My experience with DVD’s in Bali

DVD’s are all over the place in Bali, buy 1 for 10,000rp, buy 100 and get 50 for free. Whatever your budget, watching movies here is cheap.

Last night I went out and picked up the Bourne Supremacy, a movie starring Matt Damon. Back at the house the DVD would not play. This really annoys me, I set everything up, get comfortable, then have to get on my motorbike and go back. Anyway I went back to the shop on Jl. Dhyana Pura and was attacked going into the shop! A pair of arms grabbed me from behind and a voice rumbled something in my ear. It was Ray from Melbourne, who is back for a while with his wife, the lovely Wayan. “Answer your bloody sms’s.” he said.

The people in the shop changed the DVD no worries and I was on my way. The new version worked, although there was one section towards the end where the screen fast forwarded and stopped, the sound and captions kept rolling. I think there is a percentage of disks that just don’t work, and others that have some kind of corrupted data. The player you use also counts. Ika told me sometimes a DVD will work on a laptop, but not on a player, or vice versa.

DVD shops do have a player where you can check your disks. If you have time, skip forward to the second half of the movie, that’s where I find a lot of problems happening.

By the way, for all you who have seen the Bourne Supremacy. I wrote about ‘travelling in Bali as an American’ recently, and talked about attire. In this movie, Matt Damon is living in Goa, India supposedly hiding from people trying to kill him. But check out his attire, short college boy hair, day pack, watch, and the usual t-shirt / shorts combo you’ll see any American college student wearing in Europe. Add to that he’s running on the beach and drinking a bottle of water. I mean, why doesn’t he wave the Stars and Stripes if he’s going to all that trouble?