Don’t Buy This Movie

Don’t Buy This Movie

November 20th, 2008 by admin

China’s DVD pirates have gained marketing sophistication in recent years — instead of packaging their wares with nonsense descriptions or blurbs for a different movie, they copy and paste movie reviews from the Internet to help their buyers make an informed decision. Sometimes this strategy goes awry, however. For instance, in Shanghai this past weekend TT bought a copy of the French movie “Cash” (purely for the purpose of writing this blog entry, of course). The blurb on the box (original here) described the film thus: “‘Cash’ is a sad case of Paris playing Hollywood, and failing. The plot is a total ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ knock-off, with bits of ‘Heist’ and ‘After the Sunset’ tossed in. Also, Catherine Zeta-Jones was about a zillion times hotter as Europol power bitch Isabel Lahiri (than Valeria Golino in the near-identical part of a struggling international forgery investigator). Everyone else is even more forgettable, with the possible exception of Ciaran Hinds in the part of Julia’s hard-headed boss. Jean Reno, who appears in the small part of the big counterfeit kahuna, must have owed someone a favor. Don’t waste your time with this.”
Is this kind of mistake a competitive disadvantage for the DVD sellers? Probably not, given that each disc costs just a few yuan. Even a bad review may prove a selling point for those in search of a bit of mindless entertainment.