sarah eve kelly

I haven’t been through this in a while: it’s two in the morning and I’ve decided that I’ve reached my surfeit of academic greatness. Am therefore shutting the brain down and turning it to other pursuits. After I’m done here, it’ll either be The Life of Mammals or Speer und Er, just to wind down.

The problem with the Speer movie is that it is all in German, with English subtitles, which means that I can’t do anything except watch it. I thought that if I watched it for long enough I would actually learn German, but nothing doing. All that’s happened is my recognition of some of the fundamental similarities between it and English (when I was first told in grade school that English was a Germanic language I giggled, but now I’m starting to understand).

My joy in both of these DVD sets - the Life of Mammalsone and the Speer one - is owed in great part to Colby, who bought me the former for my twenty-eighth birthday and enabled me to watch the latter on my humble HP Pavilion laptop. (OK, uncle: it’s not humble at all. It is a behemoth, and deeply aware of how wonderful it is.)

I’m moving, you know. (Did you not know? I’m moving.) Being an avid collector of things both noisy and shiny, I’ve been aware for a while that my computer has a DVD player that is locked on Region 1 (the US and Canada). Locked on Region 1, she says! Whatever could she mean? Well, the answer hides the reason that for the first time in a while, I’m lashing out against Big Corporation X. You probably know that the world is divided into eight DVD regions, and I’m convinced that this fascist conspiracy was developed entirely to stop cheap Mexican DVDs entering the US. But less of that. Back to moving: when I’m in the UK I will be in a Region 2 (Europe) world, which means that I could spend days at the Virgin Megastore completely impotent (heh), because their DVDs will not play on my laptop.

I’ve seen this problem overcome before, and didn’t think much of it until about six weeks ago when I was watching the History Channel. (Why, oh why is CSI:NY on the History Channel? The person who can answer this question for me is probably also capable of unveiling the face of God.) Speer und Er, a docudrama about the career of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and Third Reich armaments minister from 1942-45, was playing on Wednesday nights. Ever since I read a biography of Speer in Vienna some three and a half years ago, I’ve been fascinated by him, and this series, which is half straightforward movie and half interviews with his children, colleagues, and first biographers, grabbed me right from the first. It’s an excellent series: go watch it.

Oh, wait, you can’t. Not unless you speak fluent German and/or live in Hong Kong. Try finding this DVD, I dare you. You can go to the Deutsch Amazon site, which will sell it to you without the subtitles, or you can order it from HMV Hong Kong, which has subtitles but only sells Region 3 DVDs.

When I found it on the HMV HK site I did a little hurrah dance: after all, I was planning on getting region-free software for my laptop anyway, so I could continue accumulating DVDs in the UK, so what’s Region 3? Nothing, darling. So I figured out what Hong Kong dollars were worth and bunged the order in for the very reasonable price of forty-odd of our own Canadian dollars.

The shipment arrived quickly, and I was surprised by that. I went to work trying to find region-unlocking software, and went through - no joke - six free-trial downloads that did nothing but play the audio while locking the DVD on the menu screen. I felt, needless to say, like an absolute ass for wasting my money, and considered for some time that perhaps the DVDs themselves were faulty.

You probably know how frustrating this is, having a simple destination elude you. I had better things to do, I can tell you, and by the time I was ready to throw the whole contraption out the window I wasn’t remotely interested in watching the movie any longer: I wanted to conquer the fucking thing, that was all. All these promises, for the low-low price of $39.95, and nothing was working.

Then Colby came over for House night. We watch it together every Tuesday night, you see. And hockey, if there is any, but not recently, because it makes us blubber like little girls. In any case I laid the problem before him. He didn’t seem terribly interested but decided to take a five-minute bash at it. Five minutes later, Speer und Er was playing faultlessly on this very machine.

Context: I had been working on this for two days, probably seven hours altogether making incoherent noises and shouting “Fuck the police!”

For anyone who is interested to know, or has suffered as I have suffered: the answer is in a completely free gizbob called the VLC media player. It’s a beautiful thing. I’d be resentful (part of me wanted to shout “I loosened the cap! I loosened it!” - even though I hadn’t: the most I’d done was fill my computer with a bunch of garbage that’s probably going to come back and bite me in ninety days), but I’m too happy: the world of media retail is once again open to me, anywhere in the world. And the BBC (those fuckers, but that’s another matter) has just released The Life Collection, which I’m absolutely gagging for. Who knew that the defecation habits of the sloth would be of such colossal interest to me?

And now it’s quarter to three in the morning and I have completed this post, changed the laundry, answered the phone, and responded to three emails. I’m a productive cat, but bleeding Jesus, I have to be at work in six hours and I still need to wash my hair. You might think that I would sacrifice my DVD fix and just shower and head to bed. If so, you obviously don’t know me well enough.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

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