Excessive translation

I've written at least one, and more like a half dozen, posts over the years in which I touch on the issue of which foreign film titles get translated to English and which don't. Other bloggers will know that although you never write the exact same post twice, you tend to return to familiar concerns, and sometimes forget you've written about them before. 

Y Tu Mama Tambien has been my go-to example of a film title you would never translate because the English version of it, And Your Mother Too!, is just so much less elegant looking and so much more silly sounding than the Spanish original.

Well, so much for that.

I happened upon the page for this movie on IMDB today, and, well, you can see the results for yourself above.

I'm quite sure this would have changed on IMDB only recently. I suspect it would have something to do with displaying all titles in the language in which you are viewing the page, and an inability to set exceptions for particular film titles. (Inability/unwillingness -- data maintenance on IMDB is certainly tedious enough as it is.)

But there do continue to be exceptions. Just as one example from the same language, I went to the page for El Mariachi and it does not read The Mariachi. (To quote Chris Farley on SNL, "For those who don't habla Espanol, El Nino is Spanish for ... The Nino.")

I also thought to check L'Avventura to see if they had changed it to the far more pedestrian The Adventure, and thank goodness, no they had not. Pierrot le Fou is not Crazy Pete, though I have actually seen it listed that way on one streaming service, if you can believe it. 

So maybe the logic is, once you approach a sentence in length, it's just too ungainly for someone who doesn't speak the language, even when most of the words in that title are pretty easy to say.

Anyway, I don't like it. But I am reminded that I need to watch this movie again. Only a single viewing in 20 years of what was one of my top ten movies of 2001. Need to rectify that. 

Excess exposition or faulty translation?

I consider Hirokazu Kore-eda to be the greatest Japanese filmmaker working today, the modern Ozu. I say this on the basis of seeing only four of his films, but they are four really good films. (And yes, this poster lists his name with the family name first, Kore-eda Hirokazu. I blame Akira Kurosawa for making me unwilling to invert the order of Japanese names when I will gladly do so for Korean and Chinese names.)

But that doesn't mean Kore-eda sometimes doesn't have the golden touch. Or does he?

Today I'm trying to puzzle out whether foreign language films -- specifically Kore-eda's -- don't sometimes contain translations of dialogue that are more expository than they would be in their native tongue.

The film that prompted this question is Our Little Sister, a film he made in a typically prolific period between Like Father, Like Son (2013) and After the Storm (2015), which seems all the more prolific because I actually saw and ranked LFLS with my 2014 films. (Ranked it #2 of the year at that.) I'd always wanted to see Little Sister but it eluded me until this weekend.

Now I should say, Kore-eda's films are expository by nature. By that I mean there is no attempt to be elliptical with the audience. His films, which usually focus on the dynamics of family in modern Japanese society, are straightforward and easy to follow. As it can be difficult to keep track of everyone's relationship to everyone else where extended families are concerned, Kore-eda will go out of his way to remind us of this in the dialogue, and the effort is appreciated.

Even by his standards, though, the dialogue in Our Little Sister seemed unusually expository. I noticed a frequent substitution of a relationship title ("my sister," "your mother") for a character name, even when I thought who was related to who, and how, had been firmly established. For the first time in watching a Kore-eda film, I almost felt like my intelligence was being insulted, ever so marginally. Almost. I respect this filmmaker so much that I can't go any further than "almost."

But what's prompting this post is not moments like that, but moments like this:

"I am in pediatrics, and we try to save lives."

That's a line of dialogue from one doctor to another doctor, and it so happens that these doctors know each other well -- they're dating. I should say, it's my best memory of the line of dialogue, though I'm sure about the first four words, and they are the only ones that matter for the purpose of my argument.

Kore-eda wants to inform us of the medical specialty of the speaker, and that's a fair goal when you are trying to keep the audience up to speed on multiple characters and what they do for a living. But wouldn't this have been much better?

"In pediatrics we try to save lives."

It accomplishes the expository goal but it also doesn't make it seem as though the first character needs to explain to the second character what he does for a living. She knows. She's his love interest. We don't know, which is why you need the line, but my phrasing accomplishes it without the awkwardness.

Since it doesn't seem like Kore-eda to be quite so on-the-nose and to fail to appreciate the dynamics that already exist between these characters, I'm wondering if it is a faulty translation.

I've discussed faulty translations before, but in that instance it was the person in charge of the translation not having a proper grasp of English spelling or grammar. This is different. This is based on an assumption only, and I have no way to prove it.

I'm wondering if the line of dialogue, as written/spoken in Japanese, is more along the lines of my version, but that the person who's translating it failed to grasp the nuance of how to translate it. Oh all the information is there, that's not the problem, but perhaps the sequence of the words makes it seem like the one doctor is telling the other something she already knows, when maybe that isn't what's really happening.

It could also be, I suppose, that this is a literal translation of how it's spoken, but that in the original Japanese, it doesn't come across as repeating information already known. It could be that linguistic custom states you present the information in this order, and the other person doesn't think "Duh, I already know this." Maybe then it requires someone to translate it somewhat less than literally so that the English translation flows as smoothly as the Japanese original.

Look, I really don't know. But I do think that a screenplay can be hurt by a faulty translation, and we would have no idea that it had happened. We would just ding the screenplay.

Our Little Sister is a really nice movie, one that continued to deepen my appreciation of its director, but it's the least essential of his four films I've seen. I note that I've given those four films very positive reviews, but a different star rating in each instance: 5 stars for Like Father, Like Son, 4.5 stars for Shoplifters, 4 stars for After the Storm and now 3.5 for Our Little Sister. I sure hope the trend of giving a different star rating to each film doesn't continue, because that means I will really dislike the rest of Kore-eda's filmography.

The one I should really see, especially as I am considering my favorite films of the decade in time to post my list in January, is I Wish, which I started to watch years and years ago on a night when I didn't have a two-hour movie in me. Realizing that, I stopped it after about one minute. If what I've heard about it is correct, that'll be another 4.5 star or 5 star movie for me.

The success or failure of the nuances of its translation? TBD.

Days of translating poorly

Remember that great meme, one of the original memes, All Your Base Are Belong to Us? It was the humorously poor English translation of video game dialogue written originally in another language, and if you've never seen it, well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano

I was getting AYBABTU flashbacks while watching Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild last night.

When the film was released in 1990 in Hong Kong (and elsewhere around the world the next year), it was not yet the work of an internationally celebrated director. Wong had made only one previous film, 1988's As Tears Go By, and Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster all still lay on the horizon.

So it should be no surprise that the subtitles seem like they were written by someone who was trying to do a racist impression of a Chinese person.

Of course, it's much more innocent than that. Likely the person who did these subtitles was trying their best, perhaps literally translating when he or she should have translated colloquially. But few of the subtitles are actually grammatically correct in English, and in many other instances where they are grammatically correct, they're just not phrased the way a western person would phrase them.

That's not the only example of shoddy subtitle work, though. The length of time the subtitles stay on the screen is often highly problematic as well, as sentences containing six to ten words sometimes stay up for less than two seconds. This is necessary when the dialogue is coming out in a rapid stream, but the words were disappearing even in situations where a thoughtful pause came before the next spoken words.

Examples are probably beside the point, but after a while, I couldn't stop jotting them down. Here are some:

"You want a revenge."

"Please don't dessert me."

"May I have a look of your house."

"He gets my phone number."

"Don't stand on my way."

"It's bored to stay in one place for a long time."

"I owe you this meal. I'll be the banker next time."

I think that last one is my favorite. It's the most Base Belongingest.

Listing any more examples would start to blur the line between someone criticizing a racist impression of a Chinese person, and actually making such an impression, if it has not already. But you get the picture.

If Days of Being Wild were just some one-off from a director who never made anything again, I might expect the subtitles to be in any form, just as likely to be worthy of wisecracks from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew as to read coherently. But Wong is a major director, and the reason I chose this movie on a night I was sick with an earache is because I'd heard it discussed in glowing terms. (And because it was only 90 minutes, though in retrospect I would have chosen something that qualified as comfort food, and was in English.)

The answer, of course -- though I had to post in my Flickcharters group on Facebook in order to find it -- is that this is one of several versions of Days of Being Wild in existence. It doesn't yet have a Criterion release, despite several convincing fan mock-ups of Criterion posters, but commenters on my post said they'd seen translations of the Chinese that were unremarkable at worst. The streaming service on which I watched the movie, Stan, just doesn't have access to these other versions, or perhaps doesn't realize that it plucked an inferior version from its available resources. (It would probably be useful if I understood a bit better the logistics involved in streaming licensing, but I won't pretend to.)

The interesting thing is that this version of Days actually does do something quite well in its translation, something I wish other films did more. It translates the money. When money is spoken of in the movie, it's not listed in Yuan, but rather, in USD, so you know the total that's actually at stake. Sure, that's good for me as an American, but the U.S. dollar is the most internationally known currency as well, so if you're going to select just one currency, might as well be the dollar. It even mentions it in a rather shrewd way, as "USD" appears in the subtitles after the first mention of money, then doesn't for a while, then does again, just to remind us in case we've forgotten, kind of like the chyron appearing under the picture of a documentary subject at some point later in the movie, just so we don't forget who we've been interviewing.

I suppose it's a reality that at least two sets of English subtitles might exist for any given movie, to say nothing of the sets of subtitles for the world's other 20 most prominent languages. But I kind of feel like once a set of subtitles that's considered the definitive version comes into existence, it should suppress all other available subtitles -- something that's a lot easier said than done, of course. I mean, if someone were really concerned about it, they could remove this inferior copy of Days of Being Wild from the rotation, though perhaps that was the reason Stan was able to license it in the first place, because it costs less than the version where the translator actually understood how people speak English.

And I suppose there's also value to viewing something as an artifact of its time. If I got only the corrected version of this movie, I might not have the appreciation of how English-speaking audiences originally experienced it. Apparently, they were not as thrown by it as I was, as they surely helped elevate the movie to its place of respect in the Wong canon. Or, they were more accustomed to films being translated poorly than I am, as I cannot think of another instance of watching a movie that had worse than very minor spelling and grammatical errors.

The problem is that I have difficulty knowing how much I really like this movie because of the circumstances of my viewing. Evidently it did become a distraction for me, else I wouldn't have written this whole post.

I do think that it was a bit of a poor bet for me in the first place, as I'm not a fan of the third movie in the informal thematic trilogy that began with this movie, 2046, and I highly respect but still don't probably love In the Mood for Love, the trilogy's middle film. I don't tend to love films where men and women torment each other while lying around in tank tops around smoke-filled flophouses, which is a not totally inaccurate description of much of the first half of this film, and is why for a long time I bristled at the early films of Jim Jarmusch. So Days of Being Wild may never have been totally my thing, but the subtitles certainly didn't help.

Of course, any time you watch a film while suffering from a painful earache, you should not expect it to become your favorite.

The year without documentaries or foreign films

I've written a couple times on this blog about the paucity of "legitimate" documentaries released this year. By that I mean documentaries released in such a way that they distinguished themselves from run-of-the-mill documentaries on lesser platforms and crossed over into the public consciousness/discussion. In fact, I seem to write some variation on this post about every six months.

What hadn't struck me until recently was how few foreign language films have gained any traction in the zeitgeist this year.

Because I assumed they had just eluded me, I asked the members of my Flickcharters Facebook group what they were looking at as their 2017 foreign language films. They didn't have any either.

Or really, they had some, but they were ones I ranked last year because that's when I saw them at MIFF.

They came forward with suggestions like After the Storm and The Lure, films I was glad to see attaining a certain prominence after I'd ranked them both high on my list last year. They also mentioned films I was a bit less high on, like The Salesman and Graduation, which I also saw at MIFF 2016. (Guess that was a pretty good MIFF.) Then there were those that I saw at this year's MIFF, like The Square, which I do indeed have on my current list. There were a few assorted others but I tend to think of them as stretches to qualify as "prominent." The one exception may have been the French film BPM, an award winner at Cannes. But that may be the only exception.

What gives?

As always, we should blame Netflix.

In addition to siphoning off legitimate films and making them seem somehow less legitimate -- or at least, removing any fanfare from their release and reducing them to "just another thing to watch on Netflix" -- the company also creates a platform for low-level foreign films, the type that might otherwise not make a dent anywhere except their country of origin. While this seems like a good thing, it also helps make the greater market more murky. We find it hard now to tell the difference between foreign movies that might have once crossed over and been marketed it to us as international phenomena, the type we should see in the theater, and "just another foreign film."

Funny, that's kind of the same as what they've done to documentaries.

Of course, whether to truly blame Netflix for this, or just to acknowledge that they were the best to capitalize on an inevitable trend, is a matter of debate. I do think, however, that the effects can be seen rippling outward and having an impact on areas such as this one. Whether anything Netflix has done has actually crippled the market, or the perceived market, for foreign language films is unclear. It does seem clear that the wider-ranging impact of the Netflix business model is not yet known, and may not be known for some time.

I also wonder if it can be explained by the fact that foreign directors no longer stay in their own countries, or at least not to the extent that they used to. Twenty seventeen saw new releases from Zhang Yimou, Yorgos Lanthimos, Tomas Alfredson, Olivier Assayas, Nacho Vigalondo, Ana Lily Amirpour, Luc Besson and Niels Arden Oplev, but all of their films had English as the dominant language. That's to say nothing of directors like Guillermo del Toro and Lasse Hallstrom, who have been entrenched in English language films a lot longer. Foreign films are becoming a victim of the success of their directors.

All I know is, when I want to go to the movies to see a foreign language film, there ain't much on to see.

Here's hoping it's just a statistical aberration, a function of the random nature of release dates and the fickleness of public tastes. I don't want my future as a consumer of foreign films to be sifting through all the "just another film"s available on Netflix.

Those not worthy of translation

They say film is the ultimate collaborative medium, but you wouldn't know it from the way the opening credits of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring were translated -- or not translated, as the case may be.

Late Spring is my latest movie in my monthly Asian Audient series, and I'll discuss it at length in the coming days, but for now I must devote a separate post to getting a seemingly insignificant aspect of it off my chest. An aspect that's not so insignificant if you were one of the many people who toiled away on this movie -- anonymously, as it turns out, to English-speaking audiences.

As the screen grab above indicates, whole sections of the film's opening credits have gone untranslated. You are only left to assume which collaborators' contributions are getting the short shrift here, be it the costume designer, the boom operator or the casting director.

I should say that this is not something unique to Ozu or Late Spring. I believe the same was true of last month's entry in the series, High and Low, directed by Akira Kurosawa.

I didn't comment on it then. But I'm commenting on it now.

What gives? Why the dissing of all those "lower" on the list of contributors than the director, writer, cinematographer, producer and cast?

I suspect it has something to do with an excessive sense of politeness and modesty that would be very much in keeping with Japanese culture. "You don't need to know who all these people are; we know you just want to watch the film."

But then again, it seems at least somewhat unlikely that the original Japanese creators had anything to do with the subtitling. In fact, although Late Spring was of course screened in the U.S. and would have had subtitles, my guess is that the current subtitles were not those originally on screen at the time, but rather, a later insertion for some DVD release or other reappraisal of the film. So although Japanese people would have needed to be involved for the sake of, you know, actually determining what was being said, the choices on what to include or not include could have been in the hands of an American.

I guess I'd also understand excluding the translation of the names of many of the collaborators if their names were in danger of blocking any on-screen action. But as you can see, and as was the case in most cinema at the time, the credits had the screen all to themselves. And though there's certainly a basic stark beauty to seeing just the Japanese characters on their own, it's nothing that a few English subtitles would fatally disrupt.

Oh well. I can tell you I appreciated their contributions, even if I could not match their names to them.

But more on that in the coming days.

The indefinite article

I did not like Le Week-End. Let's get that out of the way at the start.

But instead of bagging on it from the get-go, today I'm coming back to struggling with something that I don't think I've actually written about previously, even though it bothers me from time to time:

How to alphabetize movies with foreign titles?

I struggled with this most recently when I watched L'Atalante, not knowing whether I should put it under L or under A. Translated to English, the title is The Atalante (it's the name of a boat), which would always be alphabetized under A.

However, I was uncertain enough with that decision that I put it to the Flickcharters group on Facebook. One guy came back with what I thought was a convincing argument. He said that libraries alphabetize foreign titles by the first letter that appears, even if it is an article, because they don't assume their English-speaking customers understand any language other than English. If you had no idea how French worked as a language, you would certainly look for L'Atalante under L, not A.

I bought that. But then I watched Le Week-End and I doubted it again.

The title is The Week-End. Then why am I alphabetizing it under L? I wouldn't alphabetize it under T if it were in English. And complicating matters further, it's not even a foreign film. It's an English language film that takes place in Paris.

The uncertainty goes way back. I watched El Mariachi sometime in the mid-1990s, and always alphabetized it under E. I knew that El meant The, of course, but my argument was that there was something essentially iconic about the title: EL MARIACHI. Like, if there were some lesser-known Spanish language film called El Orso (The Bear), I wouldn't consider it an iconic title and therefore would just file it under O.

But then El Mariachi's alphabetization got directly challenged by El Topo, which I saw a couple years ago. (And yes, you'd really think I would have seen a movie whose title started with El sometime between the mid-1990s and a couple years ago, but I don't recall having this debate with myself once in the interim.) El Topo is a probably more iconic title than El Mariachi, but I was less familiar with it, having never been around to watch midnight movies in New York in the late 1970s. This one seemed like a clear-cut case of needing to be alphabetized under T.

As I sit here and type this, I am not actually sure what I'm doing with these two movies right now. Let me go and check and I'll be right back.

I guess the grandfather clause applies, because I added El Topo as Topo, El but left El Mariachi as El Mariachi.

French titles have all followed the El Topo model ... with the exception of L'Atalante. For example, La Boum was once filed under L, but the last time I revisited this question, I recategorized it under B.

The question then becomes: Why do we translate some titles and not others? I might as well call La Boum The Party in my records, but I don't. That's because it was introduced to me (in French class, no less) as La Boum. I have thought of it as such since. (For a fuller discussion of this topic, see here.)

I think I would be okay with either methodology if I could just pick one and stick to it. But apparently I can't, which is the most frustrating part for an anal-retentive listmaker by myself. I just can't categorize L'Atalante under A and I just can't categorize Le Week-End under L. Is it just the fact that the L has an apostrophe, and it looks too funny to write Atalante, L' ? (It's so funny that I had to leave a space after the apostrophe just so I could distinguish it from the question mark at the end of that last sentence.)

One thing is certain: Le Week-End is no good under any taxonomy. It's Le Merde.

Truth in advertising, though: It took me almost a whole weekend to watch it. I started watching it admittedly too late on Thursday night, and internet problems prevented me from making the progress toward finishing it I needed to make. I had only 40 minutes or so left to watch on Friday night, but caught only 20 more before I was done in. I managed to finally finish it after midnight on Saturday.

I suppose I should tell you what I found so objectionable about it: the incredibly mercurial nature of Lindsay Duncan's wife character. You get that Jim Broadbent may not have been a perfect husband to her, but also that he always tried, and is probably guilty of being an eccentric old goof more than any actual sin. Yet her behavior toward him is consistently inconsistent. One minute she's looking at him with absolute disdain, the next she's laughing and flirting, and the next she's talking about divorce. It's maddening, and the film's lack of any forward momentum in other respects just makes it feel incredibly tedious. By the time Jeff Goldblum shows up as an annoying third wheel of sorts, the whole thing has become Une Catastrophe.

But would I file that catastrophe under U, or C?

Turn me on, Norway

I'm always interested in examining how the foreign films I see have made it onto my radar.

Most American film fans really have to seek out foreign films, since few of them are marketed or distributed heavily in the United States. In fact, only the five that get nominated for Oscars each year have a great chance of making it down to the casual film fans, and even then, only one or two of those seem accessible enough to secure a place on their Netflix queues.

I, however, am not a casual film fan, so I see a lot more foreign language films than most people. Which still results in only a pathetic fraction of those that get made.

My method of learning about them is usually some combination of randomly reading about them, hearing them touted on a film podcast, or perhaps seeing a trailer for them at an arthouse theater.

Because of the random nature of this exposure, it seems like you should watch an equal number of movies from all pockets of the world, assuming you aren't carrying in a bias in favor of any particular region, and assuming you have an open-minded desire to expose yourself to as wide a cross-section of world cinema as you can.

Within this, though, you notice certain patterns emerging, certain parts of the world that seem to be really bringing it in terms of quality during the same period of time. Sometimes you even notice thematic and stylistic similarities that may have a cultural origin.

In the past couple years, South Korean films and Romanian films have each had distinct periods where they've asserted themselves into my consciousness. This year, though, it's films from Norway that are having a moment.

As I write this, I'm a bit surprised to note that three of my top 20 films from 2012 (out of 77 that I've seen) hail from Norway. Which means that 2011 was a damn good year for the Norwegian film industry. (Because of my ranking rules, I rank the films in the year they became available for me to watch for the first time, which was 2012, even though the three films all hit Norwegian theaters in 2011.)

No night better symbolized Norway's sudden ascendency than Monday, when I watched two of these three films in the same evening. (Watched the entirety of one, and finished another I'd started on Sunday.)

It was a total coincidence that I happened to do this, utterly unpremeditated. I'd had Turn Me On, Dammit! (whose trailer I saw at an arthouse theater) as a disc from Netflix since the second week of November, and I prioritized Oslo, August 31st (available on Netflix streaming) because of hearing it touted for a second time on the previous week's episode of  Filmspotting. I'm just thankful I didn't ruin the latter film by watching ten minutes of it during a bout of insomnia on Saturday night, then squeezing in another half-hour Sunday night before finishing it on Monday. And the only reason we watched Dammit on Monday night was because our DirecTV is out, as discussed on Monday.

Both of these films are full of wonderful and sometimes heartbreaking surprises, so I won't tell you too much about them. But just to get your curiosity piqued, Turn Me On, Dammit! is a coming-of-age story told (refreshingly) from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl, confronting her budding sexuality and its unintended consequences within the setting of a small-town Norwegian high school. Oslo, August 31st is a pensive look at a day in the life of a recovering drug addict, who must confront people from his past as he contemplates his future. As is the case with many good films, the plots are deceptively simple. It's the attention to storytelling detail that makes these two films sing.

But my favorite of the three Norwegian films in my top 20 is a gas of a thriller called Headhunters, which I watched back at the end of September (and learned about by hearing Joe Morgenstern's glowing review of it). This one contains more unexpected moments than the two previous films combined. Rarely have I seen a film straddle this many genres and have such a deft touch at each of them. It reminded me of the best work of Joel and Ethan Coen, except with more humanism. To say any more about it would spoil a terrific rollercoaster ride worse than riding a rollercoaster after a long night of drinking.

As if we needed further proof that there's Norway in the air, a Japanese film called Norwegian Wood, based on Haruki Murakami's novel, would qualify for my 2012 list as well. This one originated in Japan all the way back in 2010, but its U.S. release wasn't until January 6th of this year. I do plan to watch it before I finalize my rankings next month, though I don't expect it to have anything to do with Norway.

Of course, the problem with watching all these foreign films that originated in other calendar years is that each one presents a potential problem to me in terms of this year-end list. What if one of these films ends up being my favorite of the year? I have a philosophical problem with that, because when I look back on these lists in years to come, I don't really want to see that my #1 movie is something that only belongs with that ranking year based on the technicality of it U.S. release date. I narrowly avoided that fate in 2008, when I ranked 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days my #2 film of the year, just behind The Wrestler -- even though many critics ranked it in 2007, having seen it at film festivals. Since then it has definitely surpassed The Wrestler in my estimation. I caught a break with last year's #1, A Separation, which was the rare foreign film to debut in its country of origin in the same year that it debuted in the United States.

I guess I should just be glad that I'm seeing movies that are this good at all, and hand-wringing about year-end lists is not that important. It's the experience of watching the movie that matters, and it's nice to be reminded that you sometimes (frequently?) have to go abroad to find the most original stories being told in cinema.

And in 2012, the way to those stories is Norway.

Much more beautiful en Espanol

The first time I heard the title for Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In (which I watched last night), I thought, "That sounds like sort of a tortured, awkward title, doesn't it?"

I mean, it's only five words. How tortured and awkward could it really be? But nonetheless I took that impression from it.

Of course, Almodovar wasn't naming his film with its English translation in mind. (Though with how important it is to do well in English-speaking countries, maybe he should have given that more consideration.) In Spanish the film is of course called La Piel Que Habito, which just seems infinitely more elegant. (I say "of course" because you can see the title in the more pleasing Spanish language poster I've included here, which is not a close-up of this woman's face, covered by a mask of bandages.)

I know that part of my perception of the title's elegance is a result of me finding the Spanish to be exotic, and therefore, more beautiful. Even if it means the same thing as "The Skin I Live In," those words just sound more beautiful than their English counterparts, which are not particularly beautiful words. And although the grammatical structure in English is not particularly complicated, it's just awkward enough to seem like what it is: a translation.

However, this is not the first time a title to one of Almodovar's movies has seemed a bit awkward in English. Let's take Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The movie came out in 1988, meaning I was either 14 or 15 when I encountered it for the first time. I specifically remember thinking "What is this movie whose title is practically a sentence?" The Spanish title in this case is no shorter: Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios. In fact, that might actually be more awkward.

You do, however, get an interesting difference in length when it comes to his next film, which we call Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! En Espanol that movie is called, simply, Atame! Meaning that the title was simply untranslatable to us in a way that would mean something to us, because we don't understand a concept like this in a single word, as the Spanish do. (Atame literally means "tie me up." I love that this concept could be expressed in a single word, especially since it involves a person asking for a thing that most people never request.)

I notice Almodovar also made a film with a title that probably never stood a chance not to sound weird: 1995's La Flor de mi Secreto, known to us (to the extent that we know it at all) as The Flower of My Secret. Try wrapping your head around what that's supposed to mean. For the record, the film is about a romance writer who has to confront a personal and professional crisis. 

Then you've got his 2006 film Volver, which is the other thing that sometimes happens with foreign titles: They don't get translated at all. Volver means "return," but we don't call this movie Return in English -- we call it Volver. See here for a longer discussion of why some foreign titles get translated for consumption in the English-speaking world, and some don't -- though don't expect any satisfying conclusions.

Anyway, it was my first Almodovar since 2004's Bad Education (La Mala Educacion), so I was glad to get back to him after inexplicably blowing off his two straight collaborations with Penelope Cruz (Volver and Broken Embraces, or Los Abrazos Rotos). Not only is La Piel Que Habito shot beautifully -- I was especially noticing the precise framing and mis en scene -- but it contains some of the darkest and most thought-provoking themes in his work, which has always been fairly dark and provoked a considerable amount of thought. (Not to mention that it also contains genuine surprises in the narrative.) And while at first blush I thought it seemed like a departure for Almodovar, having watched it, I now feel very definitely that it fits comfortably into his canon. 

You might say it's the same interesting skin, or piel, that Almodovar has always been living in.

Lady's choice: Choix de la dame

It was my wife's turn to pick the movie again last night, as part of our bi-weekly Lady's Choice Movie Night series. (I'll probably have to keep explaining this every post, but "lady's choice" is not gender specific. It's an inside joke I explained in detail here.)

Although it's fun if the movie can be a surprise to the off-week person right up until we watch it, sometimes that's just not possible. Like, for most of my weeks, I'll probably be scheduling a DVD to arrive from Netflix. Since she gets those emails from Netflix, she'll know what's coming. She, on the other hand, will choose from our instant queue most weeks, meaning I can be totally fooled. After she floated the idea of watching Gomorrah a couple nights ago, I was expecting that might be the choice. But she decided that the 2 hour and 17 minute running time might kill us last night, so her ultimate choice was indeed a surprise after all.

In fact, I had her press play on the movie without me knowing what it was, so I could see how quickly I could guess. I'm proud to say I got The Visitors (or Les Visiteurs) within the first five seconds. (It helps that I've grown pretty familiar with the 150 titles we have in our instant queue.)

Well, I'm certainly glad we didn't watch a 2 hour and 17 minute foreign film, because a 1 hour and 47 minute foreign film proved long enough for me. See, my son had given me another miserable night the night before, and even though we started watching around 8:15, I was ready to pack it in for the night at the half-hour mark. Fortunately, I struggled through, because it's against the very spirit of this film series to cop out of a movie for any reason. Pleading exhaustion is just not cool. (So if I'm fuzzy on the details of the last 20 minutes of the film, forgive me.)

Actually, The Visitors was an interesting choice for me because I had already seen its Hollywood remake, the 2001 film Just Visiting. Which also stars Jean Reno and Christian Clavier as 11th century knights who are transported to the present day by a sorcerer, but features such American-friendly presences as Christina Applegate and Tara Reid. And I actually had a limited affection for that widely reviled film, so seeing its source material seemed like a natural fit for me.

And it was -- to a point. The exhaustion was definitely a factor, but I also assumed I was missing some of the finer wordplay due to the fact that the knights are actually speaking in old French, which was not necessarily being translated very well in the subtitles. Both of us -- my wife is basically fluent in French, and I'm actually pretty good -- were picking out mistranslations that didn't even seem like they needed to be translated incorrectly for American audiences to understand.

But overall I found it funny enough, considering. The woman who played Applegate's role, Valerie Lemercier, had terrifically snappy comic delivery that just made her a joy to watch. (Interesting, though, how relatively plain-looking Lemercier is -- you would never see that in a Hollywood movie.) She also has a put-upon husband (Christian Bujeau) whose annoyance with the visitors is pretty comical. (But he has to tolerate them on some level -- since his wife is Reno's descendant, the physical similarity causes them to conclude he's a long lost uncle with amnesia.) Unfortunately, much of the humor put forth specifically by Clavier as Reno's manservant is pretty broad and physical, and didn't work as well for me.

When I wasn't sure how well the whole movie was working for me overall, it occurred to me to wonder whether there was a ceiling for how funny you could find a comedy that's not in your native tongue. I quickly surveyed my favorite foreign films, and few if any of them are comedies. Then I thought about the converse, about whether the French and other foreigners find American comedies to be particularly funny. Which got me thinking about Jerry Lewis, whose films I am watching this month as part of my Getting Acquainted series. The fact that the French love Jerry Lewis could have something to do with the fact that very little of his comedy is linguistic in nature -- the physical stuff translates much better.

This thought momentarily disappointed me -- it made me question the idea that cinema can be a universal language. But then I quickly remembered that I have seen an absolutely hilarious foreign film -- in fact, a French film -- just within the past month. Having enjoyed Jean Dujardin so much in The Artist, we watched his second collaboration with director Michel Hazanavicius, the spy spoof OSS 117: Lost in Rio, streaming off Netflix about three weeks ago. (The first OSS 117 movie -- subtitled Cairo, Nest of Spies -- had temporarily disappeared from Netflix instant, though it is back now.) We were in fits during Lost in Rio, and not just because of Dujardin's undeniable gifts with physical comedy. In fact, the wordplay was some of that movie's funniest bits.

Okay, so maybe The Visitors just doesn't scale the heights of what a French comedy can offer.

Or, maybe I was just on the verge of slipping into a coma the entire time.

La creme de la creme of foreign films

Welcome to my second edition of Flickchart Tuesdays. In this series I will examine some movie proclivity I may never know I had, based solely on how I've ranked my favorite films in Flickchart. See my "flickchart" label at the bottom of this post for all previous references to Flickchart and a description of what it is.

Today I'm going to explore my top ten foreign films, based only on my current rankings in Flickchart. (For the purposes of this post, I'm observing the same rules as the Academy does -- they have to be foreign language films.)

The rules are that I'm not even going to vet out my topic before I start writing. I'm just going to choose a topic, then go into Flickchart and see what comes up, however embarrassing the results may be.

Without any further ado:

1. Run Lola Run (1999, Tom Tykwer). I believe this movie actually came out in 1998 in Germany, but my first opportunity to see it was 1999, where I ranked it the #1 movie I saw that year, so I continue to list that as its release year. This choice should not be such a surprise for anyone who read last week's post containing my top 20 overall. Nothing but love for this movie: wild, passionate, devoted love. Flickchart: #16.

2. The Bicycle Thief (1948, Vittorio di Sica). A classic, for good reason. I am now kicking myself that I've seen this only once, and it was a good 20 years ago now. Every time I see The Player I'm reminded that I needed to see this again. And every time I see Reality Bites. (Let's see if anyone gets that reference.) Flickchart: #26.

3. The Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa). This was in my top ten overall in my previous incarnation of Flickchart, before I re-ranked my films based on a new ranking system. The current ranking is probably more accurate -- but never fear, Seven Samurai, being in my top 40 overall is massive praise from me. It's just a shame I can't sit through it more often, it being a girthy 204 minutes. Still, I've watched it twice, and am immeasurably richer for it. Flickchart: #38.

4. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007, Cristian Mungiu). I love movies about abortions! Actually, I love movies made with unforgettable technique (every other shot in this film is an impressive long take), brilliant acting and plenty of substance, and the so-called "Romanian abortion drama" qualifies. So much so that it's my fourth favorite foreign-language film of all time. Flickchart: #65.

5. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007, Julian Schnabel). More incredible technique and an incredible, moving story. There's so much life in this film about a man who can only move one eye. And so much great acting by that man (Mathieu Amalric). I'd watch this movie again and again ... even if I had only one eye. Flickchart: #69.

Can I just pause here for a moment to note my diversity? Five films, five languages: German, Italian, Japanese (hey, those World War II Axis powers can make movies), Romanian and French. There should be a Spanish film coming soon ... maybe next? Like I said, I don't know -- I'm figuring it out as I write!

6. Let the Right One In (2008, Tomas Alfredson). Okay, not Spanish, but how about Swedish? My favorite vampire movie of all time may be slightly inflated at this ranking, but my oh my is this filmmaking at its best. If you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about. Flickchart: #71.

7. Cinema Paradiso (1990, Giuseppe Tornatore). Okay, Italian repeats before we get our first Spanish-language film. There are few movies out there that celebrate the love of cinema more wonderfully than Cinema Paradiso. A simply joyous film. And the ending always gets me. Flickchart: #87.

8. Waltz With Bashir (2008, Ari Folman). Wow, I did not expect an animated film to make the list ... though now that I think about it, there could have been a couple contenders. This visually trippy memory piece, where Folman (as himself) interviews veterans about their remembrances of the night 3,000 Palestinian refugees were massacred in Beirut, is simply outstanding. Sounds heavy, but the animation is so wonderful that it leaves you feeling lively. Flickchart: #108.

9. The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot). This should count as multiple languages, because multiple languages are spoken in this film about the impossible task of transporting tons of sensitive explosives across rough terrain in Central America, via truck. Just saw this for the first time about two years ago, and it floored me. Flickchart: #133.

10. Mother (2009, Joon-ho Bong). I've simply never seen a film quite like Mother. Terrific technique, terrific acting -- I still don't know how they got some of the shots. See it. Flickchart: #139.

Still no Spanish-language films. Well, I'm going to make it my habit in these posts to list 11-20, without any commentary. Maybe we'll find one in there.

11. The Professional (1994, Luc Besson). Flickchart: #147.
12. Lemming (2005, Dominik Moll). Flickchart: #148.
13. The Lives of Others (2006, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck). Flickchart: #163.
14. Delicatessen (1992, Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro). Flickchart: #174.
15. Oldboy (2003, Chan-wook Park). Flickchart: #176.
16. The Seventh Seal (1957, Ingmar Bergman). Flickchart: #179.
17. Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001, Alfonso Cuaron). Flickchart: #187.

Praise Jesus. Finally a Spanish-language film.

18. Letters from Iwo Jima (2006, Clint Eastwood). Flickchart: #188.

Does this count? Hell yeah. It was in Japanese.

19. The Sea Inside (2004, Alejandro Amenabar). Flickchart: #199.
20. Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman). Flickchart: #202.

Most surprised not to see on there: Amelie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet). I know I've backlashed some against this movie in recent years, mostly because Audrey Tatou has kept playing Audrey Tatou year in, year out in the decade since Amelie was released. But I still predicted it would be in my top 20. (I looked ahead, and it would have been #25.)

Breakdown of languages in top 20: French five, Swedish three, German two, Italian two, Japanese two, Korean two, Spanish two, Hebrew one and Romanian one.

Only repeat director on the list: Ingmar Bergman.

Would love to hear your thoughts on my choices. See you next Tuesday for more Flickchart fun.

On second reference

As I was writing my review of the Korean thriller The Chaser yesterday, I was reminded of two things:

1) How much I loved this tense, taut, terrifically scripted and acted film;

2) How much I dislike reviewing Korean and Chinese films.

This last is for one particular, stupid reason: I always get all jumpy every time I have to make a second reference to the creative talent.

See, Koreans and Chinese (and Taiwanese and those from Hong Kong) are among the many Asians whose names are not presented in the Western fashion. Whereas we present the personal name first and the family name second, they do the reverse. Korean names give me further pause, because they also have a hyphen in the personal name, and the second half of that hyphenated word is lower case, which defies my expectations of how a name should be presented, on a purely grammatical level. (Shouldn't the second half of the name be "important enough" to get capitalization?)

Take Na Hong-jin, the director of The Chaser. If I were shoehorning him into the rules of the English language, I would refer to him has Hong-jin on second reference. That could also be the easiest convention for the audience reading my reviews in English, because it would conform to their expectations. But it would also be unconscionable, becauase it's not correct. So he is Na on second reference, and every reference after that. (As a side note, calling him Na also strikes me as odd because Westerners generally have longer family names than personal names. Not so in Korea. So if I were writing a long piece, I might be referring to this man multiple times by an "insubstantial" two-letter word. I don't mean that as some kind of critique that would expose me as a xenophobe, just that it's another disconnect we Americans have when reading foreign names.)

So why is it so hard? It's not like I have to learn some new, third, totally counterintuitive rule. It's either last name second (in the West) or last name first (in Korea). You simply adapt to the appropriate convention based on the origins of the film you're discussing.

Except it's not quite that simple, and here's where the nice Chinese folks I mentioned earlier come in to play. If I were referring to the director of Raise the Red Lantern and Hero, I would call him Zhang Yimou on first reference, and Zhang thereafter. Except that doesn't work as a hard-and-fast rule. Take Ang Lee. You would never consider calling him Ang on repeat references, always Lee. Sure, Lee has been making Hollywood films for 15 years now, so molding his name to our conventions would probably have happened organically, even if it was not technically correct. But when he was directing Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), would we have called him Ang? Would we? (In Lee's case, it probably would have been natural for Westerners to refer to him as "Lee," because we have plenty of Lees of Anglo heritage in the western world. Whereas we don't have many Zhangs or Yimous who came over on the Mayflower.)

Oh how I long for the simplicity of the Japanese naming system, which conforms to ours. Or does it? Never for a moment would I consider referring to Akira Kurosawa as Akira on second reference. Yet it's not actually correct to call him Kurosawa -- this is just how the Western convention has developed for referring to Japanese people. They actually have the same system as the Chinese and the Koreans, we just ignore it by convention. Which is fine with me, as long as it's the accepted method of doing things.

What I'm discovering by doing a little research is that it comes down to personal preference in a lot of instances. I downloaded a very helpful PDF from the Asian Pacific American Handbook, which states the following:

"There is one simple, sure-fire way for you to ensure you get the names right, in all references, of Asian and Asian Pacific American subjects: Ask them their personal preferences.

This point is especially important with new immigrants, because some may still list their names in the style of their homeland (often, family name listed first) while others may have already adopted American usages (family name listed last).

But it is also a worthwhile practice to inquire about name preferences of Asians still in Asia who have long-standing associations with this country. They -- or the American media -- may have adopted Anglicized usages. For example, former South Korean President Park Chung Hee (family name of Park listed first) was often named in the American press as Chung Hee Park."

That explains the baseball player Chan Ho Park, who would probably be Park Chan-ho according to the convention I've chosen.

Now I'm more worried. Should I be calling him Hong Jin Na, rather than Na Hong-jin? He's a first-time filmmaker (which makes The Chaser all the more amazing), so he doesn't have any real association with the western world, let alone a long-standing one. And wikipedia doesn't help, because he doesn't even have his own page yet, and he gets only one mention in the page for The Chaser. That helps with the first reference (they, like the website I write for, call him Na Hong-jin), but not the second. That's usually my method, to look up an interview with or article about the person in question, and steal whatever convention that writer used. But with a relative newcomer, it's not so easy.

And it's not something you just want to blow off, either, because it's all about respect. If you get it wrong, not only do you look disrespectful, but you also look ignorant. Discuss among yourselves which sin is worse.

Oh well. I guess my editors will correct me if they don't agree with my interpretation. Since Na is N/A in terms of my ability to ask him about it, he's Na in my book.

And in anybody's book, The Chaser is a movie you should seek out. Mind, prepare to be blown. (Love the poster, too.)

Ambiguous pronunciations

I don't know how to pronounce the title of the Luc Besson film I reviewed earlier this week.

Before watching it, my default pronunciation had been "Angel A," with "Angel" said exactly as Americans would say it (as opposed to "On-hell," as Spanish speakers would say it), and the "A" rhyming with "bay." You know, like this was Angel A, to be followed shortly by Angel B and Angel C. It's kind of a weird title when spoken as such -- no wonder my wife gave me a skeptical look when I named the movie as a viewing option -- but I had no other cues to suggest another pronunciation.

But the movie's main character is named Angela, and since it's French, the name is said as "On-zhu-luh," not "Anne-juh-luh" as we dumb Americans say it. However, the hyphen tells me I can't say Angel-A like that either. If I just said it as a name, it wouldn't be instantly recognizable to other people as this particular film. (A quick search shows me at least five other features named Angela in film history.) When we talk to other people about film, our goal is to be able to communicate a title to them with as few modifiers as possible. We'd rather say "Have you seen Angel-A?" than "Have you seen the French film directed by Luc Besson called Angel-hyphen-A?"

I could pronounce the whole thing with a French accent, pausing to denote the hyphen, and then finishing with a short "A" (rhymes with "raw"), as they would say it. However, this has two problems: 1) It sound pretentious, and 2) The word "Angel," in French, does not mean anything. I don't mind telling you that the reason the title is constructed as such is that Angela is an angel. But "angel" is an English word, so if I said Angel-A with a French accent, I would just be french-izing an English word. When you come right down to it, the movie should really be called Ange-la, because "ange" is the French word for "angel." I guess it just shows you how dominant American marketing considerations are, that the film doesn't even have a separate French title -- only the one intended to coddle American viewers.

So, how would you say it?

Reminds me a bit of the movie What the #$*! Do We Know?! This half-documentary, half-fiction, half-spiritual, half-scientific consideration of existence -- which has its weak points, but is overall pretty interesting -- could not really be pronounced in spoken language as written out. You could call it What the Fuck Do We Know?!, because that's essentially what it's called -- if they intended it to be called What the Hell Do We Know?!, they would have just called it that, and no other swear words fit into that spot grammatically. But What the Fuck Do We Know?! is quite impolite, so the movie quickly picked up What the Bleep Do We Know?! as an alternate title. That's in fact probably the only way to search it, unless you have memorized the exact sequence of punctuation marks they use in place of the word "fuck."

One of my favorite examples of this outside of the movie world is the band called !!!. That's right, that's the name of the band: "!!!" Three exclamation points. You are supposed to pronounce it as "chik chik chik." But that's just annoying, isn't it? Every time you need to reference it, especially to people who have never heard of the band before (which is probably most people), you have to have this whole semantic discussion about the band's name and how to say it. If you are a fan of the band, it must be a real relief to meet another fan of the band, so you can just say "chik chik chik" and be done with it.

Then there's Koyaanisqatsi, a movie whose title comes in and out of my life, always disappearing again because I can never remember how to spell it (let alone say it). It's a 1982 documentary scored by Philip Glass and featuring images of nature juxtaposed with images of man's toxic influence on nature, and it's supposed to be great. However, even just to talk about this movie in this piece, I had to dig three pages deep into the status updates of a friend of mine on Facebook, who mentioned it a couple weeks back (hence bringing it to my brain's foreground once again). I guess I would pronounce it "coy-annis-cotsy," if I had to venture a guess. Hey, I just looked it up, and whaddaya know -- that's pretty much it.

Now that I've written about it, I guess I'll always have a place to ascertain the spelling if I ever want to actually schedule a viewing.

Translating money

Do you think we should be translating money in foreign films?

I was watching the 2005 film 13 Tzameti on Friday night. I have trouble deciding whether to consider it a French film or a Georgian film -- the primary language spoken in the film is French, because the action takes place in France, but both the director (Gela Babluani) and the protagonist are Georgian, some Georgian is spoken, and "tzameti" means "thirteen" in Georgian. Which led to a bit more confusion -- I can't decide if the film is really supposed to be called either 13 or Tzameti, and in fact, some places it is listed as 13 (Tzameti). But on wikipedia and several other places it's called 13 Tzameti, so I've decided to go with that. I do know that the Hollywood remake, due out this year, is called simply 13.

Anyway, the movie is about an underground game of multi-person Russian roulette. In this particular instance of the game, there are 13 participants. Men are lured to a secret location -- it's hard to tell what percentage of them know what they're getting into -- and play several rounds of Russian roulette, all pointing their guns at each other in a circle. Some are obviously killed in each round, but some survive because the man who was pointing his gun at them either had an empty chamber, or was killed before he had the chance to pull the trigger. I won't say how many are ultimately killed, but the idea is that one man is declared the winner, and he walks away with a huge sum of money. The rest of the money is shared by gamblers who watch the proceedings, who bet on which ones will survive.

The large sum of money is what I want to talk about today. I don't recall the total size of the pot actually being mentioned in the movie, but I was watching the movie mostly after midnight (and it was in French), so it's possible I missed it. I did see it listed as 850,000 Euros on wikipedia. But there are smaller amounts of money mentioned throughout the movie, and each time someone mentioned one of these amounts -- which I wasn't totally sure were Euros at first, either because I'm stupid or because it was late at night -- I thought, "Is that a lot?"

And that made me ponder the function of subtitles, as I have at different points in the past. Subtitles are not meant merely as a literal translation of the words being spoken, because sometimes that would leave the viewer confused by turns of phrase that have a meaning only to native speakers of that language. What's intended by the phrase is what's really important.

So if you want to extend that, you could say that subtitles are intended to provide foreign viewers with the same perspective a local viewer would have. Therefore, just translating a sum of money as however much money it is in that part of the world is not really doing the whole job, is it?

Euros are not necessarily a great example. As one of the most prominent currencies in the entire world (outside of the U.S. dollar, I would argue), the Euro has a value that most viewers in any country should be able to approximate. And I'm okay with the filmmakers giving us some benefit of the doubt, crediting us with having a certain level of intelligence.

But let's take a more extreme example. Let's say the movie is set in Ethiopia, and it's about an Ethiopian goat farmer. The currency in Ethiopia is called the Birr. What if there were a crucial scene in the movie where the goat farmer fought with a prospective customer over the price in Birr of one of his goats? Wouldn't we benefit from having this conflict translated to us in English dollars? Maybe there could be brackets after the words 15 Birr (I have no idea what a reasonable number of Birr would be to spend on a goat) that said something like [$150]. It might get clunky, but it might help us understand better whether it was the goat farmer or his customer who was being unreasonable. And that might actually be really important for us to know.

I don't know, these are the things I think about.

Without translation

My wife and I were watching the brilliant Spanish language thriller Sin Nombre last night, directed by the tongue-twister-named Cary Joji Fukunaga, when a question occurred to me:

Why are some films marketed in English-speaking territories with their original titles, while others are marketed with the titles translated to English?

Sin Nombre literally means "without name" in English. So why do I know this movie as Sin Nombre rather than Without Name, or Nameless? And who decides?

Don't get me wrong, I prefer Sin Nombre. But I just don't understand the system, or whether there even is a system. It could be case by case, or there could be a rule of thumb.

For one, I would imagine the title would be translated if there's a good chance an English audience would stumble over it. Let's take the excellent French thriller that we know as With a Friend Like Harry ... The French title for this movie is actually Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien. Now, only two of those words are even more than one syllable. But most American wouldn't know what the hell to do with this title -- they wouldn't know which letters are silent (for the record, it's the s and the t), whether Qui was "kee" (which it is) or "kwee" (which it is not) or "kwigh" (which it is also not), or why the comma appears in a spot they're not used to seeing it. What's more, With a Friend Like Harry ... is not actually a literal translation of the title, which would be something more like (excuse my rusty French) Harry, A Friend Who Wants You Well. Even if that's not exactly it, it's close enough to show you how a literal translation doesn't work either. (Incidentally, the original English translation they used when showing the film at festivals was Harry, He's Here to Help).

But the ones that puzzle me are the ones where the original title would not be that difficult to pronounce. Take one of my all-time favorite movies, Run Lola Run. In the original German, the film is called Lola Rennt, or, quite literally, "Lola Runs." Or at least, that's what I thought it quite literally meant. Oddly enough, when I looked up the word "rennt" in a German-English dictionary online, the closest it could give me was "renntag," which means "race day." Well in any case, Lola Rennt should be something even the dumbest American can pronounce, because it's pronounced almost exactly how it looks. Even the dumbest American won't be thrown off by the extra n in a word that is very familiar to them.

So that rules out pronunciation/ease of saying the title as the sole factor. Clearly, there's a desire to convey meaning as well. I would not expect anyone who doesn't speak German to get that "rennt" has anything to do with running, even though Franka Potente is running on the poster. So Run Lola Run works much better in that sense. However, I have such respect for the film that when I reviewed it years ago for my website -- one of the top five films I've ever gotten to review in terms of my personal affection for it -- I listed it on first reference as "Lola Rennt (known in the U.S. as Run Lola Run)." I'm sure it's known as Run Lola Run in other places than just the U.S., but this was the fourth film I ever reviewed for this site, and perhaps I was a bit nervous. (Though I do still like the review, even nine years later).

Part of the reason the title needs to convey more about Run Lola Run is that it's a high-concept film. Most people know going in that it's a movie that occurs in "real time" (more or less), that it has a repeating "choose your own adventure" narrative structure, and that it involves a lot of running. This knowledge was, in fact, key to why most people wanted to see it.

Not so with Sin Nombre, and that's probably why it got to keep its original title. In fact, I didn't know a thing about it -- other than that my friend really liked it -- before I popped it in. Neither translation of the title conveys much about the actual plot -- it might just as well be called Egg Salad Sandwich for all it prepares you for the movie you are going to see. Not that it's an inappropriate title, either -- it's just the kind of title that makes more sense to you after you've seen it than before. To be sure, there are other factors in it keeping its name, such as the fact that many Americans speak a little Spanish anyway, and Sin Nombre sounds infinitely more deep and poetic than Without Name.

Just as Y Tu Mama Tambien sounds so much more high-minded and sophisticated than And Your Mother Too.

Translation vs. transliteration

I was re-watching Julian Schnabel's absolutely wonderful The Diving Bell and the Butterfly the other day, and it reminded me once again of the true function of subtitles.

They aren't to give us the exact translation of the words, as some choppy (and hilarious) Engrish subtitles from Japanese movies would have it. Rather, they're there to tell us what the characters meant. And more than anything, not to trip over themselves in adherence to the literal.

Even if you've never taken a single French class, you'll probably realize there's something wrong with the subtitles in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But we'll get to that in a minute.

The true story concerns Jean-Dominique Bauby, a former editor of the magazine Elle. After suffering a stroke, Bauby (or Jean-Do, as his friends call him) develops an extremely rare disorder called "locked-in syndrome." The syndrome paralyzes everything in Jean-Do's body except his eyes, leaving blinking as his only method of communication. As if that weren't bad enough, the doctors must sew up his right eye in order to prevent it from becoming septic. A fully functioning brain, and only a single eye as its outlet of expression.

In order to maximize the potential of that fully functioning brain, a speech therapist develops a system to help Jean-Do "speak," as it were. She reorganizes the letters in the alphabet according to their frequency of use in the French language, and then reads the letters off to him. When she reaches the first letter of the first word Jean-Do wants to say, he will blink. Then she'll start over again with the second letter of the first word, until it's obvious what word it is. Then on to the next word. And so on.

Well, Schnabel et al encountered a slight problem with this on the translation side. Namely, do you maintain absolute fidelity to the dialogue, and translate the letters that are actually being spoken, or do you fudge the translation in order to spell out the English word in the subtitles?

They opted for the latter. I think it's the right decision, but it still leaves the viewer in the unusual position of watching Jean-Do blink over the letter M, and have the letter D appear in the subtitles. Then on to the letter O, and have the letter E appear. Then on to R, and have an A appear. Jean-Do is spelling the word "mort." But we're seeing the English word "death."

Did they have an alternative? Well, not a good one. The only other thing to do would be to spell "mort" as it's being spoken, then maybe include the English translation in parentheses. It'd look something like "mort (death)." But that would tend to blunt the impact, wouldn't it?

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly also called to mind a second issue I have with subtitles as they are used generally. And on this one, I'm not sure I agree with the approach.

Namely: How come songs sung in foreign languages seem to also rhyme in the English translation?

Jean-Do's children sing him a song to lift his spirits, and I noticed that the words were sounding right in French, and looking right in English. But most words that sound the same as other words in French aren't the same words that sound the same as the same other words in English. The probabilities are just not favorable. (I tried to find the nursery rhyme sung by Jean-Do's children on the internet, to truly test my theory, but I had no luck).

Yet there's some perception by the subtitlers that we English audiences would consider that song less pretty, less song-like, if its words did not appear to have a rhyming English translation. Even though logic tells us that it would be impossible to rhyme in two languages at once and still keep your meaning, thereby forgiving the failure to rhyme in the translation.

Well, the conclusion seems obvious: Instead of the actual words of the song being sung, words that mean a similar enough thing are what we're seeing in the subtitles. At least, let's hope the words have a similar meaning. If the meaning is not very similar, aren't you subtly changing what's being communicated by that song? Sure, a lot of the time, the exact meaning of a nursery rhyme is unimportant. But sometimes, it sure the hell is.

I don't know, I like to think I'm mature enough as a viewer to get that the song rhymes in some language, even if it's not the one I speak.

I hardly think The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the only film guilty of this, which is why I'm just meaning to discuss a phenomenon in general rather than point an angry finger at this terrific film.

And it is terrific -- no matter what your native language. In fact, it's such a unique story, so uniquely told, that even people who hate reading when they're watching movies will love how it communicates the act of communication.

Language barrier, or bad movie?

I'm in the middle of watching a Japanese film called Kids Return. No, I'm not engaged in writing a blog entry while watching a movie -- though I have been known to multi-task like that when a movie is really bad, and I can get the gist just by listening. Such dialogue-based comprehension is impossible when the characters are speaking Japanese. (An aside: Isn't it funny that we still want the volume to be turned up, even when we don't understand the words?)

Actually, I've taken a break from Kids Return -- also not uncommon. I sometimes watch a film in 2-3 sittings, the way fast readers read books. Though I don't think my feat is nearly as impressive. In fact, you might call it the opposite: a sign of severe ADD. As it happens, I'm saving the rest of Kids Return for the trip to the gym I plan to make before work tomorrow morning. It's one of two mornings each week I go in late, and I have a portable DVD player that I strap to the top of the stairmaster with the help of a thick rubber band.

I don't yet know how Kids Return is going to turn out, but it is starting to give me that old familiar feeling.

Namely: "Is this a bad movie, or do I just not get it?"

Generally speaking, I'm the kind of guy who gets really cranky if a script constantly hits me over the head -- repeats character names ad infinitum, bludgeons me with symbols, and is replete with crude exposition in the dialogue. However, that's with English language scripts. I flip the script, as it were, as soon as you shift to subtitles. When the movie is in Japanese and most of the characters are young adult males dressed in matching school uniforms, I need all the help I can get.

The thing is, there's a very good chance that Kids Return is really a bad movie. But I feel like I'll have to start watching it all over again to be sure, and that's not something I'm planning on doing. I don't think they did a good job of differentiating the characters in the first five minutes, but it's a lot easier to blank out on information imparted in subtitles than in spoken dialogue. You could argue it depends entirely on what kind of learner you are, but I think I personally am much more likely to have information subconsciously imprinted through the spoken word. Someone who digs on the visuals -- and I really thought I was that guy, given that film is a visual medium, and I dearly love film -- might actually do better with the subtitles. But not me.

And so it is I'm wondering exactly how I'm going to review Kids Return. Further complicating matters is the fact that the two main characters appear in two different time periods, but director Takeshi Kitano -- otherwise known as "Beat Takeshi" -- doesn't have the courtesy to indicate it through some kind of wavy-lined editing technique. You know, the kind used when Marcia Brady flashes back to her nose getting broken by the errant football. The fact that Kitano is considered one of Japan's modern masters makes my potentially negative review all the more problematic.

It's probably a good thing that Kitano didn't spend these first 70 minutes bashing me over the head. But I could have used a little something more. In fact, not only am I going to have a hard time reviewing this film, I think I'd even have a hard time synopsizing it. Thank goodness that task is already complete. (And maybe I'll find a longer synopsis on wikipedia that will help me make enough sense of what happened to review it.)

How did I end up with Kids Return, a film I'd never heard of, in the first place? Especially since this is 2009, and Kids Return came out in 1996? I suppose it's time to tell you a little more about how I get reviews assigned to me. The website I write for has a page for every film title in the database, and each title has one distinct review and one distinct synopsis. While almost every film has a synop, not every film ended up getting reviewed -- probably because they didn't have reviews when the site first started. In fact, there are quite a lot that are still up for grabs. I amass a list of these available titles I've either seen or want to see, and about every two months I submit them a new one. They shave off a few titles that have already been claimed by others and approve the rest. Then I begin whittling away.

But a couple times they've also come up with their own lists for me -- films that they were surprised did not have reviews, and so assigned to me in order to rectify that. I like getting these lists because they expose me to movies I'd otherwise never see. However, the flip side is that sometimes they end up incomprehensible, like Kids Return. I wish I could say that this were the first Japanese film they've assigned me that left me a little perplexed. Rather, it's probably more like the fourth.

I think we may be dealing with a uniquely Japanese phenomenon here. As all the best pop culture spoofs of the Japanese are aware -- and as some of the more abstract Nintendo Wii games are acutely aware -- there's something strange and untranslatable at the core of Japanese entertainment. A cultural insiderishness that can't cross any oceans. In films like Lost in Translation, we marvel at it. In films like Kids Return, it's just baffling.

Here's hoping the last 35 minutes bring it home for me.

The list-maker's crisis

It's only Day Two, and I already need your help.

Ever since I saw the amazing Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days last week (that's a lot of time periods, but please follow the capitalization and italics), I've been struck by the 2008 version of my annual quandary:

How does a film get fixed with a definitive release year?

If that seems like a rather esoteric thing to get hung up on, read on and I'll explain why it's bothering me.

You see, ever since 1996, I've been keeping a year-end list of my favorite films released each year. It's not like most year-end lists, which stop at 10. In this case, "favorite" is a relative term that also encompasses "least favorite." I rank all the new releases I see each year -- from #1 to all the way down to #82 (or so it was last year, besting my previous high of 80 set in 2002). I also see plenty of other films from other years, though that probably goes without saying.

When I first started, I would wait until the end of the year to take a hard look at everything I'd seen, and then try to make some kind of sense of it. But in the last ten years or so, I've decided it's both easier and more fun to rank as I go. Which system produces a truer representation of my feelings about these films is hard to know -- but I like this system better, so I'm sticking to it.

Naturally, I have to set a deadline by which I stop ranking these films, otherwise I'd continue to obsessively shuffle my rankings forever. By tradition, I give myself until the morning the Oscar nominations are announced -- which this year, in a break from Oscar's own tradition (nice to know that Oscar is less anal-retentive than I am), will be on a Thursday rather than a Tuesday. Thursday, January 22nd, to be exact. I assume they are still sticking to the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. PST. (Yes, I get up to watch.)

Unlike the full-time critics who see everything, I don't get invited to all the special screenings (nor could I attend many of them anyway, since they tend to occur during the day). So I have to allow myself a few extra weeks more than their editors allow them, to catch up on late-year releases -- trying to stick more to the Revolutionary Roads and the Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons than the Marley & Mes and Bedtime Storieses. (Those titles don't really pluralize, do they.)

Anyway, that gives me a less than two-and-a-half more weeks to see everything I'm planning to see this year, or forever hold my peace. I may see another 2008 movie the very next day, but it'll be too late -- the "official record" will be sealed.

Over the years, these year-end lists have been fun to revisit. Not only do they give a good snapshot of who I was at that time (and in most cases I'm proud of it, my #1 ranking of Titanic in 1997 notwithstanding), but a lot of times they show me how wrong I was (though I do refuse to throw Titanic under the bus). I don't generally berate myself for the things I ranked really highly -- in most cases I still think those films have exceptional merit. Rather, it's the films I didn't know would endure so well that I laugh at. Let's take the excellent year of 1999. Who could have known that I would rank the cult favorite Office Space a lowly #42 out of 57, below such classics as Varsity Blues, Outside Providence and Ed TV? Not I. That ranking is probably the best example of the flaws inherent in the rank-as-you-go system -- I saw that film early in the year, and by the following January it was getting elbowed aside by schlock. Funny, because even now I remember how hard we laughed in the theater. Then again, that could have been a release -- a group of grad students and I had just come from the funeral of a classmate's father. In fact, we were all still dressed in our funeral attire. Quite surreal.

That, my friends, is what you call a digression.

So as I write this, I'm at only 66 for 2008, which puts me on a pace to see one a day from now until the 22nd if I want to break last year's record total. And though I've been cramming lately, let's say it's probably not going to happen.

And now we get to the crisis. That number may actually be as high as 69 ... or as low as 65. That's right, I have four films of indeterminate vintage, and as of right now, I've only assigned one of them to the year 2008. And only tentatively at that.

Here's my problem: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was sure as heck a 2007 film in Romania. But it wasn't released in the United States until January 25, 2008 -- three days after the Oscar nominations came out. There simply would have been no way for me to include it on a year-end list for 2007. Short of flying to Romania, that is.

I used this logic to convince myself to include it on my 2008 list. It's no small decision, as I currently have the film ranked at #2 for the year. Doesn't a film this good deserve to be recognized in my own "official records," especially since I saw it in the first year I was realistically eligible to see it?

But just when I'd decided to wash my hands of the affair, I came across moviefone's year-end movie list. Quite a strange list to be sure. But who am I to criticize? Anyway, as I was going through the rankings, I came across 4 Months -- it was ranked a lot lower than it deserved to be, but its mere inclusion convinced me that I'd made the right decision.

This certainty lasted all of about two minutes. Soon afterward I came across The Counterfeiters, another film I'd recently seen and quite enjoyed.

Which just so happened to win the Oscar for best foreign film of 2007.

How could it be more cut-and-dried that a movie belongs to 2007, than to have it win a 2007 Oscar? In fact, when I saw it in August, I used that same logic to exclude it from consideration. Yet it was released even later, stateside, than 4 Months -- not until February. In fact, its very nomination for the Oscar was probably a factor in its US release (forgive whatever minor liberties I'm taking with cause and effect in the process of distributing foreign films). That's quite a paradox for my own personal ranking system.

My reasoning for keeping The Counterfeiters on the sidelines for now, yet including 4 Months, is that The Counterfeiters was nominated for an Oscar and 4 Months was not. That's quite flimsy reasoning, especially since the Romanian film was nominated for numerous other awards last year, including a Golden Globe. In fact, the very reason it was even on my radar is that I saw it on some critics' top 10 lists last year. I guess those critics had the money for that ticket to Romania (or to Cannes, where it won the Palme d'Or).

Foreign releases are tricky. I so want to shower praise on 4 Months -- however privately, in the confines of my blog and a Microsoft Word file called "2008 Film Rankings" -- that I can't believe it would be ineligible for such praise under any of the rules I've established. But those rules also make a certain amount of sense, don't they?

So I'm asking you, dear reader, to weigh in on this issue. What do you think I should do about these two movies? Do you qualify them, or disqualify them? Or do you observe a distinction between them? And don't just tell me what you think I want to hear. I'm not looking for a Yes Man. (Especially if it's Jim Carrey). I'm looking for a real dispassionate, academic consideration of this. Or at least, the best you can give me with the morning's first cup of coffee.

Remember when I said my current number of films for the year could be as high as 69? (Heh heh). Well that brings up another issue. I've seen two movies this year that haven't been released yet. And in fact, they don't even have a future release date.

You see, my wife is one of the judges for a horror film festival called Shriekfest, which takes place in Los Angeles in October. Her own short film played the festival in 2006, and this year she became one of the judges, who would help decide this year's slate. Naturally, I watched some of the films with her -- both shorts and features.

The three features were pretty sketchy in terms of quality: Midnight Movie, iMurders and Shadowland. The best of that bunch, Midnight Movie, appeared at Shriekfest as well as the possibly more acclaimed Chicago Horror Festival a week earlier. (The Chicago Horror Festival is mentioned on IMDB -- Shriekfest is not). According to IMDB, Midnight Movie also got a limited release starting October 24th. Done and done.

But what about the others? iMurders played Shriekfest, I'm sure in part because it had a name cast that included the likes of Billy Dee Williams, Charles Durning, Gabrielle Anwar and William Forsythe. But as mentioned earlier, this appearance is not noted on IMDB -- though something called the Downbeach Film Festival is. And then the thing that really throws things into chaos: IMDB suggests that iMurders will have a 2009 release, but offers nothing more in terms of specifics. Does that mean I have to save iMurders until next year? (Shadowland, by the way, has yet to materialize in any shape or form, though at least it finally has an IMDB page).

When I first moved to LA, I used to accept those invitations you'd sometimes get to see a film that was basically complete, but didn't have a release date yet. Awaiting audience feedback to see if any tweaking was needed. That's how I saw the Kevin Costner thriller Dragonfly and Alexander Payne's About Schmidt (then called something like Introducing Warren Schmidt). I don't do this anymore because I don't want to see an unfinished movie any more than I'd want to see the first day's work on the Mona Lisa. But I did do it then, and it wasn't such a worry because I knew both films were sufficiently high-profile to get releases the following year. But what if Shadowland never turns up anywhere? Is it now or never? In this case, I ask it more as a philosophical question than out of any concern for this particular film.

I've prattled on and on, and if these are the only two postings I've made at the time you read this, you'll think I want you to bunker in for 20 minutes every time you come to my blog. Nah -- most of the time I'll ask for no more than 15. ;-)

But in any case, if you want to answer my question, I'd love to hear what you think.