When Brad almost came to San Miguel
There he was, Brad Pitt, in the lobby of our one local cinema, if only on a huge poster for “Fury” his latest movie which premiered in the U.S. almost three months ago.
On the poster Brad seemed to be brooding
about war and peace or some similarly weighty topic, with his arms resting on the cannon of a
Sherman tank, his face and army fatigues covered with grease and dirt, his
haircut eerily reminiscent of Kim Jong-un’s, the North Korean doofus dictator who
looks like a meatball in uniform. Moronic haircut and all, Brad looked
pretty buff for 51.
More auspicious yet was
the banner across the bottom of the poster: ¡Próximamente!
or Soon!
Brooding Brad |
The prospect of seeing Brad
and his movie, which had received quite favorable reviews in the U.S., raised
our blood pressure a point or two. You see, for all its colonial enchantment San Miguel is not a main stop on the international cinema circuit. Often it feels as if we live in French Lick, Ind., pop. 1,801.
Indeed, “Fury” hasn’t
come to San Miguel yet. Meryl Streep’s new flick, “Into the Woods” as well as the
acclaimed biography of Stephen Hawking, “The Theory of Everything,” and “The
Imitation Machine,” about the guy who helped break the Enigma Code during World
War II, may not make it here any time soon if ever.
Our hopes for a Brad sighting were dashed
again at a street market in Mexico City a few weeks ago when we saw a DVD of “Fury” on
sale along with dozens of other recent releases for the today-only bootleg price of three
for $10 pesos, or about 25 cents apiece. You’re right, it was a stupid
purchase. That price doesn't cover even the cost of a blank disk.
Neither “Fury” nor another movie played at all, and the third movie was not the one on the jacket. And the damned vendor assured me his DVDs were “guaranteed.”
Neither “Fury” nor another movie played at all, and the third movie was not the one on the jacket. And the damned vendor assured me his DVDs were “guaranteed.”
The Brad Pitt chase is a
good introduction to the movie market in Mexico, controlled by a few giant
chains like Cinepolis and Cinemex—but with a huge bootleg market on the side,
despite all the warnings at the beginning of every DVD about how the FBI and
Interpol will send you to Guantanamo if you dare show or
sell unauthorized duplicates of any film.
Jong-un to Brad: Didn't we meet at the hairstylist? |
Large movie distributors’
tastes in movies naturally control which ones are shown in Mexico, and judging by
their selections the chains must have a pretty low regard for the IQ of the
average moviegoer. Anything more intellectually riveting than “The Penguins
of Madagascar” might take months to get San Miguel if at all.
But more baffling is
where all the bootleg movies come from. We have an established distributor in
San Miguel, the widely revered Juan the Ripper, who for $40 pesos will sell you
DVDs of just about any flick or TV show making the rounds in the U.S. Reportedly he also sells some gay videos that he calls "happy movies."
Judging by the crawlers that appear periodically at the bottom of the screen, some of Juan's originals were DVDs sent to reviewers for Golden Globe or Oscar nominations. Helpful movie lovers sometimes also give
Juan legitimate (or not) DVDs that he copies in exchange for four free DVDs of
other films.
The rest of the bootleg
DVD cornucopia at Juan’s or on the streets of every town in Mexico must come directly from Back of the Truck Entertainment or Over the Transom Productions.
More ominously I’ve read that drug cartels may control the bootleg
video industry though it’s hard to imagine they would want any more money to launder. I’m not going to ask around about the narco’s business strategy; those guys are very touchy about their privacy.
Unfortunately, Juan’s
duplication apparatus is not up to snuff yet and while the video comes out perfectly
the audio is often garbled. And seldom are there subtitles to help you figure
out, say, what’s for supper at Downton Abbey, where the characters speak in a
mixture of upper- and lower-class British, depending on whether they sleep
upstairs or downstairs.
The bootleg DVD for “Babel”
(2006), also starring Brad Pitt, must have presented the biggest language
challenge of all time. The characters spoke English, Japanese, Berber Arabic
and Spanish. In fact one of the characters was a deaf-mute Japanese girl who
communicated in sign language or by pointing at her privates. So if you bought the bootleg version with
Spanish subtitles or none at all your head probably exploded halfway through the show.
Where the rest of the
millions of bootleg copies of American movies comes from is indeed a mystery in
broad daylight. The movies are for sale practically everywhere, along with
bootleg CDs, for as little as ten pesos each. From our experience, the majority of
street DVDs play pretty well and occasionally have English subtitles.
The Mexican government
clearly is not very interested in enforcing national or international copyright
laws or busting the manufacturers and distributors of bootleg videos that are as common on any
Mexican street as tacos al pastor or ears
of corn with mayonnaise.
Many Americans here
bypass all these problems by downloading or streaming films through the internet, an option not available here at Rancho Santa Clara where we rely on a very leisurely wireless internet connection. Downloading “Gone With the Wind” would take
us a week before we even got to the burning of Atlanta.
Instead we send away for
DVDs from Amazon—legal and with clear sound and subtitles—or get some from
Liverpool, the local department store. It comes out to between five and ten
dollars each. That's about as much as going to the movie house, buying popcorn and
soda, and a McDonald’s sundae afterward, and it beats watching grainy Claudette Colbert retrospectives on the Turner Movie Classics cable channel.
In case you’re wondering
about Brad’s whereabouts, I checked the Cinemex website for San Miguel yesterday
afternoon and it claims that “Fury” is in fact arriving—you guessed it—¡próximamente!
I don’t believe it. Brad
and his movie already have taken me for a ride twice, and I’m not falling for his hype one more time.
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