They stock the offbeat, the obscure, the seminal, and everything in between - and movie fans can't get enough. In Part Three of
CityNews.ca's five-part series profiling Toronto's top indie video rental shops, we check out Marquee Video, where the motto is 'rent, love, return.'
Marquee Video co-owner Giuseppe Anile has been a film fan his whole life - in fact his first ever purchase was a VCR at age 14.
"I rented four movies no 14-year-old should ever watch: Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, A Clockwork Orange and Raging Bull," he smiles, admitting that his hands were in front of his face for much of the Stanley Kubrick-directed classic. Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull had a particular impact.
"Watching Robert De Niro come out in the opening credits when he's doing his boxing schtick. That blew me away."
You'll find all four films on Marquee's shelves with close to 5,000 others. Anile and a buddy opened the College St. store nearly three years ago, taking what was then a cleaning supply store and overhauling the space. They tore down walls and layers of drywall and wallpaper to accommodate the stacks of DVDs as well as a coffee and ice cream bar.
Titles are typically arranged by genre although there are special sections dedicated to directors and writers as well as a wall for the Criterion Collection, of which Anile says he has about half.
"I love the Criterion Collection but there's probably about half of it I would never buy. I think they're hacking it up now a little bit. I don't want to see the special effects first movie that some guy made in his garage. That's me, and I get to pick the movies so I guess that's that," he says.
"The studios they bought the whole library of, all that French New Wave stuff, all that Italian stuff that happened in the '50s and '60s, and in the '70s they've got a lot of American films. Those are great to watch, those prints are incredible to see."
Anile, whose T-shirt bears the store's short and sweet tagline, "rent, love, return," admits he doesn't have quite as much time for movies as he did when he was a kid - he used to watch 14 films a week, now it's about 7 - but his affection for them hasn't waned over the years. And he admits that while the video store is a business, it's also a job he loves.
"It keeps on building every year, we have a lot more members," he observes. "The hope is that it becomes a community hub of sorts, which is what we wanted."
Giuseppe Anile's Top 5 Essential Viewing:
Seven Samurai
8 1/2
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
The Night of the Hunter
Il Conformista
The Test
CityNews.ca picked ten hard-to-find films and asked each store if they stocked them. Here's how Marquee Video measured up:
Harold and Maude - yes
Dog Day Afternoon - yes
The Doom Generation - yes
Big Night - yes
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys - yes
The House of Yes - yes
Cinema Paradiso - yes
Brazil - yes (standard and Criterion Collection version)
Five Easy Pieces - yes
City of God - yes
Marquee Video
1037 College St. W. (416) 532-5423
Sun-Thurs 12pm -10:30pm
Fri-Sat 12pm - 11pm
http://www.marqueevideo.com/
Rental cost
5-day $4.50 (most films)
2-day $5.25 (new releases)
Rent 4 older titles, pay $3.50 each
Rent 5 older titles, pay $3 each
Photos and video by Brian McKechnie
Toronto's Top Video Stores
Part One: Queen Video
Part Two: Suspect Video