Come on, repeat after me: Everyone's a film geek now. And it's true. You got more people with DVD players, and the noble pirates of Quiapo are providing us with truly sophisticated copies of art house films everywhere. Well of course not all the DVD features are there, but what can you say. It is a fake.

What you'll be missing if you get pirated DVDs is it's built in film school. Yes, Zoolander, there is a film school in there:

If letterboxing is the most obvious element of film-geek culture to be mainstreamed by DVD's, the most important is the audio commentary — the lengthy exegesis that comes, for better or worse, with almost any DVD movie that can still claim a living participant, be it director or cast member. Certainly, the idea of offering a director — who, unless his name is Spielberg or Lucas, almost never gets on "Entertainment Tonight" or the E! channel — the opportunity to reflect on his or her creation makes sense in the information age, with viewers seeking all the facts they can get about a movie.

Such running narrations — once rare, now common — had their start with the laser disc. And the process of providing the best commentary was perfected by Criterion, a company that took as its mission eliciting lengthy interviews with directors and boiling them down into thoughtful, and often staggeringly intense, conversations about filmmaking. Martin Scorsese's comments on the Criterion Collection's laser disc of "Taxi Driver" isn't just an interview; it's a master class, with an intoxicating wealth of raw data and insight into his perspective. The director's explication of just a single scene — Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) lingering in a hallway, while the camera pans from his lonely pay-phone conversation to the forlorn light bulb above — ranges from ruminations on the screenwriter's intentions to Mr. Scorsese's borrowing from the Italian B-picture maestro Mario Bava.

For a time, it seemed that Criterion's output might eliminate the need for film schools altogether, since their essential components, access to films and information about them, were packaged in two-disc sets. (Films released with lots of extra features came in multi-disc sets because a laser disc can't hold as much information as a DVD can.) The Criterion Collection's laser disc presentations were so deluxe that the filmmakers themselves literally signed off on them: the cases included a somber black label with the director's signature and the legend Director Approved Special Edition.