Does the following statement - a must-miss of snoringly mediocre proportions - make you want to buy or not buy a copy of a movie? Discuss.

But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let me explain ...

In order to save up for this trip, certain things had to be sacrificed. Among those things was any idea of my getting familiar with DVD technology. As a budgetary measure, the trusty Goldstar VCR was where multimedia began and ended in our house.

Thus, until now, the world of DVDs has remained a complete and utter mystery to me: regions? special features? these things meant next-to-nothing.

Then along came Vietnam and the most riotously out-of-control piracy I have ever seen. Thailand and China have nothing on this place - wall to wall racks of CDs, software and DVDs abound.

Slowly, my education began. One of the first things that I noted was that the DVD covers mocked up for these illicit copies are nothing short of hilarious.

Stare at the fine print and you'll discover that you're as likely to be reading text that came off the back of a Rice Bubbles box as you are to be reading anything at all about the movie contained within. Almost without exception, the standard-format list that appears on movie posters and on the back of DVD covers - you know, the sort that lists the director, major stars, the producer etc all with their names in capital letters - will pertain to a movie that is NOT the one you've got in your hands. The English used is liberally peppered with random mubers and symbols (which pop up in the middle of words) and is unlikely to make any sense.

Slowly, it dawned on me that these slabs of text are lifted pretty randomly from the net and just pasted willy-nilly onto the covers because it 'looks right'. Hell, if I had to come up with a DVD cover entirely in Chinese expressing the essence of what Bertolucci's The Dreamers is all about, I'm certain that it would be an equally abysmal affair.

Today, however, I saw a DVD in downtown Bangkok that outdid these paltry efforts by a long shot. It was a pirate copy of Raising Helen starring Kate Hudson.

The back cover was very slickly reproduced; the plot synopsis appeared word-perfect and was professionally laid out. Two large critical quotes had been blown up to mammoth proportions so as to grab the eye of the potential buyer.

All of a sudden, I realised what these two quotes actually said:

"[A]n acrimoniously cookie-cutter affair without an honest bone in its body" read the first.

And the second? Well, that was the "must-miss of snoringly mediocre proportions".

No errors, no Chinglish, not a word out of place. Sheer poetry.

Of course, DVDs are not the only places in which, ahem, 'illicitly reproduced materials' may show up. Take the bedlinen at our Bangkok guesthouse as one example.