Screening a rare film we got off ThePirateBay this morn, followed by a selection of unfindable Taiwanese tunes we downloaded off a dude on Soulseek
Concert, exhibition and screening organizers are annoying. I made the mistake of logging on to Facebook, which instantly made me remember why I stopped using that website.
The first thing I saw was an event suggestion for a screening of Lopushansky’s Dead Man’s Letters, a perestroika-era postapocalyptic flick that I’ve seen many years ago, but remember as being interesting enough despite having major flaws, in particular if you are either researching the films of the time or just dig Soviet/post-Soviet sci-fi. The cinema is, apparently, “proud to present a special screening of a very rare Russian film that has not been officially released on DVD outside of Russia.”
Which sounds pretty cool and is technically correct, except for the word “rare”, owing largely to the fact that it’s 2013, the movie is cult and if you don’t want to buy a bootleg DVD of it for thirteen bucks on eBay, which I wouldn’t recommend, you can just go ahead and get it from just about any tracker worth its salt. Not that it wasn’t nice to watch the same .avi file be projected onto a screen in a cinema but it’s time to upgrade your vocabulary. There are movies out there that never got an official release and are unfindable using other means: those are “very rare”. Dead Man’s Letters is certainly not one of them, and it’s hard to believe that people organizing a Lopushansky screening in Berlin are unaware of that fact. Most probably, just like pretty much every other event promo text out there, theirs is just trying to bullshit me. Misusing the category doesn’t increase your value, though; it just devalues the term itself.
By the way, I am not calling on you to go out and do illegal stuff, either. If you are interested in the movie, you are free to go and order the Russian DVD from Ozon.ru. Unsurprisingly, it’s in stock. Contrary to popular belief, Russia is not an iron-curtained impenetrable wasteland of snow and ice; they ship to all countries. If you live in a larger city, you can probably find a Rusian store in your neighborhood, too, which will gladly order the widely available DVD for you. You may then proudly proceed to legally download a ripped copy with English fansubs and feel like a badass.
This page describes the annoying situation pretty decently.
Permanent Pollution 