The Reel Ends on 7th Avenue

I was out for a walk with my little boy this morning and was shocked to discover that Cinema Classics, that great little mom'n'pop film nerd emporium on Perry Street & 7th Avenue had been closed, emptied & gutted. I can't have been in there less than a month or two ago (I picked up DVD copies of Kurbrik's "Barry Lyndon," "The Apartment", "Klute" and George Cukor's "Gaslight") and ended up getting in a huge music-geek discussion with the dude behind the counter (a similarly ardent Stranglers acolyte). It was that sorta place.

Much like many of my favorite long-since-vanished record stores, Cinema Classics reveled in the cult, the esoteric, the obscure, the far-flung & and unjustly forgotten. If you went in there looking for a copy of "Pretty Woman" or "When Harry Met Sally," you were rightly sneered at and sent away empty-handed. But if you were in search of a rarified Czech documentary , a long-out-print Bergman opus or some way-out exploitation flick, Cinema Classics rewarded you for your refreshing adventurousness.

I bitterly lament its closing.