LAU: Movies, and being bored at work

This is frustrating. I have absolutely NOTHING to do at work as I'm leaving (normally I at least can start planning next term’s lessons, or talking with teachers about what we're going to do) and a million things to do at home (tidying, packing, sending boxes...) but as I've used all my annual leave up I'm stuck in the staffroom doing very little. Except making pointless blog posts like this.

I've been watching loads of Japanese movies recently. Something to do in the week, and although you can't really pigeonhole a whole country's cinema, there do seem to be a lot of nice vague pondering films which I like.

Anyway, I rented them all from Tsutaya, and have burned most of them to my hard disk, but wanted to buy some before I leave as a ripped file on your HD can't compare to having the real physical product on your shelf. Thing is, although most things here are similarly priced or cheaper, DVDs and CDs are generally more expensive. DVDs rarely, if ever, drop below £15, and newer releases are over £20. So I thought I'd check on Amazon UK to see if any of the movies have been released worldwide, as I know some of them (Dare mo Shiranai and Tony Takitani in particular) have an international reputation. So anyway, on the UK site they were both available for £7.50 ish, way less than the Japanese ones. (I bet you're thinking what an interesting story this is.) Anyway, the point of it was, the trade off was that the cover was kind of shit compared to the Japanese one. I checked a couple of other movies (I have nothing to do at school and was killing time... it's not my hobby) and in most cases the Japanese was better. And I feel bad for the Americans who always seem to get terrible covers. I guess maybe design is more important in Japan than in Europe? (and more important in Europe than the US?) Although that's quite a broad statement to make. What's also interesting is that most of the Western movies I've seen have the same (or really similar) covers to the UK versions (don't know about America) so I wonder why the designers abroad seem to want to play around with covers so much?

The order - although it's obvious - is JP, UK, US. I love the JP cover of this one.

Think the UK and JP covers of Nobody Knows are equally good, although the JP one sums up the feeling of the movie better. The US gets a bum deal again.