Better than a casino

If you want to do some serious gambling, skip Vegas and Atlantic City and come to Shanghai. Nothing beats the rush of buying a pirated DVD and popping it into the player, eagerly wondering if it will work at all. Pirated DVDs are everywhere, not just sold off the back of some entrepreneur’s bicycle, but in established stores with proper entrances and posted hours!

One such store, located inside the walls of the ancient Jing’an Temple with an entrance next to a famed Shanghai Friendship Store, supplies me with all my DVDs. They cost 8RMB for ‘low quality’ and 15RMB for ‘high quality’, but the quality rating doesn’t mean much. Most of the DVD’s I’ve bought have worked perfectly with the odd exceptions – On my copy of The Assassination of Jesse James not only was it impossible to turn the subtitles off, but the subtitles were for some other movie (and a rather crude and violent sounding one at that).

The funniest part is, there are pirated DVD brands. On the box there will sometimes be a sticker or a mark of some kind, denoting who produced this illegal copy. The quality of the DVDs with ‘the smiley face’ and’ the McDonalds logo’ have been so overwhelmingly superior, I struggle to imagine why I won’t buy them exclusively in the future.

In China piracy is so rampant, that the DVD’s and Theatre editions are released at the same time. There is no sense in waiting a few months to release legal DVD’s, because by that time everyone will already own illegal copies. These DVD stores exist, and not in secret, selling pirated wares while the police to nothing. Amazing as it seems, it works for me. On my way home from work tonight I’m going to roll the dice and pick up a copy of the rest of the Oscar winning films –as long as they have a happy faced logo on them.