Days of Thunder

A couple of days ago, I bought a copy of Days of Thunder on VCD for only 1 dollar. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman starred in that movie. I watched it a few times when I was a kid - from tv-re-runs.

When I first saw the VCD and the screaming yellow gaudy price label, I thought to myself, wow, as lowly as VCDs are regarded nowadays with the threat of high-def DVDs and blue-ray DVDs that they say are not really DVDs... 1 dollar is really too cheap to sell such a classic movie's VCD, right? Surely it was worth a little bit more. Maybe 2 or 3 dollars more perhaps?

After all, the one bad thing about VCDs are just that one has to get up in the middle of a movie to change from Disk 1 to Disk 2. Sure, sure, they say that the DVD visual and audio quality is way better, but really, how much quality does one need? Like how many languages are you going to read the subtitles in? Anyway, I'd rather save some dollars from this expenditure and spend it on increasing the thread-count of my pillow case.

I decided to buy the vcd. I thought that it might be nice to re-run it on my laptop on a casual evening and fall asleep watching the pretty faces fall in love. I remember reading from a magazine article about how when Tom Cruise first met Nicole Kidman on the set of Days of Thunder, he was so smitten that he got his people to call up her people, and they dated, and fell in love, and got married, and attended many Hollywood gala-events together. It's a really great fairytale on-screen-couple becomes off-screen-couple kinda story.

Nevermind that her hair was all frizzy and he's actually shorter than her. Nevermind that they're both broken up, leaving us with that weird-but-not-weird-in-an-interesting-way-movie, Eyes Wide Shut, and are probably off sleeping with other people now. I figured that I could allow them to remain, in my impression, as in my childhood, and as in "Far and Away" (another movie starring them as a couple), in love and happily married to each other. It takes a little bit of denial, but it doesn't really hurt anybody and nobody cares, so I just indulged me.

When my computer couldn't read the VCD initially, I was understandably a little disappointed, even though it was just a dollar investment's - I had hyped myself up.

Yet (after re-starting my computer and successfully played the VCD), it was not as disappointing, as when I was watching the show mid-way into the Disk 2 when the disk suddenly jumped - from just when they were flirting to the part they were lying in bed together. My immediate thoughts were:

ALAMAK. No wonder (this VCDs) were sold for 1 dollar only. Nowadays still got censor out the sex scene one meh?

There weren't even the rolling around in bed. It just fast forwarded to the after-sex talk.

Precisely in realising that the censor standards were more stringent then than now, this incident then really drove home the point that the time now is different from before. The time has changed and so have I, for I am not just contented with romantic fairy-tales, and I am not accepting of abrupt censorship anymore. I am now an adult, and I want to watch unrealistically-beautiful people, whom I would never meet in real life, having hot passionate sex.

And I suppose this is part of growing up.