Yo ho ho & a bottle of rum
I dont have a cutlass or a parrot called Polly. I drink my rum spiked with Diet Coke. The nearest I’ve got to having a wooden leg was holding a pencil between my toes. Yet, I am a pirate….
It all began in 2003. Back then I was just a teenage explorer with a playstation addiction and a fondness for sausages. I arrived in Thailand with a rucksack filled with white t-shirts – they would keep me cool and keep me cool – or so went the theory. I left with my pack bursting at the seems with pirated tunes & flicks. My music collection quintupled overnight. Doki-doki. Feel the beat.
Fast-forward 28 months and this pirates ship is moored in Hanoi. My joy at learning of my houses’ proximity to the “National Cinema Centre” of Vietnam was tempered somewhat upon my discovery that they only show movies that came out in the West in the 17th Century, and then they dub them badly into Vietnamese just to completely ruin any artistic appreciation one might attempt to garner.
So we buy DVD’s. A decent DVD in the U.K might cost you anywhere from a tenner to twenty round pounds. The dong (Vietnam’s wonderfully named currency) is not so strong – this is a country where you can get a glass of beer for 5p and a DVD might set you back 50. And that’s where the fun starts. Just as a stolen galleon filled with gold bullion might turn out to be a motorboat stuffed with copper – you’re never quite sure what you’re gonna get…
The crunching of popcorn, and amorous pashing of teenagers is usually a sure sign that the movie’s been filmed on a camcorder in a cinema. Another great gag is when someone’s downloaded it from the internet where the picture is the size of a digestive biscuit, & then blown it up to fit your telly – thus making the resolution as grainy as an hourglass full of sand. The real pleasure can be had in reading the subtitles, which 9 times out of 10 bear absolutely no relation to the movie upon which they’ve been overlaid.
A few days ago I bought a dvd called Hooligans. It’s about hooligans. British soccer thugs. The ironic thing is that it’s all in German. I’m looking forward to watching it, and perhaps picking up the Deutcshe for “You’re gonna get your fucking heads kicked in” and “You’re not breathing anymore” Useful stuff.
“I greased the lens and framed the shot using
a friend as my stand-in
the script it called for rain but it was clear
that day so we faked it
the marker snapped and I yelled “quiet on
the set” and then called “action!”
and I kissed you in a style clark gable would
have admired (i thought it classic)”
Tags: Vietnam
The Dude
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