A new month, a new list.
My happy discovery in Harbin the other week of The World's Greatest DVD Shop (well, in truth, it was The Chairman's find - he's a veritable truffle-hound for this kind of thing), triggered some recollections of the hassles I've had over the years with my DVD buying in Beijing, the bizarre failings I've found in pirated disks here. Here's a rundown of the most amusingly eccentric flaws I've encountered. (I omit the routine 'theatre copy' vice of shaky hand-held video recorded in the cinema. Friends complain of this occasionally, but I've almost never come across it [Once Upon A Time In Mexico would be the only example I've bought, I think]. Perhaps I avoid this annoyance by eschewing the newest releases. If you wait a few months, until an official DVD release, you can usually get a very good quality pirate copy. If a film has only just hit the screens, then you're only likely to be able to get a 'theatre copy'...... or, around Oscar time, a voter's copy that has those irritating 'For Your Consideration' banners across the bottom of the picture. A good DVD shop owner will usually warn you against such compromised versions.)
The 8 Most Bizarre And Annoying Faults In Chinese Pirated DVDs
8) Disk freezes on Start Menu (This used to be quite a common failing; less so now; my copy of Barton Fink is plagued by this, but you can get it to start eventually by repeatedly pressing 'Play' at just the right moment.)
7) No English soundtrack (Sometimes, even when it's an English-language film, you'll find that the soundtrack has been dubbed into Chinese.... or Russian.... or Korean.)
6) No English sub-titles (Sub-titles are often useful, if not essential, to aiding understanding, if - as quite often happens - the soundtrack is poor quality; and Chinese students of English usually find it helpful to be able to refer to the sub-titles.)
5) English sub-titles are in fact Chinglish gibberish, presumably generated by machine translators
4) English sub-titles are taken from a completely different film (I once bought a copy of Finding Nemo which had perfectly good English sub-titles - except that they were quite clearly taken from an ultra-violent gangster pic, with multiple f-words. Not nice for the kiddies.)
3) English soundtrack has been re-dubbed by non-professional actors (Amazing, but true: I had a copy of Titanic once which appeared to be fine in every way, except..... it wasn't Kate and Leo speaking the dialogue!)
2) Soundtrack is overdubbed (My first copy of Collateral became unintelligible towards the end because the soundtrack was over-recorded with a very noisy action sequence [from earlier in the same film, I think] which completely drowned out the dialogue.)
And the winner........ 1) Sub-titles are in good English, but have been created entirely by guesswork (Yes, really. I had a copy of Kill Bill that was like this - the sub-titles were grammatically flawless and perfectly plausible, but they just weren't Tarantino's dialogue. It was like that game on the comedy improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? where the panel members have to make up dialogue to accompany a soundless film clip. Oh, the jobs you can get as a foreign student in this country! "Please don't kill me, Bill!" "I'm gonna." Priceless.)
7 comments:
A total aside, but are you affected by the sandstorms??
And that game is WICKED addictive.
What - the FreeRice game??
Yep, it has been pretty sandy here the last couple of days.
Oh no - my illegally produced merchandise is defective! Excuse me, Mr. Drug Dealer, I think there was a little too much lactose powder in that smack you sold me last week.
I kid, I kid. I just love winding you up on this.
Well, Cowboy, many people find themselves transacting business in fields which are 'illegal' (often merely because the law is an ass); but I would hope that there is still some basic business etiquette (and yes, one would hope, some common 'human decency') at play even in these transactions. I certainly would complain if my dope dealer had stiffed me.
Unfortunately, the ways in which dope dealers stiff people tend to be motivated purely by greed rather than incompetence, and can have unfortunate health consequences - which renders them less inherently amusing.
Chinese DVD pirates are just so endlessly inventive in the ways they manage to fuck up a relatively simple product that it gives me hours of innocent fun.
Much as I disagree this is an area where the law is an ass (patent law often is, but the right of an artist to control their product is different), there still strikes me as something very amusing about the attitude.
I guess it is an example of the prevalency of piracy over there - here you expect pirate copies to be utterly crap. Which is another reason why business with your present home is interesting to say the least.
Yes, well, we've done this one before, Cowboy, but..... 'rights'? 'Artists'?
This is mostly about mega-corporations trying to use 'the law' to fight business battles for them because they're too fucking lazy or greedy to try to win the fight in the market place. I'm sure the big American entertainment companies could stamp out most of the piracy here quite easily if they were willing to make a real investment in pioneering the market and selling at or below cost for a while to undermine the pirates' advantage.
I think the law is particularly likely to come out looking an ass in situations like this because the theoretical basis of the law is shaky, the practical enforcement of it is pretty much impossible, and the people seeking 'enforcement' are mostly not the artists but fat cat corporations who have plenty of money already.
And it's a much bigger issue than just 'the law'. It's about the development of the entertainment market in a still-very-backward-in-many-respects country, and about all of the opportunities for education and cultural growth that go with that.
If THE LAW says, "You can only buy these movies from us, and they're going to cost you $5 or $6 a pop", nobody in this country is going to see those movies. If the concerned parties (and THE LAW) instead say, "We accept that there is no way we can stop people downloading this stuff for FREE and copying it very cheaply, so...... hey, how else can we make money out of our movies? Let's put more effort into our sponsorships and merchandising in China!", well, that would be a lot more sensible.
How can you live in that hellhole, Froog? :-)
I seem to recall that in Jamaica in the 1980's a 'video shop' was a wooden shack with a sodding great satellite dish in the backyard hooked up to a VCR. The Jamaicans are what you might call good honest criminals...
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