Tag: Movies

It’s a classic scene from pretty much every genre of film: the bad guy forces his henchmen to do some task (kill someone, steal something, guard against the enemy, etc.) and when the henchmen fail, the bad guy kills them for failing.

This drives me crazy. First of all, killing isn’t acceptable, but he’s a bad guy, so they probably don’t care. Also, killing your guys is wasteful since you now have to find a replacement that you can trust which isn’t easy for bad guys.

Most importantly, the bad guy has no right to punish his people for failing at a what in this scenario is usually an impossible task. If the task is essentially impossible, then they did not actually fail, so where do they get off punishing them as though they expected them to succeed. Why do they have such unrealistically high expectations? If they actually do expect them to succeed because they think the task is achievable, then they should just do it themselves.

It is infuriating when they execute henchmen for failing an impossible task. What do they expect to happen when they send another guy to do it? Will they just keep killing their own guys each time they fail? Will they execute themselves if they try it and fail?

Stupid bad guys; typical.

DVD authors usually disable certain actions so that viewers for example cannot skip the FBI warning about copying the disc (they were perfectly able to fast-forward through it back in the VHS days). These are called POUPs or Prohibited User Operations.

Not surprisingly, consumers have their quibbles about being forced to sit through when they just paid money for the movie. It’s like having to watch commercials in a DVD. In fact, being forced to watch commercials and trailers is one of the POUPs that consumers complain about. Fortunately POUP commercials and trailers are rare and can usually be skipped.

One POUP that is relatively common is being forced to see the rating and the notice about movies being different formats. This is absurd since an R-rated movie is not supposed to fall in the hands of a minor anyway and if it does, it’s not like the kid is going to see the notice and stop watching. That makes forcing viewers to watch the rating notice completely pointless and irritating. Forcing them to watch a notice that the movie has been formatted to fit the screen or is a different cut from that shown in theaters is equally stupid and pointless.

Thankfully, because there are numerous operations, a lot of DVD authoring companies miss some. For example, while notices are usually blocked from being skipped with the next function, they can often be skipped by fast-forwarding through them. That said, sometimes a DVD authoring company is particularly bad and blocks everything, so that for example, you cannot stop once a forced video has started.