At the postal museum

At the postal museum

“With great power comes great responsibility”

Spiderman, 2002

With cheap DVDs comes a low boredom threshold

Me, 12:32

Aside from a landscape as beautiful as it is varied, the rich culture that comes with 5,000 years of continuous culture, and a language more fascinating and poetic than any other, the best thing about China is the cheap knock-off DVDs.

Olympic crackdowns have closed some of the bigger shops, but it’s still easier to find a hooky copy of “High School Musical” than a toilet with a seat. Fake DVDs cost between 5 and 10RMB per disc, and at that price  you don’t mind abandoning a movie at the first sign of suck.

So here are 3 DVDs I didn’t watch all the way through:

  1. The Oxford Murders

    2. Frodo from Lord of the Rings goes to Oxford University to study something or other, and gets involved in some kind of murder. I’m not sure whether he kills, is killed, or just dies from boredom because I turned it off at the following lines:

    Frodo (playing Squash): *Grunt*
    Frodo’s Love Interest: Wow, you’re really hitting those walls
    Frodo: Don’t talk to me about walls, this town is full of them

    *CLICK*

  2. Futurama: Bender’s Big Score

    3. Painfully unfunny sci-fi cartoon twaddle. Here’s part of the synopsis from IMBD:
    “….Fry returns to the 31st century by freezing himself while his temporal double, created after another time travel trip, stays on in the 21st century, the double ends up befriending a Narwhal and becomes a marine biologist, but is apparently killed by Bender in 2012…”

    Need I go on?

    We already know that time travel is not possible, otherwise someone would have gone back in time and killed Matt Groening shortly after The Simpsons Season 10.

    Stopped this one when the terrible Jamaican accent and complete lack of jokes became too, too much.

  3. Rise Of The Footsoldier

    4. Apparently based on the true story of a cardboard cut-out gangster called, oh I don’t know, Rockhard O’Hooligan or something. This is the most violent film I’ve seen and yet was still, somehow, boring.
    My only good bits of this film were
    a) When the delivery guy turned up with my pizza and
    b) when I turned it off after 50 minutes.