Everyone else has already seen No Country for Old Men, so I'll mostly skip the content. It was just like the book, only a little more upbeat. As for the outer packaging, the claim that it was "Beyond High Definition" seemed to be at least as true as it is when the slogan appears on a legally distributed Blu-Ray product: the picture was phenomenally crisp on the giant new flat-screen TV that our friend Alex is embarrassed about having bought.
But it was the inner packaging that made it memorable. Somewhere along the bootleg-DVD supply chain, someone felt the need to include an envelope with the official Beijing Olympics logo on it--tucked inside the plastic case, inside the cardboard sleeve, where no shopper could even see it. Piracy as conceptual art.
Here are two entirely different and unrelated boxes of baking soda from the baking-supplies section of the East Lake Jenny Lou's market. What follows is the box-top text from one of them:
PRODUCTS TRAIT
Because Environmentally sensitive products are part of our heritage
and tenet. And that ARM & HATCHET has helped the environment.So since
all along ARM & HATCHET Baking soda and ARM & HATCHET Super
washing soda are environmentally acceptable alternatives to other hous-
ehold products. For example:bake, tenderflesh, cleanlinese.
We already manufacture a good many Nuatural and Encircle products.
this now. aftertime we are lend for this calling more adapt marktable encircle
products. Arm & Hammer
Even in American pop-culture terms, it's hard to quite explain the 2004 movie Baadasssss!: Mario Van Peebles, directing himself, plays his father, Melvin Van Peebles, in the story of how Melvin Van Peebles wrote, directed, starred in, and distributed his 1971 independent black-militant action movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Inexplicable does not mean bad! Baadasssss! turns out to be pretty entertaining. But this is a movie in which Mario Van Peebles, playing Melvin Van Peebles, orders an actor playing Mario Van Peebles as a boy to appear in a flashback scene in which the character of Sweetback--who is being played as an adult by Melvin Van Peebles as played by Mario Van Peebles--loses his virginity. Sweetback himself, played by Mario Van Peebles as Melvin Van Peebles, also wanders onscreen from time to time as an apparition who argues with Melvin Van Peebles (also, still, played by Mario Van Peebles) about the progress of the movie-making. Also there is an actor playing Bill Cosby (who turns out to have secretly helped finance Melvin Van Peebles' underground project when it ran out of money) who seemed to have looked nothing like Bill Cosby until the actual Bill Cosby appeared as a talking head in a documentary coda with the credits and I realized that the actor's facial structure did look quite a bit like that of the present-day, aged, sagging-faced Bill Cosby, who (like Paul McCartney) has to a great extent ceased to resemble the iconic self that everyone pictures when they picture him.
I'm not sure how any of that is supposed to come across to the Chinese pirated-DVD audience:
The title has been translated into Chinese as "Da Liumang," or "Big Hoodlum." This is the second-most-inexplicable DVD offering I have come across here. First place still goes to Bon Cop, Bad Cop, an ultra-high-concept Canadian buddy-cop flick in which a straitlaced, coat-and-tie-wearing Anglophone Toronto detective is forced to team up with a rule-breaking, leather-jacketed Francophone Montreal counterpart to pursue a serial killer (who is seeking vengeance for offenses against professional hockey) who has dumped one victim on top of the Ontario-Quebec border sign. In Chinese, the title is rendered "Good Cop, Bad Cop."
