During our weekly DVD evening, we yesterday watched Man on Fire, an otherwise quite interesting movie. The problem with the DVD was that it was set up like a VHS tape. The DVD started with an extremely lengthy preview of an ultra-violent movie (well, so it seemed…maybe they only showed the really brutal stuff in order to…uh, well, wouldn’t really make sense). I tried to fast-forward or go to the next scene or enter the DVD menu, but nothing worked. So we sat through the preview, expecting the menu to appear afterward. Well, no menu, but straight to the movie. Which is odd already, but it became worse. There was no way to change language or subtitle settings. The movie started German-dubbed, and apparently that was the only way we could watch it. Obviously, the people who devised the DVD didn’t have any material at all to put onto the disc, so they decided to simply skip everything else an ordinary DVD has to offer as well. Which, in a Machiavellian sense, is a really good plan. Like this, everybody will be bitching about the lack of basic features, and nobody will notice that there’s not a single special feature on it. Too bad I’m such a genius! Your plan failed! You suck!
PS: My girlfriend mentioned that after the preview of the ultra-violent movie, it said “Comming soon!”. By then I had lost interest in the TV-screen, so I couldn’t confirm it. Unfortunately, there was no way to go back other than sitting through the preview again. Which would have killed us both. So maybe the whole crippled DVD thing is an attempt to cover up that spelling mistake.