Much as we'll always cherish and continue to support the Cities' independent video stores, we have to admit that it's awfully hard for them to compete with a chain-owned Uptown outfit whose parent company recently anointed it as a "flagship store." In other words, the second-largest video-rental corporation in the country (after Blockbuster) made a list of the most esoteric and/or out-of-print video titles and called in copies of those titles from their Hollywoods all over the state, stockpiling the returns at the flagship on the edge of Kenwood, where the snootiest renters are presumed to live. Thus was born a rental warehouse whose holdings in both video formats are vast enough to include a lot of rarities that you'd struggle to find under the same roof of any other store in town. Tapes of films not yet available on DVD abound (particularly in the foreign section). And disc-wise, we damn near drool over the shelf devoted to dozens of DVDs from the highbrow Criterion label.