Chris' Deployment Journal

PC Jake Smith holds up a bootleg 'Val Kilmer Collection' box set at the Shara Shop.

While loved ones send us what films (and sometimes entire boxed set seasons of tv shows) they can, most guys' source of movies are the 'haji movies.' In the Shara Shop, the little tiny convenience/candy/tobacco store run by our interpreters, they sell bootleg DVD's for $5-6 per. This can be a real bargain at times as they often have up to six movies on each DVD. There's one slight problem though - the quality usually sucks.

There are two kinds of haji movies, the first, and better, being straight up copies of older DVD's. The quality on these isn't terrible. Usually the picture gets a little pixilated during night scenes or sweeping landscape shots and sometimes the sound is low. Some guy's computers (like mine) can be a little fussy with these DVD's too, sometimes just refusing to play them.

Often these come in boxed sets that look very professional, until you look a little closer as typos abound. The Cameron Diaz boxed set included a copy of 'Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas' that was listed on the outside of the box as 'Fear & Nothing in Las Vegas.' Sometimes such collections contain movies that that particular actor isn't even in.

The other type of haji movies are the ones pirated right from a movie theater, where a guy with a camera actually just films the movie as it's played on the screen. These ones can be real laughers as you'll often see heads of people seated in front silhouetted on the screen, people will stand up to go get a drink or popcorn, you hear creaking as people shift in their seats, the video is dark and the audio sounds like it's playing through a can, and occasionally you'll hear a cell phone go off. But guys still buy these ones as it's the only way we can see first-run movies.

So we watched Russell Crowe in 'Cinderella Man' with a cell phone bleating in the foreground, saw a dark and hard to hear copy of 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith' that cut out every 20 minutes or so, and even got to watch the new Star Wars movie just a day or two after it hit theaters, although the heads of people in most of the scenes were cut off and I think there was a time code in the lower left corner during some scenes. Not exactly 'suspending disbelief' but hey, what can we do? Our copy of 'Kicking & Screaming' even had French titles on it. Regardless, with 'Kicking & Screaming' we laughed and, perhaps most importantly, passed another two hours here, without thinking about IED's, or police calls, or the heat, or patrols, or just how much we miss our families. The quality might not be great, and the atmosphere certainly isn't as grand as The Egyptian in downtown Boise, but, for now, we'll take it.