Wednesday, June 20, 2007

bad publicity

Phil brought home a bunch of 'I-swear-I-didn't-know-it-was-pirated-when-i-bought-it-officer!' DVDs the other day. Most of the DVDs we buy here for $1 don't have the correct covers or blurbs on them so you get to see some pretty funny stuff. This one for Get Rich or Die Tryin' had me laughing (don't blame me for the movie choice- Phil has been in China for so long that he is at the point where he'll buy anything) The front cover looked authentic but on the back was written:

"A tale of an inner city drug dealer who turns away from crime to pursue his passion, rap music. This movie is horrendous. The terrific directing cannot separate the fact that this movie is perhaps one of the worst 'I sell records, why not make an album?' movies ever. He cannot act, sounds like he is reading his lines from a textbook, and his feelings range from dumb to ohmygod! The visual style of this movie acts, and the whole film seems like a horrible stereotype developed by racists (of all colors) who see inner city blacks as nothing but criminals. It is a shame that nice movies set to an African American theme flop, but movies that showcase the worst in society that affect kids do so well."


Upon googling the above review I found it was copied and pasted straight from a comment on the IMDB site for this film.

Reviews like this, so obviously taken from the internet by someone who cannot read what they are stealing, are very common on the DVDs sold here. In fact I'd say I see one of these on about one in every ten DVDs- and in fact the actual rate is probably higher its just that only half of them are written in English, the others being in French, Italian, Spanish and a lot of Russian. It sure makes buying unknown DVDs interesting!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i saw a similar thing on another dvd in one of those stalls and i just didn't know what to think!
now i know where these reviews come from :)

Mia said...

Ummm I actually saw that movie and agree 100% with the pirate's review. It was right on the money!

Louise said...

Lol, I'm sure it was Mia- it certainly isn't really my style anyway. However to print it on the cover...???

:-)

Vincentia said...

Yes, I have just returned from an overseas trip and saw exactly the same thing!

The film was OK...