cl alluded to the language barrier. It's something I really considered with this film, more so than with other foreign movies, because it's so stylized; I was wondering whether they had a really particular or stylized way of talking that got lost in translation. Did anyone else have that feeling?
I remember reading a long time ago — in The Nation, I think, when I still subscribed — a film reviewer who described Pedro Almodovar this way: Imagine if Woody Allen had grown up gay in General Franco's Spain. That makes a certain amount of sense to me. Anyone else see it?
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Other than the fact that it is not possible to imagine Woody Allen growing up gay in Franco’s Spain—might as well imagine him growing up as a blond surfer boy in SoCal—there are some obvious comparisons in their movie making. Most notable is the way they both focus on the neurotic city dweller. There are Freudian takes on this too. I’m trying to remember which Almodovar film has a black and white SciFi interlude featuring a shrinking man. He gets smaller and smaller until one night he climbs up into his girlfriend’s vagina while she sleeps. I bet Woody Allen liked that bit if he saw it.
Yeah, Woody Allen would think that was really neat.
I found this short, interesting blurb that touches on a few of these topics, plus his 10-year career as a clerk for the phone company.
I thought that because the movie came off as a farce, some of the simplistic dialogue was complementary. Like the whole bizarre Pepa commerical. "No blood! Or guts! Unbelievable!"
Or the scene where the telephone repairman and policeman exchanged IDs.
I copied this from imdb to quote it correctly ... but there was this passage:
"Learning mechanics is easier than learning male psychology. You can figure out a bike, but you can never figure out a man."
I thought these cliché-type lines, very simplistic, were deliberate in any translation.
In movies like this, it is important to have the DVD. Here's a tip, which is what I did: Have the subtitles on, and have the audio language on English. There are differences in translations and sometimes it help give a better idea of what the writer intended.
Clever, boy. I’ll have to try that.
It sounds so pretty in Spanish, though. I could tolerate English on a second viewing, I guess. I remember seeing "Like Water for Chocolate" with subtitles ... terrific ... and then accidentally renting a VHS with voiceover. Horrible.
Yes, until George just gave me a reason I might want to use them, I would have said that dubbed sound tracks are one of the world’s irredeemable evils as is Musak: they both diminish the quality of people’s lives even if they don’t know it.
I did get the sense that some lines, while very funny, were probably even funnier in the original language.
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