1) First time I'd seen a movie released by Netflix on a screen bigger than a TV (or my own home projector).
2) First time I'd seen a movie with Vietnamese subtitles on screen.
3) First time I'd seen a movie at a movie theater in a resort.
4) First time I'd seen a movie with the audio description turned on for blind people.
I'm not even sure what order to discuss these things.
I can get 1 and 3 together in one, I think. Yes, the resort where we're staying has a small cinema. It seats about 50 and plays movies at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., plus once at night on weekends. It's a pretty nice little cinema, all things considered.
You know how I like seeing movies on vacation, especially if it's a novel venue. This might not have been as novel as the time I saw Aladdin with my boys on the top of a mountain in one of Australia's few ski resort towns, but it was that sort of thing.
I ideally wouldn't have seen a movie I can otherwise get on Netflix, but each movie on the schedule was only playing in one time slot during the week we're here, and this was the best combo of a movie I hadn't seen and a movie I actually wanted to see. Other kid-friendly candidates were Lightyear, which I hope to never see again, and DC's League of Super Pets, which my son had just watched half of on the plane -- his second viewing. Puss and Boots would have been the best option but it was playing the first morning we were there, and we hadn't gotten a hold of the schedule yet by that point. Rounding out the options were the latest Minions movie, a Tad the Explorer movie, And Wish Dragon, which we had both already seen and liked -- and which was also available on Netflix. (There were some random Asian movies playing in the afternoon slot that I could have gone to if I'd wanted to go solo, but it seemed better to make it an activity with my son.)
And in any case, The Magician's Elephant counts for 2023, which you know is a thing I care about.
It did occur to me that this is the first time I'd be seeing a Netflix movie on the big screen. I had remembered considering going to Roma and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Marriage Story, but in each case I ultimately caved to the ease of having them available in my living room. If I hadn't gone to this, who knows how long the streak of not seeing Netflix movies on the big screen would have continued.
It should not be a huge surprise that there were Vietnamese subtitles on screen, but I think Chinese subtitles might have been more useful. Although I don't consider myself very good at determining the heritage of particular Asians from appearance alone, my wife surmised that many if not most of the other guests here are Chinese, given that China is only about a four-hour flight from here. The presence of all these Chinese made me feel less bad about our Vietnamese hosts having to communicate almost exclusively in English. It turns out it's as much for the Chinese as it is for westerners like us, since English is the language we have all sort of agreed to understand.
The Vietnamese subtitles might have been distraction enough for my son, but there was one other element to the movie that was far more distracting:
Someone had accidentally turned on the English descriptive audio option, the one used by people who can't see very well or at all.
For half a second I thought this was some kind of odd narrative device, where an omniscient narrator is describing the events on screen as some kind of framing device. When it didn't stop, and when it interfered slightly with the words of the film's actual narrator, I thought back to moments earlier when this same slightly robotic female voice had told us that the movie's title was now appearing on screen, and knew we were in for a movie's worth of superfluous description.
My first thought was to notify the projectionist and explain what was going on. But then I thought about some of the communication challenges I'd had the past few days about far simpler things, like how to book the basketball court for my older son to play basketball, and I knew that even if I did manage to explain what was going on, and did manage to convince them to turn it off, I'd lose no less than five minutes of the story. And I hate to sacrifice any part of a movie, if I can help it.
My second thought was to sacrifice the whole movie. It was clear my son was not excited to put up with this for the next 95 minutes.
But then, remembering how much I enjoy a novel experience like this, and thinking how few other options on the schedule would work as chances to watch something in the cinema, I convinced my son to stick it out.
We did get used to it, and in fact, I found myself marveling at the task from a narrative and logistical perspective. You have to describe what's going on in a way that is descriptive enough but short and to the point, and entirely avoids the film's actual spoken dialogue. It does mean that there are few if any points in the movie where it was actually silent for a moment, but it didn't prevent us from getting absorbed in the movie.
I did want to mention its slight racism though -- or if not actual racism, then at least "racial awareness."
Like essentially every film made in the past five years, The Magician's Elephant is conscious of having a racially diverse cast. And the audio description sure let us know about it.
Sample: "The action shifts to the apartment below. A tall black man and a petite white woman are sitting at a table."
Now, the argument can be made that if you are trying to create as accurate a depiction as possible of what the person would be seeing on screen if he or she could, you know, see, then the skin color of the characters is something you should provide. But the whole idea behind our current progressive era of representation is that the casting is "race blind." A "blind blind" person might logically be able to envision the characters however they saw fit, and if they're good at identifying the race of a person by the sound of their voice, more power to them.
In the end, we both liked the movie a lot -- in fact, it might be my favorite of 2023 so far, in a very small sample size. My son, whose ability to fight these distractions I was more worried about than my own, actually gave it a 9 out of 10, he said.
I'd only go as high as 8, but that's still pretty great for a slim pickings option watched at a resort with Vietnamese subtitles and descriptive audio telling us the skin colors of all the characters.
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