Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Friday, August 20, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Punch-Drunk Love Meets End of Days! A few weeks back I bought Punch-Drunk Love on DVD, used, as part of a 3 for $25 sale at Hollywood video that I sometimes fall prone too. My brother Tim, on hearing this news scoffed, "You actually bought the art-fag version of The Waterboy?"I had, and I was not ashamed. At least, until I put the movie in my DVD player. A map of the world cut into an odd jigsaw came up. "This disc is intended for play on non-modified Region 1 players. There is nothing wrong with this Region 1 disc. To assure playback you should purchase or rent a disc designed for your region as set forth below." And then there's the map of the world, sliced into region with each region colored a soothing rage-deflecting color. The United States and Canada are a soothing chalkboard green. Mexico, interestingly, is Region 4, an orange you only see in toys that come from cereal boxes and kindergarten textbooks. Mexico is the same region as South America and, oddly, Australia. You can play a Mexican DVD on an Australian player and vice-versa. Strangely, the map does not indicate where I can rent or purchase a disc for non-modified Region 1 players. Perhaps Puerto Rico, which is also Region 1, but is not colored chalkboard green. The galling thing is I don't have a non-modified Region 1 player--I have a Region 1 player on which you can turn off the regions. It wasn't modified; it came that way. The last time this had happened, Edi and I had rented Once Upon A Time In Mexico and I had come up with a great solution: I'll just reset the defaults on my DVD player so it's seen as a non-modified Region 1 player. That'll solve everything! I felt like the Smartest Guy in the World (or at least non-modified Region 1). So that was a quick fix, but it turned out to be a hassle in the long run--my defaults were screwed and reset to parental block on anything over G; I couldn't find the unpublished menu allowing me to deactivate my region codes; and somewhere among all my stuff was the booklet of my five year old player that had the code allowing me to turn off the parental blocking. Took me over a half-hour to straighten everything out, just to see a pretty mediocre Robert Rodriguez movie. Thus, when the map came up on The Art-Fag Version of The Waterboy, I just made a disgusted noise and took it out of my player. I didn't have the book near me, I had saved the web page with the instructions on my computer, but hadn't yet distilled the instructions into something I could keep on my Palm Pilot. It just didn't seem worth the effort, which was a shame since I really had liked The Waterboy. The day before yesterday, taking a break from writing about comic books, I was staring at the DVD on the shelf next to me, and I idly fantasized, "Gee, wouldn't it be great if I had a non-modified region 1 DVD player so I could play the occasional movie that can only be played on non-modified region 1 DVD players and the rest of the movies, the whole wide world of cinema, I could continue to play on my lovely old DVD player?" It came to me in a flash of light, the sort of flash that scientists have been able to slow to a speed of five miles per hour in controlled laboratory experiments. I had a Playstation 2! It has a DVD player! A non-modified Region 1 DVD player in fact! This trojan horse app which stirred so much excitement when the PS2 first came out had always been rampantly disregarded in my household (with the appearance of the PS2 at Paris house, the DVD players outnumbered the inhabitants 5:4) and I had forgotten about that whole application by the time I moved in with Edi. It was perfect: I already had the PS2 set up on the entertainment cart. It now rolled to the bedroom with the TV and the VCR and the DVD player when we watched movies there. I was The Smartest Guy in the World! So I threw The Art-Fag Version of The Waterboy into the Playstation 2, and turned it on. Sadly, I have to confess: I was excited just to turn on the PS2 again. I had sworn off video games for the near-future (I think until the new GTA, but there's a whole Doom3/Xbox wrinkle I won't go into here) and was happy just to hear the damn thing boot up. And then the Playstation 2 asked me for the parental control password to watch The Art-Fag Version of The Waterboy. What followed was comical hijinks as The Stupidest Guy in the World turned his stuff upside down looking for a Playstation 2 booklet he had never bothered to keep track of. After all, The Stupidest Guy in the World knew how to play video games! You put them in the Playstation 2 and you turned it on! Then came The Stupidest Guy in the World searching the Internet. There were tons of pages explaining how you could delete the parental password control and input your own code, of your own choosing, for your own convenience. It was just like performing a fatality in Mortal Kombat II; you just hit down-up-x-x-x-right-left-R3-L3 and then when you hear the beep... Okay, maybe it wasn't that hard, but The Stupidest Guy in the World was having a tough time with it. Each instructionary page was phrased a bit vaguely, or written just poorly enough, until I found the page where a guy who fixes people's computers for a living announced that this was the number one side job he was asked to do by embarrassed customers, and here's how you do it. Well, I did what he said and it worked. The sadly lilting Jon Brion music came up against a shifting curtain of lights and the title, The Art-Fag Version of The Waterboy, came up. Edi came into the living room while I capered and pointed. "What's up?" She asked. I pointed to the TV and gave her the short version of the story. "I'm the Smartest Guy in the World!" Then I had to get back to work and finish the newsletter. I still haven't seen the movie. Like that five mile an hour burst of light must surely be saying to itself: I'm getting to it, I'm getting to it. posted by Jeff Lester | 8:45 AM | |
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