What was the last film you watched?

[Mr Larrington]

When France Info broadcasts an interview with someone furrin they overdub it in French but the furrin remains audible. It's not soooo bad when furrin = Korean or such, but when furrin = English my bump of language herniates.

Watched a bit of a Bond film on French TV some time ago.
It's just not right when Sean Connery has a tenor French voice.

Eddie Izzard used to do a routine about how his routines featuring Shir Shean (and James Mason as God) didn’t work on a French audience because the latter doesn’t shound like Shir Shean in France.

[mattc]

I confess I can't do subtitles, god knows if I wanted words, I'd read a book. They're full of words.

I can handle dubbing until I notice the lips. It's the same with sync issues. Once you notice they're out of sync you can't unnotice and soon that's the only thing you notice.

The 1-inch high barrier.
(as some foreign johnny recently put it)

[Pickled Onion]

I confess I can't do subtitles, god knows if I wanted words, I'd read a book. They're full of words.

I can handle dubbing until I notice the lips. It's the same with sync issues. Once you notice they're out of sync you can't unnotice and soon that's the only thing you notice.

Some Eastern European countries do this thing where a guy speaks what the actors are saying. There's no attempt to sync or have an actor that sounds anything like the person on screen.

[T42]

Wait until your hearing starts to go, then you'll need subtitles for English.

[Pickled Onion]

I already do for films where they mumble or have a Southern US drawl or the director thinks it's great to mingle the dialogue with loud ambient noise.

English [CC] often also includes the lyrics - I've never been able to follow song lyrics on first hearing - but can get a bit much (as a hearing person) when it fills the screen with [muffled snigger] [grunting] [mournful piano music in the distance] etc.

[T42]

Le Coup de Torchon, a 1981 film about a complacent and somewhat pathetic flic in 1938 Central Africa.  It's in French with only French subtitles so it's probably not on Netflics in the UK, which is a pity because it's bloody good.

[T42]

I already do for films where they mumble or have a Southern US drawl or the director thinks it's great to mingle the dialogue with loud ambient noise.

English [CC] often also includes the lyrics - I've never been able to follow song lyrics on first hearing - but can get a bit much (as a hearing person) when it fills the screen with [muffled snigger] [grunting] [mournful piano music in the distance] etc.

We started one a while back where the subtitles were in large white upper case on a black background.  With two people talking most of the screen was covered.

[Jaded]

Wait until your hearing starts to go, then you'll need subtitles for English.

Indeed.

Now all we need is subtitling to move into the 21st century and allow users to format the text and background as they prefer.

[Mr Larrington]

I already do for films where they mumble or have a Southern US drawl or the director thinks it's great to mingle the dialogue with loud ambient noise.

English [CC] often also includes the lyrics - I've never been able to follow song lyrics on first hearing - but can get a bit much (as a hearing person) when it fills the screen with [muffled snigger] [grunting] [mournful piano music in the distance] etc.

We started one a while back where the subtitles were in large white upper case on a black background.  With two people talking most of the screen was covered.

I watched some documentary about the survivors of the Uruguayan rugby team plane crash in the Andes.  Many interviews at the crash site conducted, natch, in Spanish.  Eng. subtitles provided in a grey so light as to be practically indistinguishable from white.  A feature of the High Andes is that they are covered with SNO…

[Kim]

Now all we need is subtitling to move into the 21st century and allow users to format the text and background as they prefer.

This sort of thing (and availability of subtitles in general, tbh) is encouraging piracy.

[Peter]

Not really watched (but definitely going to track down) but caught a glimpse of the B & W masterpiece "Hindle Wakes".  Just as I switched to it, there was a 30sec sequence which included a 2-6-4 Stanier Tank, a 2-seater Allard coupe and a Blackpool balloon tram.  I think there's a plot as well.....

[Nuncio]

So that's Jojo Rabbit, 1917 and David Copperfield in the last few weeks. I'm on a roll. Probably Parasite next.

Well it took nearly a year but we got round to Parasite last week. Very good but I sometimes struggle with lurches between comedy and tragedy, and I was shocked when it took that abrupt turn. But it's been a week and I'm still finding myself thinking back to it.

[redshift]

Alien Nation.

I've not seen this since it came out about 30-odd years ago.  It hasn't aged well, but it was and remains a surprisingly watchable 1980's formula buddy-cop movie with all the required tropes: Irascible detective, institutional speciesism, Terence Stamp as the bad guy, terrible one-liners. It's a nearly good bad movie.

[Mrs Pingu]

Agree with all the comments on subtitles (some programs are just mumbly), but Kim, why are user selected subtitle settings encouraging piracy?

[Hot Flatus]

Started watching Life of Pi.

After 20 minutes I turned it off through sheer boredom.

[Kim]

Agree with all the comments on subtitles (some programs are just mumbly), but Kim, why are user selected subtitle settings encouraging piracy?

Because if you watch a programme on television or iPlayer or Netflix or the Channel 4 thing or whatever, the subtitles are frequently absent^[1] and often shit.  Complaining to the provider usually earns you a stock response and at best a refund on the rental of the film.

Meanwhile, if you pirate the programme, you can load it and a .srt file into your video player of choice, where you have full control of the font, colours, synchronisation, position^[2], two subtitles tracks at the same time^[3], etc.  And you don't have to sit through the shitverts.  Thanks to the proliferation of FOREIGNS in ABROAD, pirate .srt files are readily available for most things that are worth watching, though the quality of the transcription and/or translation can sometimes be a bit dubious.

After a few iterations of trying to do things properly, you start to get the fuckits and go straight to what's most likely to work.


_{[1] The particularly bastardly broadcaster trick is to provide subs for the first few episodes of a series and then give up.
[2] As an owner of a 5:4 monitor, I like to use a player that can render the subtitles in the letterbox area, so they aren't overlapping the video.
[3] Postman Piers does this with English at the top of the screen and Polish at the bottom for his partner.  Or possibly vice-versa.  Genius!}

[Beardy]

Well, that was a cheese fest. The Seventh Son, a ripping yarn of swords and sorcery. Well, ok a diverting 90 minutes when I should really have gone to bed.

Further to the above discussion wrt subtitles, as long as they text is on screen at the same time as the orator of said words, I’m happy; I certainly couldn’t tell you if they were lip sync’d. We’ve virtually stopped watching ITV content because the iteration of the Samsung ITV Player app that my TV supports doesn’t offer subs and we watch nearly everything on catch up, Netflix or Prime these days. It pisses me off big time when the BBC just bundles ‘live’ subs on iPlayer with All4 being the most consistent in serving usable subtitles. Netflix is still streets ahead of Prime, and on the rare occasion they have published content without subtitles, they usually add them within a week or so. All in my anecdotal experience of course, as I haven’t don’t a formal set of tests.

[T42]

Vivement Dimanche, directed by François Truffaut. Utter crap despite having a good cast. Bailed out half-way.

[Kim]

Space Sweepers

Just watched this.  On the basis that you can usually judge the tone of a science fiction film by the aesthetics of its spacecraft, put this down as two hours of absolutely top-notch greebling.

[rogerzilla]

Taken 2.  The series deteriorates as it progresses, so it's not *quite* shit.

[rogerzilla]

Run Silent, Run Deep.  I do like submarine films.  Das Boot is the pinnacle, of course, but this one is pretty good, even the effects.

[ian]

Taken 2.  The series deteriorates as it progresses, so it's not *quite* shit.

I believe Liam said of Taken 3 that losing your family once was awful, twice terrible, and three times: really bad parenting.

[Steph]

Cheapish sale at Asda "Jojo Rabbit"

Patchy at first, but good, and then there is a sudden switch (no spoilers). I laughed and wept.

Bloody good film.

[fuzzy]

The Dig on Netflix.
I can see how some think it a bit twee but I enjoyed it.

[andrewc]

A friend has drawn this to my attention & I've not seen it mentioned here.    Trailer.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkklZNE9S-g


https://vimeo.com/ondemand/motherload/293884562   Full film £5.95




MOTHERLOAD is a crowdsourced documentary about our cultural shift toward isolation and disconnection, what this means for the future of the planet, and how life on a cargo bike could be an antidote.
Filmmaker Liz Canning cycled everywhere until she had twins in 2008. Hauling babies via car was not only unsustainable but took the freedom and adventure out of life, and Liz felt trapped. She Googled “family bike” and uncovered a global movement of people replacing cars with cargo bikes: long-frame bicycles designed for carrying passengers and heavy loads. Liz set out to learn more, and MOTHERLOAD was born.
As Liz meets cargo bike inventors, riders and advocates all over the world, she contemplates the increasing tension between modern life and our hunter-gatherer DNA. She discovers the history, and potential future, of the bicycle as the “ultimate social revolutionizer.” When characters in the film encounter cultural resistance—in particular, bikelash focused on women and mothers--MOTHERLOAD draws connections to the struggle of cyclist Suffragettes and women's seemingly endless fight for bodily autonomy. 
Liz’s experiences as a cyclist, a mother, and in the making of MOTHERLOAD, reveal that sustainability is not necessarily about compromise and sacrifice, and there are few things more empowering, in an age of consumption, than the ability to create everything from what seems to be nothing.
NOTE TO PARENTS: Lots of kids LOVE this movie, but, a heads up-- there are a few brief images involving violence (a newspaper photo and a couple shots of zombies). There are also bits of adult language in the bikelash scene. We offer a censored version (in which this brief adult language is bleeped out) here: