I'm also a film critic

It’s been raining all weekend, which threw a huge wrench in my “swim and tan all weekend” plans. In the face of these difficulties, I turned to the bootleg DVD stalls in the market. These places are great. The selection is eclectic, everything is dubbed into Spanish, and they’re cheap. A disk costs 10 Quetzales, only slightly more than a dollar. The best thing about the DVD stalls are the collections. Rarely does one disk only contain one movie. Instead of going home with one rocky film, you’ll go home with three. Some of the combinations make sense - I’ve seen the Rocky/Rambo pack in practically every stall. Steven Segal, Van Damm and Terminator are other common themes. I am the proud owner of a disk containing all five Ong Bak films in the original Thai, with Spanish subtitles (which doesn’t matter at all, as there are more broken bones that lines in those movies).

These collection’s aren’t always grouped by actor, and that’s where things get fun – trying to guess why these particular films were paired. “Three films with aliens/spaceships” includes Aliens, Star Trek, and Predator. You, Me and Dupree, Leap Year, and something with that guy from all the romantic comedies is clearly the “romantic comedy booster pack”. And then there are more intriguing combinations… I purchased a disk containing The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The Expendables, and Salt, clearly an action pack, the first week I was here. I made the mistake of purchasing it at a stall without a TV in which to test out the disks, and when I brought it home, I found out I had bought a blank DVD. Swell.
Yesterday though, I saw the same disk, in a stall with a TV. I had the guy test it, and Nicolas Cage leapt onscreen, waving his hat and throwing fireballs. Excellent. My rainy, cold Saturday afternoon was saved!

Except that, after the wizards were done killing Morgana in New York City, the movie that queued up next was not the Expendables, but the Other Guys. First off, no matter how much I like Mark Wahlberg, he is not a replacement for all the action heroes ever killing everyone. Second, I struggled to find the connections between The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Other Guys. Was this disk “Films in which both main characters have lady-troubles”? “Films that take place in New York, but with wildly different stories”? The third film confused things even more. It was a Twilight parody called Vampires Suck, and the sections I skipped through were only slightly more entertaining than the original. Edward’s disco-ball-jockstrap was appreciated. The film as a whole was not.

Sitting there, slightly dejected and confused, I was temped to write this compilation off as a mistake. The disk cover didn’t match the movies on the disk, perhaps the movies didn’t match each other either. This made me sad, my vision of street vendors selling carefully crafted movie playlists shattered by this cinematic jumble.

But no - I suddenly realized that there was a connection between at least two of these films! A statue of a bull in New York!

Here it is, witnessing the breaking of the partnership between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, a crucial scene to any cop film.

And here, here it is standing next to the evil wizard!

And here it is, animated by the wizard and kicking the ever-loving crap out of a volkswagon! Made in America bitches! Don’t fuck with our sorcerers!

I can’t explain the twilight movie (a universally true statement), but it was incredibly satisfying to understand the subtle cinematic undercurrents tying the first two films together. Order was restored to the world of bootleg DVDs, and my back-up job will definitely be "bootleg movie playlist crafter".