Days 26-29: Screw You, MPAA!

There is one funny thing about prison which is actually kind of nice. We watch a lot of "guy movies", and many of them are new releases. Robbins brings them in, and we watch them on the Work Release DVD player. I am pretty sure he has a friend who downloads them via BitTorrent.

Legally, this is definitely in the murky grayness of trading "bootleg" or "pirated" videos, since many of the movies we've watched are still in the theaters. A Video Camera is placed in the projection room, with the complicity of theater-workers, and audio is dubbed from the stereo output used to broadcast on the low-power FM system for use by the hearing impaired. Prisoners certainly can't be choosers, so a lot of them are a welcome change from the homo-eroticism of a prison viewing of professional wrestling. I, sitting in prison, was able to see Prince Caspian before many friends had a chance to make the theater.

I cry no tear for you, the poor MPAA, and your alledged lost revenues. I am sorry to hear that the Internet is forcing you, like the RIAA, to adapt your prehistoric business model (or perish). How well did fighting the relentless march of technology work out for Carriage Makers at the turn of the 20th Century? Anyway, if you want me to pay for a movie, I will be more than happy to download a DRM-free video for $10 (my market price for a DRM-free audio album is $5, which I happily paid Radiohead). Theater-going, with screaming children, high ticket prices, disgusting restrooms, cell phones, over-priced food, and no rebates for crappy films, is out of the question. I'll can easily sit at home on my couch, than you very much, so price the movies for the market or stop whining about us using BitTorrent.

So the possible illegality (to date, the only legal precedents are related to file sharing, not downloading or viewing) of this doesn't really bother me. Stick it to the man, and all that.

But, considering the venue, Robbins could pick his movies more wisely. The problem is the horror genre that I like to call "torture porn".

We've watched two of them recently - Timber Falls and the insulting Rob Zombie remake, Halloween. These movies are not frightening - they are just disturbing, and well, gross. Mutilation and torture are common themes, to the point of literal interpretation: usually the bad guys tie up a woman and do all sorts of horrible things to her. Including, but not limited to, cutting, slashing, hitting, etc. And of course, rape. The latter movie I mentioned had a scene featuring the rape of a mentally ill girl. Young women identified as 15 year olds are featured prominently in nude sex scenes and then quickly cut and covered in blood.

I'm no prude, and I think the 1st Amendment is the Bee's Knees. But considering we have some people even in Work Release with Protection From Abuse orders against them, one guy with an assault charge, a few people who have had charges of making terroristic threats against their spouses or partners, and one rumored pedophile (where the victim was a cop pretending to be a teenage girl), maybe, just maybe, these films are not appropriate.