in the rental game.
“We contribute to the cultural landscape of Albuquerque,” he said. “Netflix and Redbox does neither of those things. They are like the Walmart of movie rental.”
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And Tlapoyawa said Netflix and Redbox fail to offer any sort of browsing culture. At Redbox, users just interact with a computer screen, flicking through a couple screens before selecting a movie.
Browsing, though, is alive at Burning Paradise. People move through aisles, often picking up films, if only to look at the cover. They feel it their hands. They can see how many times it’s been checked out based on the condition of the box, and these subtle cues are lost on the Internet audience.
“We are kind of the defense against this war to kill the browsing culture,” he said. “It’s just (promoting) this antisocial, shut-in consumerist society.”
Attracting a diverse array of customers is important in this fight.
Burning Paradise’s demographic doesn’t just include college students or Winnings regulars, but people from all around the community. While browsing, a fellow customer recommended movies to others.
“You haven’t seen Shortbus? Shit, man, you need to see it. It’s hilarious!”
And while the customers don’t always take one another’s suggestions, at least they interact with one another instead of taking ideas from an algorithm based on their viewing preferences, Tlapoyawa said.
As for his own preferences, Tlapoyawa said he used to be a big fan of horror flicks, or as he called himself, “a horror head,” but he got into foreign flicks after a friend suggested a John Woo film.
“I didn’t even know the French were making horror films,” Tlapoyawa said.
What he does know, however, is that the American rental market is like a bad horror film.
Tlapoyawa said a lot of his customers use both Netflix and Burning Paradise — Netflix is for convenience and Burning Paradise is for getting new releases.
But he refuses to get an account. He said he doesn’t need one.
“I own all the movies I ever wanted to watch,” he said.
