el crispito

We tend to get great majority of the films we want to see. While there are some films that are released worldwide on the same date, most of the American films we get here arrive here a few months after they're released in th United States. We're still waiting to get Borat here, although it's already showing in Tijuana, Monterrey and Mexico City. I can't wait. My mother said it's "pure pornography," but I suspect I'll be disappointed.

On occasion, we get films here from Spain (notably the Almodóvar films) before they're released in the US. That's kind of cool, but the problem there is that they don't have English subtitles, and my Spanish isn't good enough yet to completely understand films that are only in Spanish. I find it easier to understand films that are, say, French, but subtitled in Spanish.

However, the Hollywood crap that I was talking about earlier, it's almost always subtitled, instead of dubbed, with Spanish. The one exception is animated films, which I suspect they dub because they're supposed to be for children, and therefore, a large portion of their target audience can't read (yet). This has Shawn and I terrified that we will not be able to see The Simpsons feature film when it's released this summer. Well, if the schedule for the release of the feature film follows the schedule for the release of the DVDs, it won't open here until about five months after it's released in the US.

Perhaps the funniest thing to me about the movie theaters here in Mexico is the fact that they sell nachos at concession stands. They are the same exact nachos that you get in movie theaters in the United States: stale chips with liquid cheese food out of a can that is a color that doesn't occur in nature. It's either that or the fact that they run public service announcements here trying to curb piracy. They always feature children doing unethical things like cheating on exams who have supposedly come to see such acts as acceptable because their parents buy pirated copies of movies on DVD at a flea market for two bucks. They always end with a reaction shot of the felonious parents, their eyes misting over with tears upon the realization that they have undoubtedly condemned their child to the depraved life of a flagitious miscreant through their thoughtless villany. Because newly released DVDs here go for like USD $30 or $40, I laugh out loud at these spots in the theaters.