Category: Film Page 95 of 101

Golden Globes

Okay, when Clint Eastwood wins the Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Film (a category in which Mel Gibson was also nominated, along with actual foreign directors like Guillermo del Toro and Pedro Almodóvar), it might be time to rethink the purpose and effectiveness of the category. The Foreign Language category has always been a sort of afterthought, an “oh yeah, other countries make pictures too” sort of thing. At the Oscars, anyway, they’re rarely considered for the Best Picture award, since they have a whole category of their own! But doesn’t that highlight an undercurrent of feeling that a non-English Language film isn’t really worthy of a Best Picture award? Which is so silly. SO SILLY. I’m the first to admit that there’s a difference in sensibility between American films and foreign films, but that doesn’t mean one is better than the other. They should be judged equally against each other. Especially when both Letters from Iwo Jima and Apocalypto are AMERICAN films, and they’re only getting put in the Foreign Language category because Eastwood and Gibson chose to use Japanese and Mayan rather than English. Independent, limited release films are finally starting to get their due (all five Oscar-nominated films last year were limited releases), and it’s time foreign films do as well.

BTW, Meryl Streep is awesome. She pointed out that everybody had seen her film (The Devil Wears Prada) because it was a wide release, playing everywhere, and encouraged everyone who didn’t have the chance to see the other nominated actresses’ films (Sherrybaby, Volver, Little Children, Notes on a Scandal, The Queen, Running With Scissors, Little Miss Sunshine, Miss Potter, Dreamgirls, all limited releases, though some more limited than others) because it wasn’t playing near them to go speak up about it to their theatre managers. I’m sure this wouldn’t have any immediate effect, because a lot of the release schedules are determined by the studios, but if enough people made a fuss about not being able to see independent, foreign, and limited release films, maybe it would filter up.

Warren Beatty, dude, your wife is a way better actor than you are. But she’s not a director, so I guess you still have an edge.

Wow, this year Helen Mirren was the first person to ever play both Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Elizabeth II, and last night she won Best Actress awards for both of them. Incredible. I haven’t seen Elizabeth I, but she totally deserved it for The Queen (Even if I was chanting “Maggie…Maggie…Maggie” at the screen, just because I love Maggie Gyllenhaal that much.)

Guess I’m going to have to start watching “Ugly Betty,” huh. Can you imagine being America Ferrera and winning a Golden Globe over all those other people? Especially Felicity Huffman. My gosh. I watched half of the first episode on ABC’s website, but then the site choked on me. ABC, you might want to have that looked after. NBC’s site works better, I was able to watch the last several episodes of “30 Rock” with noooo problems. Except that at Christmastime they had the whole series up, and this week, they only had the past five or six eps. I wanted to watch them all! Networks are so annoying sometimes. But that’s by the by. Also, Hugh Laurie’s real voice sounds totally different from House’s voice. Not only the accent, I knew about that, but it’s deeper. Threw me a loop, because I don’t remember his voice being that deep on Blackadder.

A little surprised by Babel‘s win. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t honestly say whether it was appropriate or not, but I figured The Departed had a lock on it. Guess I should’ve seen Babel in St. Louis when I had the chance, instead of talking myself out of it.

Subtitle Fun!

There are so many times I wish I understand all other languages just so I could laugh at subtitle translations. Even my teeny bit of French sometimes is enough to know when they’ve missed the meaning (or skipped entire lines). However, with Bollywood film? Sometimes you don’t even need to know Hindi to laugh at the subtitles. There were many grammatical issues with the subtitles to the film Taal (which was otherwise pretty good, if over-melodramatic, and had some of the best Indian music I’ve ever heard), but these two were on a whole different level.

taal2
Um…”cent” does mean “one hundred,” which is what he said. In fact, he said “one hundred percent” in English (as Indians often do, mixing English with Hindi often within the same sentence). Yet they translated the “one hundred” into French for the English subtitles. Very multi-lingual of them. (BTW, this never happens elsewhere…they usually do subtitle the English, because the speakers switch back and forth too quickly for it to register sometimes, but IN ENGLISH. Not French. They’re not doing some fancy trick to show you how they’ve suddenly switched to a different language, as they did in l’auberge espagnole to indicate the English-speaker’s broken French.)

And my favorite:
taal1
Dude. “Mumbai” means “Mumbai.” Who knew? The best part is that the actual-within-the-movie “Mumbai” showed up first, then the subtitle followed a moment after, like a live subtitler was doing it and realized that we might not know what “Mumbai” meant and he’d better throw up a “Mumbai” just to make sure. Throughout the rest of the film, they subtitled “Mumbai” as “Bombay,” so I could see if they had indicated that Mumbai was Bombay, but no. Mumbai is Mumbai.

I think that takes the cake for the most pointless subtitle ever.

edit: in the funny subtitle vein, check out the English subtitles to a Chinese pirated Revenge of the Sith: The Backstroke of the West. (Thanks glow_boy over on Livejournal for that link!) Thirty-two down, note that the Jedi Council continues in…The Presbyterian Church! That’s right, folks. There is an explanation for that particular translation down in the comments which makes sense, but still. My Indian-film subtitles can’t hold a candle to Engrish.

December Reading/Watching Recap

You know, having neither school nor work does wonders for media consumption, as does access to St. Louis libraries. Nineteen movies and six books, including Stranger Than Fiction, Before Sunrise, The Queen, The Wrong Man, Volver, V for Vendetta, We are Marshall, The English Patient, Eragon (book), and Ficciones after the jump.

Best of 2006

I’m not quite finished with the December reading/watching recap, but since publishing “best of” lists is the thing to do at the end of the year, I figured I could go ahead and do that. And by “best of 2006” I mean “best that I saw or read in 2006,” because, as usual, I was not proactive enough at theatres and new release bookshelves to give any sort of a best movies or books released in 2006 list.

Top Ten Films I Watched in 2006 (none of the lists are in any particular order…most are chronological of when I saw them, because that’s the order of the records I started from)

Honorable Mentions

Ten Films You Probably Haven’t Seen But Ought To

Some Films I Really Had Gotten to St. Louis Before I Had to Go Back to Waco:

Top Ten Books I Read This Year

Top Five TV Shows (network only; I can’t keep track of cable)

Top Five Guilty Pleasure TV Shows (by this I mean either that they aren’t really GOOD, but I like them, or merely that I enjoy them, but not in a substantial, fannish way)

On the subject of TV shows, 24 will probably be joining the first set of TV shows this spring, and American Idol will certainly be joining the “guilty pleasure” set in LIKE TWO WEEKS! Just so you know, this blog will likely be taken over by American Idol fever after the premiere on January 16th.

November recap

Two…count ’em, TWO…movies this month. How freakin’ pathetic is that? And one of them was because I was writing about it for class. Oh well, there are twelve books. That’s right. More than I’ve ever read in a month before, ever. Well, yes, all of them were for school. Or work. A lot of them are plays that I read into a CD burner so that the stage design professor I work for in the theatre department could listen to them later.

Page 95 of 101

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