Dodgy DVD Distributors

A trip to China wouldn't be complete without stocking up on DVDs. When I first arrived in Shanghai, in the summer of 2004, discs were typically 8RMB (53p) apiece, but technology has moved on, and Harbin in 2007 typically sells them for 6RMB (40p) each!

Big supermarkets like Carrefour sell DVDs too, but these range enormously in price from 5RMB for unheard of Z-movie's, through to upwards of 100RMB for multi-disc boxsets. The difference between 盗版 (fake) street-sellers or small hole-in-the-wall shops, and 正版 (real) editions is that legitimate copies are more likely to be dubbed into Chinese, with correct subtitles, and in high quality.

Pirate DVDs are almost always a lottery, with completely unrelated subtitles, Russian-language versions of Hollywood films, and telescreen editions being some of the worst problems a careless buyer might face.

Mitigating the difference (apart from the obvious price advantage) is the 'try before you buy' policy most pirates are happy to indulge; the huge range that most pirates carry; and occasional censorship on state-sanctioned movies. Notoriously, the mainland Chinese version of Infernal Affairs (无间道 - recently remade as The Departed) had a completely different ending to the HK version. Andy Lau's bad-guy character is robbed of his happy ending in the mainland version, lest the morality of the story corrupt the country's youth!

I bought a stack of ten DVDs at just such a pirate stall near University. As I paid, I tried to haggle.

"Buy nine, get one free?" I asked?

"We only make 5 jiao (50c) on each disc, so that's impossible" the shop-girl claimed, apologetically.

"Come on, how about a little cheaper? I'll be a regular customer". I tried my best cheeky grin.

"57RMB (£4.80) then?" She replied, knocking 20p off the asking price, and shaving her (alleged) profit margin to less than 2p a disc!

I pretended to consider it, then paid up with a suitably annoyed expression, living by the adage that he best haggling comes from the buyer and the seller both thinking they've cheated the other.

All this serves as preamble to saying that I've just seen two fantastic films. "Children of Men" and "Pan's Labyrinth".

There are some similarities. Both are 2006 films by Mexican directors (Alfsono Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro respectively) that make extensive use of 'invisible CGI' to tell their stories. I griped about the state of film-making in a previous post, so I was pleasantly surprised by these two, which are (relatively) big-budget, yet thoughtful and thought-provoking pieces of cinema.

Pan's Labyrinth is the story of a little girl in 1940's Spain and the fantasy world that she creates to deal with the horrors around her. Or is it? Del Toro deliberately leaves ambiguous the question of whether the fantasy world is real.

Del Toro's vision is incredible. There are some creature designs that are just out-of-this-world, and yet he gives equal weight to the story portions set in the real-world. I can't recommend this film highly enough. The film is entirely in Spanish, but don't let reading subtitles, or the fact that it's billed as a fairytale, put you off.

I'll try not to journey into spoiler territory here, but Children of Men is a strongly political science-fiction picture, set in a near-future England. London is depicted as a gritty, dirty, crumbling version of today's city, in which terrorism and social breakdown have led to an increasingly militarised police-state.

The whole thing is shot in a washed-out realistic style using plenty of hand-held cameras and mind-blowingly long and intricate tracking shots. The effect is to give an almost documentary feel, and it's all eminently believable and scary stuff.

[Update: I forgot to say that science-fiction can be grouped into two categories - I'll call them stories and fables. In a story, you might have an entire alternate or future Universe, which has its own history, people, and even economics. In a good story, it'll all be logically consistent, and offer a glimpse at what could have been, or what might happen. See Neal Stephenson's novels The Diamond Age or Snow Crash for his great depiction of a future world, complete with its own culture, social structure, and lingo.

A fable, in contrast, is a story that holds up a mirror to the world we live in today. Typically allegorical or metaphorical, it will try and reveal a deeper truth. Try Alan Moore's original graphic novel V for Vendetta, which was written in response to his concerns about the Conservative government of 1980's Britain.

The very best science-fiction, then, combines both. It'll weave a story in a world that is at once fantastic and believable, then within that story attempt to teach or warn us about something that is relevant in the here and now. It's why I live the genre so much, despite its less than pleasant connotations of dorkiness. Anyway, now that I've had time to think about the film, I would say Children of Men is a successful example of both story and fable, and I've been struggling to get it out of my head.]