I know, I know.

We’ve all seen this lit­tle ditty about school, sui­cide, and the impor­tance of eat­ing dessert first. What you haven’t seen is said ditty on your own tele­vi­sion screens, lis­ten­ing to the audio through taped-up head­phones so you don’t dis­turb your par­ents read­ing on the couch five feet away. You can try to get them to watch the movie with you, but the new O mag­a­zine came today, and your mother is engrossed in Dr. Phil’s lat­est meth­ods for sav­ing her chil­dren (read: you) from them­selves (yourself).

I am happy to say I’m dif­fer­ent from all of you, because I have seen WSI in the rel­a­tive com­fort of my own home.

Given that at least 80% of the peo­ple who read this have already seen the movie, I don’t see the point of cri­tiquing the film itself. I already know what most of you think about this film by lis­ten­ing to the cast com­men­tary. So I think I’ll just review the pack­ag­ing and periph­er­als that Andrew spent so much time designing.

Right out of the ship­ping pack­age, I was very pleased with the cover design and film notes. The back design was par­tic­u­larly nice, free from thumb­nailed screen­shots and bogus movie reviewer quotes pro­claim­ing WSI as the best roman­tic com­edy of the year, or some such bullshit.

Take a moment out of read­ing this review and scroll down the page until you come upon the posted image of the pack­ag­ing. Now, scroll back up and con­tinue read­ing. The art on the discs looks COMPLETELY DIFFERENT in per­son: the col­ors are vivid, the images are suc­cu­lent and invit­ing; look­ing at these 4.5 inch plas­tic slabs, I found myself won­der­ing if they were edi­ble. I haven’t licked the discs yet, but it’ll be the first thing I do after writ­ing this.

Having unwrapped and opened the DVD box, I took a moment to sup­press my sali­vary glands and pro­ceeded to put disc 1 (the movie) into my DVD player. I then thought bet­ter of it, and put disc 2 in (the not movie).

Quick show of hands: how many of you received the per­sonal intro­duc­tion to the inter­ac­tive menus by Andrew him­self? Really? Good. I won’t feel stu­pid talk­ing about it now.

The inter­ac­tive menus are gor­geous. When nav­i­gat­ing the con­tent, the POV pans and zooms around the menu, induc­ing motion sick­ness while you search for the hid­den video of Parker at the…never mind. And no crude menu options super­im­posed over clips of the film, either! Just a classy black-and-white pro­duc­tion still of Greg look­ing bored. When he dies, we’ll use that image in the slide show at his memo­r­ial service.

The doc­u­men­taries on the spe­cial fea­tures disc, in true Hollywood film­mak­ing style, are much more involved and…well, long…than per­haps they should be. We must remem­ber, though, that if we are to join the elite as a legit­i­mate film inter­est, we must be able to choke our view­ers with as much lax edit­ing and worth­less con­tent as pos­si­ble. For $20, peo­ple expect not just a film expe­ri­ence, but a soporific as well.

The film itself, being on the first disc, was good. It looked and sounded a lot like the last time I saw it, but the kicker is I was watch­ing with head­phones and I couldn’t tell the ADR from the orig­i­nal sound feed! The mix­ing on this movie is…NYAAAQ! Not even Hollywood can rock that shit like Andrew did!

I liked the com­men­taries, as well. I think Andrew was slightly off his rocker when he decided to hold a com­men­tary ses­sion with more than ten peo­ple, but he had the fore­thought to invite his par­ents to the record­ing ses­sion; their pres­ence prob­a­bly kept the com­men­tary from devolv­ing into an obscenity-laced shout­ing match…I’m refer­ring to YOU, Parker and Paul.

So, in a long-overdue sum­ma­tion, I like the movie. I like the spe­cial fea­tures. I like the DVDs. I like the DVD case. I even like Pokémon. I like 5-star rat­ings, and I’m going to give Wholesale Souls, Inc. a 5-star rating.

[rate 5]

For those of you who ques­tion my rat­ing, I just have to say that every rat­ing sys­tem has to have a basis, so we might as well use this film as a stan­dard for all sub­se­quent work.

P.S. The discs don’t taste at all like what they look like.