The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

What time would that be?  Why, it’s the award season.  This means that every studio is sending out DVD screeners to the members of their various academies.  And when there are screeners floating around, they’ll end up for sale in China.

Tonight a coworker and I went to a DVD store which is, I shit you not, the Mecca of DVDs.  It’s larger than the DVD section at your local Best Buy.  I’d be willing to bet, without exaggeration, that they had 20,000 different DVDs in this place.  It was ENORMOUS.  And it was in a basement, down a set of metal stairs.  You’d never know that it was there even if you were walking past the front door.

So, what did I get?  Here’s the list.

Juno
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
We Own the Night
The Number 23
Rescue Dawn
Meet the Robinsons
Awake
The Illusionist
The Golden Compass
Into the Wild
Jackass 2.5
Blood Diamond
Michael Clayton
The Island

And I also got three boxed sets of TV shows.

Blackadder, Seasons 1-5
Californication, Season 1
House M.D., Season 4

So, let’s assume that each one of the DVD moves above would be an average of $15 retail at Best Buy.  That’s $210 worth of movies.  And let’s give each one of the boxed sets an average price of $30.  That’s $90, giving us a grand total of $300.  With an 8% sales tax this is $324.

For all the items listed above I paid the whopping sum of ¥320, which works out to $44.75.  So I paid roughly 13% of what the items would cost in the US.

Not too shabby, huh?  Whenever I end up returning to the US I’m going to have the world’s largest pirate DVD collection.

the golden compass is a really excellent book… I can’t say how the movie turned out, but the 3 book trilogy was very good.

Watch Juno first. It was a great movie.

House Season 4?  Yeesh, they do get stuff out fast.  The last produced ep just aired like 2 weeks ago.  Might be more, no idea if they’ll spool up for some more eps now that the writer’s strike is over, and even then it’ll likely not be another 10 or so to make a 20+ ep season considering it takes a few months to do shows (from what I’ve read).

Whenever I end up returning to the US I’m going to have the world’s largest pirate DVD collection.

Unless someone who works for the MPAA reads your blog and some nice gentlemen meet you when you get off the plane.

Don’t do it. Smuggling those dvds into the US is a very serious crime. With netflix, movies are practically free anyway.

They won’t be smuggled in, they’ll be placed in a box inside my shipment, and they’ll be called “books” or something.  Trust me, I’ve moved internationally enough times in my life how to get shit into the country.  I’m not worried at all.

When I was in the 8th grade this kid moved to our school in Scotland from California.  He was a total stoner skate punk.  He took a boom box, took the back off, ripped the guts out, and filled it with weed.  It sailed through customs without a problem.

wait. you didn’t already have blackadder on DVD?

I would be carefully anyway, they might take your movies and give you a fine.