Bridget, the movie theater and a dvd burner

Ah the movie theater, the bastion of Hollywood escapism. I haven’t been to the movies in a very long time. I can’t remember if that last movie I saw in a theater was Meet the Fockers or I Heart Huckabees, but either way, they’re both on DVD now, and I saw them both last year.

This is due to a lot of reasons. Time, money, etc. Much of it has to do with Bridget not liking any of the movies that I want to see, and vice versa. And if she doesn’t want to go, well I’m not going to be that guy who goes to the movies by himself. Even when we can agree on a movie to go see, it seems that we never quite make it to the theater. In the past, more often that not, we would miss it in the theater all together and just rent it when it comes out on DVD.

Now this break from theater going began quite some time ago when I was working for Cunard. I never went to the movies because I was a) out of the country and b) confined to the ship every night, but I still saw all of the latest releases in the comfort of my own cabin. Almost anywhere in the world we went, there would be merchants (I use the term loosely) selling bootlegged copies of movies I didn’t even know were out. I saw most of the 2004 blockbusters in this fashion. It’s not a perfect science, and every now and then you think to yourself “sit down you asshole, you’re blocking the screen” to some asshole on the dvd standing up in front of the screen. Other times there can be numbers along the top and bottom (a workprint) and just outright terrible quality altogether. But with no other options for seeing the movies, this was the way to go.

Fast forward a year to the summer of 2005. We both work. We both work strange long hours. It would seem impossible to get to the movies, besides, if we were to go its $19 just to get through the door. And we still can’t agree on a movie.

So what is a boy to do? I’ll tell you what I did. I bought a dvd burner. Now this may seem like an odd decision. If I were to rent a dvd only to copy it, why not just watch it when I rent it? But it’s not quite that simple. In the same way that I was able to buy bootlegged dvds overseas, its even easier to obtain them stateside. Most movies, as soon as they are released, appear online. You only need to know where to look. Now i know this isn’t exactly legal, but to anyone who started using Napster in 1998 and followed the course of file sharing through KaZaa to Limewire to BitTorrent and so on, it’s easy to forget that aspect of things. Apparently I am not alone in this. According to BigChampagne, a consulting firm that tracks file-sharing trends, an estimated 8.6 million people were trading copyrighted songs at any give time in May 2005. While statistics aren’t available for movie downloads, you get the point.

I’ve seen a few movies since buying the burner, some of them in the theater still, some on dvd, some in limbo between the two. Again this is not a perfect science and it can be time consuming. The average movie download is anywhere from 600mb to 4gb and it takes forever to download them. Once downloaded, you have to verify that they are intact and not missing; say the last 20 minutes or something. Then you need to convert the Dvix files to video objects (.vob) in order to finally burn them to a dvd and hope that even then they play in your dvd player. I’ve found that more than often, for the quality of the movies, it’s not worth it to go through all the trouble. But then again I paid good money for the burner so I’m going to use it, you know?

This morning, Bridget says to me, lets go to the movies tonight. And I’m thinking, who is this woman asking me to go to the movies. We decided that we would either go see Mr & Mrs Smith or Batman Begins. Now I’ve heard good and bad about both, so I decided to consult a well known movie critic for his opinion, Roger Ebert. I head over to rogerebert.com and while there was no review for Mr & Mrs Smith, there was a review for Batman Begins. And right there, at the bottom of the review I saw this:

And sure enough, I did a little looking around and found this:

So it would seem that if we don’t make it to the movies tonight, we could always wait for the dvd to come out, or I could just make my own.