March 6th - DVD = Damaged Video Disk

I told you a while back about our little trip to the shady DVD store. You know, the one with the DVD that got stuck in my wife’s laptop. Well, they have struck again. This time, I settled down to watch “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” – you know, with Brad Pitts and Ben Afflek’s little brother. I heard it was a good movie, so I picked it up for like 80 cents or whatever it cost at said fine retail establishment. In order to avoid getting stuck with a bunch of non-working dvds, we brought the laptop along to the store, and tried each one out before we made our purchases. Obviously we couldn’t sit there and watch the whole movie (although I suggested it, because then we wouldn’t have to buy it…), so we just caught the first scene to make sure the thing plays, video, audio and Su Su Sudio.


When I sat down to watch this movie last night, the first scene went by fine, but as soon as the actors started in on their dialogue, I noticed there were captions at the bottom. No problem, I’ll just go into the audio set up and turn the captions off. I tried this, but no dice. They stayed on, no matter how many times I went back and turned them off. Ok, there was a glitch. Then I looked closely at the captions. The first thing I read was, “Target acquired, should I fire?” okay, this was a Western afterall, and maybe somebody in the background said that and I missed it. I am a little hard of hearing. But then I started to read things like “You don’t step to this. I’m straight thuggin’ boy.” Wow, Brad Pitt is really working some magic with the suggested script! “He ain’t yo baby Daddy!” Woah! This is getting exciting! I didn’t know Jerry Springer existed in the 1800’s.

Just then, the movie switched to black & white, and the captions moved from the bottom of the screen, to the middle, conveniently covering Casey Afflek’s face. Ok. I can live with that. But why black & white? I ejected the disk and looked at it. On the top, everything looked legit, but when I turned it over, there was a strange burn mark on the middle of the disk, near the hole. That can’t be normal. I put it back in, and the captions were still ghetto fabulous. I don’t know which movie they mixed up the captions with, but it’s so ridiculous, that I want to see it now. I kept catching myself reading the captions and getting a good laugh. I was imagining Jesse James’ southern drawl saying “Check yoself fool!”

I finished watching the movie, but I think I’ll need to watch it again. My wife started watching it halfway through with me, and she had a bunch of questions. I tried to explain the story to her, but she kept saying “Who’s Tyrone?” and “I thought this was in Missouri not the Bronx.” Oh well, I kinda got two movies for the price of one. Maybe buying counterfeit dvds isn’t such a bad move. You get all the excitement of gunfights, horseback riding and saloon brawls, but if you get bored during the slow scenes, someone is always getting “capped” in the captions. “Yo Tyrone! Pass me the remote! My sister’s cousin is on Jerry Springer. You know, the one I had a baby with? Yeuh, she fine. Now run to the DVD store and pick me up a copy of The Pianist. I heard the captions is from Super Troopers! Baaaam!”