Harrison Ford reading.
JERICHOW bears many similarities to THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE.
It is set in a part of East Germany that faces the North Atlantic--which strangely makes it seem un-German to my eyes. Germany and the sea? But like everywhere else now, it is multi-cultural in composition, increasing the mistrust between characters. (In the book, of course, the husband was Greek; here's he's Turkish)
Thomas, a former soldier, is on the run from bad debts and death of his mother. Ali is a middle
aged Turkish immigrant,who owns a chain of snack bars in central Eastern Germany along with his beautiful, younger wife. So the setup is very familiar although it plays out differently, and in the end, is about paranoia as much as anything. The characters are more enigmatic than in the Cain tale. I never completely understood the motivations of the wife and lover. But that doesn't ruin the film in any way. Mistrust is the central theme.Christian Petzold writes & directs a film about three characters, each with a dark side to their character. This is grim film, and focused on these three and their dance of death to the point of claustrophobia.
I can't imagine anyone reading this blog wouldn't like it. Acting, directing, look, all great. Give it a chance if it comes your way.
Question: are we ever going to have dubbing of such quality that reading sub-titles becomes old-fashioned? I heard we were headed toward quality dubbing years ago and yet we still read films. It takes much away from our appreciation of its look and ambiance when we are always looking at the bottom of the screen. Luckily this was not a heavily-dialogued film.
8 comments:
I'm so reading focused that when I watch sub-titled films I spend more time reading the titles than watching the movie. I think it's the same reason I don't enjoy graphic novels as much.
Thanks for the heads up on this. But, at least from my end, that dubbing never becomes prevalent. For one, it's never synched well enough, and two, and again speaking for myself, I get more from the inflections and the action on the screen, even if not every single word is properly and entirely sub-titled that I just don't see the need.
Having said all that, the Italians dub everything into Italian. Just about all of Fellini's films, for example, are all dubbed in the studio.
And, dubbing doesn't necessarily mean failure. All those great Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns are all dubbed...and they work pretty damn good.
Although we really don't watch those movies for the insightful dialogue either.
Italian films that have been shot at Cinecitta have been traditionally audio-recorded after the fact because those studios are in the flight-path of the nearby Rome airport, which seems a remarkably stupid place to put a non-soundproofed studio, except that Europeans have accepted atrocious dubbing for decades, and many Italian films were going to be dubbed, or needed to be, anyway (Mario Bava's horror films apparently often featured their international casts speaking their parts in their native languages, and hardly his alone).
There is no way that dubbing will ever not look weird, to say the least. After a fair amount of using closed-captioning for several reasons, particularly with Hispanophone programming (I can gather the Spanish much better if I can read it), I find subtitles less distracting than I do the inadequate synching of dubbing, to say nothing of the almost necessarily artificiality of their sound. Also, it's fun, after a minor fashion, to catch the subtitles in an error or oversimplification, as I can infrequently do in Italian and extremely rarely in Mandarin and Japanese (where my extremely rudimentary grasp has faded over the years).
World verification: Helion (more Sunny than Satanic...Juri's collecting these)
It just seems to me that with our technological abilities-I mean what can't you do on a cellphone type device--why can't we find a way to dub foreign films so I don't have to read them. I see probably two a month or more and usually think of it several times while watching them.
Well, because the mouth shapes wouldn't match. You could distort the mouth shapes digitally, but it seems like a lot of effort to try to make an artificial situation seem more natural. Hollywood prefers to remake.
I'm reminded of the intentionally bizarre locutions used in WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY? to match the mouth motions as much as possible. But that was striving for humorous effect. Not something you'd want so much in THE SORROW AND THE PITY or WAR AND PEACE.
As a guy who watches TV with CLOSED CAPTION and who uses the DVD option to have subtitles even for movies in English, I don't have a problem with the lack of dubbing. The sound on TV and movies is so bad, I miss parts of the dialogue. And even with subtitles, the dialogue and the subtitles sometimes don't match up!
Yes, that is another example of the Fun one can have...I think it was SCTV that was first, probably only in my experience, to parody the usual run of subtitles by having a character reply in a full paragraph or, say, Italian, and the subtitle read, "Yes."
The badness of particularly "live"/on the fly closed captioning is also pretty amusing at times, unless one's dependent on it. Even the prepared ones have chosen the wrong homonym fairly frequently.
I would watch closed caption if I could figure out how to do it. Esp. with British shows.
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