I’ve been popping in and out of West L.A.’s Laser Blazer since the early ’90s, first to buy laser discs and then DVDs and Blurays. And these days the store (located at 10587 West Pico Blvd, two blocks east of Overland) is a remnant of what it once was. Business is down, the mood is down, excess inventory is being sent back to distributors and the air conditioning is on the fritz, and in fact hasn’t been repaired for several weeks. And it’s hot outside.

I’m sorry to see an old friend wither and die. I wish I could do something to help, but what could that be exactly? Video retail revenue is dropping all over. Other L.A. video stores like Vidiots, Cinefile and Amoeba are hanging on (or so it seems), but it seems as if Laser Blazer is hurting a bit more than most, obviously due to Netflix-by-mail and streaming downloads but also the location, which has little pedestrian traffic. (Parking has never been a problem.)

I like to roam around a video store and shoot the shit with the counter guys about this or that film, but I guess that kind of behavior or social appetite is dying also.

Last January owner Ron Dassa, looking to save money, partitioned the original store space into a much smaller space in order to rent out two other partitioned areas. One is being used by an aerobics business; the other is unoccupied. Laser Blazer’s store space feels cramped, bunker-like. The last time I was there it felt like a closet without the a.c. (The staffers had the front door open, at least.)

I dropped by a week or so ago to by a DVD of The Best Years of Our Lives. Ivan Infante, a screenwriter and filmmaker who’s been the store’s buyer for I-forget-how-many-years, said they’re out of it, and that it’s not re-orderable. This would have been an unheard-of scenario two or three years ago. Today I asked if they had the Twilight Zone Bluray boxes, and the guy said only Season #4. So the hell with it. What’s the point any more? No air-conditioning and a diminishing inventory. I’ll just go order online or go to Ameoba or Best Buy. Or buy Hulu or Netflix or Amazon downloads, although I really hate the quality of the online streaming I’ve seen so far.

I’m sorry it’s come to this, but a place I used to think of as a kind of home is giving up the ghost, and there doesn’t seem to be anything to do or say except…you tell me. If I could clap my hands three times and convert Laser Blazer into the place it was three or four years ago, I would.

Roughly three months hence Eureka Video will release a Bluray of Orson Welles‘ Touch of Evil (1958) with six different versions of the film, which really amounts to three versions presented in both 1.37 and 1.85 aspect ratios. One, the 96-minute 1958 theatrical version. Two, the 1958 preview version that runs 108 minutes. And three, the 1998 reconstructed version, running 112 minutes, that was put together by Walter Murch, Bob O’Neil and Bill Varney.

Two aspect ratios for each version…so hardcore, so film-nerdy. But the orange backdrop is, for me, a problem. To advertise a revered classic film taking place in a Mexican border town and shot in the gritty environs of Venice, California, Eureka chose one of the most needlessly intense and eye-sore-ish colors in the spectrum? A color that says traffic cones and prison jump suits?

I’ve just written the following in a comment thread: “Nobody believes in a righteous, true-blue America any more. Certainly not in the way everyone did during World War II. ‘America the Beautiful’ has been over, patriotically-speaking, since the mid ’60s. What Captain America does, curiously, to dream a little dream about what it was to be a true believer during World War II, and to be a kind of goody two-shoes type of guy who wants to serve and salute and defeat the bullies, etc.

“Maybe that’s the door or window that allowed me to get into this, or that let Captain America into my realm…whatever. In a kind of a dopey, stylized way it recreates the special glow of that gone-forever era, or at least as it might have been. I was saying to myself that ‘this is kind of silly, of course, but Joe Johnston and his team really believe in this yesteryear dream-reality themselves. Because they’re selling me on it…me!’

“It’s not just a very heartfelt comic-book film, but one that seems to fly by as quickly and fleetingly as a comic book, even though it lasts a couple of hours. That’s an important aspect. It never gets loaded down with convictions that it’s delivering something momentous and meaningful…and yet it is in an odd way.

“Captain America is not in the least bit ‘realistic,’ of course. Everything it contains is about memory and echoes and haze. And about browns and ambers and sepia-tones. But it’s a highly sincere and convincing visitation of an imaginary yesteryear, and for the first time in a long time I felt a semblance of what it might have been to be a true-blue good guy and to be ‘part of the team.’ And I’m no team player.”

In the view of the sometimes very wise Kris Tapley, Captain America is “the best Marvel film since Iron Man, and perhaps better. It conjures the most endearing character of the build thus far, a well-defined leader who will certainly leave audiences ready to follow him into Marvel’s next ambitious project.”

And from MCN’s David Poland: “I kinda love the sepia-spirited movie that Joe Johnston made out of Captain America. Few films are perfect, but the ones that can keep you in even at moments they threaten to pull you out are almost as rare.” And costar Hayley Atwell — I’m paraphasing — could be the focus of a Douglas Sirk movie, and she has truly stirring ta-tas!

“The response to each movie is its own little war,” Poland once wrote. The word he was searching for was “battle.” And many of these are skirmishes. But the Captain America argument (which has begun to sound a bit more reasonable with Joe Johnston’s film managing a 62% Rotten Tomatoes rating as of early this afternoon) is, in my mind, a war.

At the very least it’s the Hatfields vs. McCoys, and I’m a Hatfield carrying my flintlock over my shoulder, and I mean to pick off as many of them McCoy varmints as I can.

I know I’m contradicting my previous remark about there being “no “wrong” or “right” in responding to a film. I guess I’m talking Hatfields vs. McCoys in an Iowa caucus sense of the term. It’s all about persuading the uncommitted and talking down the other side and then smiling and shaking hands the morning after the vote, etc. Something along those lines. Just as I knew Hillary Clinton and John Edwards had to lose to Barack Obama in Iowa, the enemies of Captain America — easily one of the best-made films of the year — must be surrounded and shelled and defeated at all costs.

Even though I realize that the pro-America team is probably destined to fail with younger viewers, and perhaps with people in their teens and early 20s. You have to be a little bit older, I’m starting to think, to really appreciate this film. You need to have gotten and appreciated the craft that went into mid ’70s-to-early ’80s Spielberg films and the quality that went into The Rocketeer and Sky Captain and to have fully understood what truly first-rate, beautifully designed, perfectly calibrated superhero chops are. You need to have that knowledge in your head and heart to really get Captain America, I think.

After last night’s screening I asked a couple of very young boys what they thought, and one of them half-smiled and said, “It’s okay.” In other words, he didn’t like it. And then a friend in his 40s said almost the same thing — “Not bad!”

The boldness of going right back to high school with a re-imagined Peter Parker (in the person of Andrew Garfield) figuring out who and what he is and ignoring the first three Spider-Man movies is moderately entertaining in itself. And to be free of the jowly, suit-wearing Republican known as Sam Raimi! It’s as if a rainshower has fallen in the forest and everything is moist and new again. And those POV shots aren’t half bad.

An 11 am screening of Sarah’s Key prevents me from getting into Captain America until sometime this afternoon, but Drew McWeeny‘s HitFix review says most of what I would have said and some other stuff I wouldn’t have written because I’m not enough of a geek.

“Captain America: The First Avenger is one of the finest movies yet from Marvel Studios, and a big departure in tone and storytelling from most of the films they’ve made so far. It is a strong indicator that the more willing the studio is to experiment, the more exciting the payoffs can be. In this case, there’s no clear precursor to this one in anything else Marvel’s done, and it feels like branching out and trying something this different freed them up.

“It helps that director Joe Johnston shot the film like he had something to prove and Chris Evans appears to have been born for this role. Everything came together here in a way that I’m not sure anyone could have predicted, and that indefinable chemistry is one of the things that makes this feel so special.

“The first and most immediate difference between this and the other movies Marvel has made so far is the time frame over which the story plays out. The film starts in the present day, then flashes back to the early days of WWII. The main story plays out not over days or even weeks, but over years. It is, in essence, a look at the entire WWII career of Captain America, and his origins as Steve Rogers.

“It isn’t structured like a typical superhero film, either. It focuses on two main arcs over the course of its running time. First, there’s the story of Rogers, a skinny weakling with a lion’s heart who is chosen to be the test subject in the Super Soldier program headed by Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) and how he learns to handle the power he’s been granted. At the same time, we follow the efforts of Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), aka The Red Skull, whose HYDRA is starting to outgrow its origins as the dark science division of the Nazis thanks to his discovery of a strange glowing cube that once resided in the vault of weapons kept by Odin in Asgard.

“The collision between these two story arcs is what keeps driving the movie forward, but there is plenty of room built in for digressions, and the end result feels like reading an entire collection of issues of the same book.

“Marvel has been working towards this moment for a while, and there have been a few moments where it felt like they were making missteps with the individual movies in their rush to reach The Avengers, but they’ve saved one of their very best movies for last, and I suspect Captain America: The First Avenger will send audiences out of the theater rabid to see what’s next.”

I’m predicting here and now that Captain America will be better than The Avengers. Another ensemble superhero piece? Blah. Give me the purity and cleanliness of what I saw last night any day.

And I need to say without malice (and in fact with a certain arm-over-the-shoulder compassion) that the five big critics who’ve panned it so far —Kirk Honeycutt, Karina Longworth, Emmanuel Levy, Marshall Fine and Tim Grierson — need to unblock themselves somehow. I don’t know what’s wrong with them or what they’ve been eating or not doing enough of, but they’re wrong, wrong….no, that’s rash. There is no “wrong” or “right” in responding to a film. But they clearly are not seeing. They won’t or can’t let this movie in.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson tweeted last night that Captain America “left me cold.” WHAT?

The reception to Captain America may be one of those watershed moments in the 21st Century that defines who and what we are as people, as critics or columnists, as film disciples. I don’t want to go nuts here, but I think it’s safe to say that people will be trashing this amazingly concise, uplifting, fliuid, dazzling, emotionally earnest yesteryear art spectacle at their own longterm peril. They’re going to have to live with what they’ve written for years, and it will stay with them like a snapping turtle biting into their foot.

I’ve been got so caught up with this, that and everything else over the last three days that I somehow forgot to post last weekend’s Oscar Poker chat — sorry. Oscar Poker #41 didn’t include boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino, who’s become too much of a swaggering, in-demand big shot to take ten or twelve minutes to discuss box-office receipts with the likes of Sasha and myself. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.