DVD Crap Detection

Yesterday, I bought one of those new DVD players with built-in Crap Detection^© technology. These things are wonderful: whenever you put in a DVD, they automatically scan its contents to determine how crappy it is, and then warn you if its crapiosity rises above a certain level.

To test it, I put in a copy of The Matrix, and it ran all the way through without a hitch. Damn that’s a good movie. So then I put in The Matrix: Reloaded, and, immediately, this popped up on the screen:

Warning: This movie is extremely crappy. Its weak facsimile of a plot serves as nothing more than a pegboard on which to pin several over-the-top action sequences and a steady stream of meandering pseudo-philosophical babble. There is a great deal of poor dialog posing as profundity, and a lot of staring. However, Trinity is still hot. Proceed with caution.

It allowed me to play the DVD, but every so often the word “Crap” superimposed itself on the action, just to remind me of what I was watching.

Next, I went out to Blockbuster’s and rented Steel Magnolias and stuck it in. This time, the player seemed a little more concerned:

Warning: This movie is crappy beyond description. It assaults the viewer with a host of irritating characters and attempts to sweeten them by making them quirky, perky, and/or sassy. It wants to be a funny inspiring tragicomedy, but what it actually winds up being is a brain-smashingly dull two-hour long public service announcement about the importance of female bonding in the face of adversity. If you insist on watching this steaming pile of shit — and we can only assume that you are doing so because you lost a bet, or are trying to impress a girlfriend — then you have our condolences.

Pretty impressive. But I was beginning to suspect that this Crap Detection technology was nothing more than a large database of cranky movie reviews tied to some DVD title recognition. I needed to test it on something recent, so I popped in a bootleg version of Troy that I got from a friend in China. The player reacted immediately. The screen turned red, and said:

You have got to be kidding me. Look, you may have two and a half hours to waste on mindless desecrations of ancient Greek literature, but I don’t. This movie is just another ridiculous testosterone-soaked action flick, men killing men for no good reason, except here they do it three thousand years ago with swords, wearing not much besides their golden-brown skin and their tiresome, bulging pretty-boy muscles. If you have homoerotic fantasies about ancient Greek warriors, I’m sure there are magazines out there that can cater to your needs. So get this piece of crap out of me and fling it back into the roiling tornado of shit from whence it came.

Wow. The reviews haven’t been great, but I thought that was a little harsh. I kind of like Brad Pitt, so I hit play anyway. Nothing happened. I hit play again, and the word NO appeared on the screen, in big red letters. So I kept hitting it until the screen said FINE and the movie started. But I couldn’t watch for long. The DVD player kept emitting farting noises whenever Brad Pitt said anything, and it replaced the soaring martial battle music with looney tunes jingles, and, worst of all, it removed the heads from all the women — including Helen of Troy — and replaced them with George W Bush’s. I gave up.

Next, I tried Flash Gordon, surely one of the worst movies of all time. I was kind of looking forward to seeing what the player had to say about this one. But it didn’t say anything at all. The screen remained blank. Presently, I heard some gnashing, gnawing, buzzsaw sounds coming from inside the DVD player, and it began to shudder and whine. The sound got louder and louder. I stepped back, thinking I’d tripped some extreme-crap-induced self-destruct mode, when the tray slid open, and hundreds of tiny pieces of DVD spilled down onto carpet. It had eaten Flash Gordon. Apparently some movies are so bad that they have to destroyed, for the good of the country. I scooped up the remains and poured them into the case, hoping the guys at Blockbuster wouldn’t notice.

There was one more feature I wanted to try. It’s called Crap Detection Smart Play^© — instead of warning you about a movie’s crapiness, the player just cuts all of the worst parts out, showing only the non-crappy stuff. I turned it on and put in Titanic. “Smart Play Active”, it said, and zoomed me forward past the credits. I watched selected cuts from the the first twenty minutes or so, basically Leonardo getting on the ship, and then the action hiccoughed and we were down in the hold, and Kate Winslet was naked. That lasted for a couple of minutes, and the player hiccoughed again, and the ship was sinking. I watched it go down for half and hour, and then the movie cut off just as we were about to zoom forward in time to that old woman and her ridiculous framing story. Two and a half hours of crappy movie reduced to forty minutes of pure quality. Not bad at all.

They have Crap Detection TVs, too, but I don’t think I’ll get one, at least not for another week or two. The American Idol finale is right around the corner, and I cannot miss it: I heard Clay Aiken might make an appearance, and that Paula Abdul is just so damn adorable.

Hey, we all need a little crap in our lives.