I am so furious right now... (1 Viewer)

ThomasC · Mar 22, 2004

I'm in a Chinese film class this semester, and we have film screenings every Monday. Today, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was scheduled. Everything was going just fine until the first words were spoken...in ENGLISH!!! WTF?!?!?!?! We haven't watched any movies dubbed until now, and I was looking forward to see this again! UGH! So, after the shock wore off, I whispered to a couple of my classmates, "What the fuck, this is DUBBED!!!" Then I went to the teacher and asked, "Do you realize that this is dubbed? I can't watch this." He just shrugged, and so I walked out. I mean, WTF?!?!?!

Alex Spindler · Mar 22, 2004

I think the appropriate question was...were you Fast?

I hope the same attitude doesn't translate to other foreign film showings. :frowning: This is an especially bad situation given how great the deliveries by Chow and Michelle are.

ThomasC · Mar 22, 2004

Was I fast? Are you asking how long I stayed before I walked out? About a minute or two after the dialogue started. I had to think for a few seconds about whether or not I was going to walk out. A few seconds of English convinced me to walk out. I think this is the only dubbed movie that will be shown, due to the popularity of the film. The rest of the films on our list are Hero, Yi Yi, Ermo, Chungking Express, and some other movie that came out in the past few years, I can't remember the whole title, just two words, one of them was "Spring."

Richard Travale · Mar 22, 2004

No, I think he was playing on "The Fast and the Furious".

I would talk to the dean of whichever department this class is a part of. A class like this should only be showing subtitled films at least.

ThomasC · Mar 22, 2004

Haha, I did think of that at first. I'm one of the few teenagers that didn't see The Fast and the Furious when it came out, and I still haven't seen it.

Alex Spindler · Mar 22, 2004

George_W_K · Mar 22, 2004

I agree Thomas, for your class, it should have been in its original form.

SteveGon · Mar 22, 2004

Thomas, my sympathies! Out of curiosity I watched a few minutes of CTHD in English and it was simply terrible. Your professor should be ashamed!

Malcolm R · Mar 22, 2004

Not to defend this, but were they playing a VHS or DVD? I think the VHS copies were all English (unless special ordered, perhaps).

ThomasC · Mar 22, 2004

It was a Hong Kong DVD or something like that. There were English, Chinese, and Russian/Hebrew-like copyright warnings. There's no excuse.

Matt Pelham · Mar 22, 2004

So you're taking a film class where the professor screens dubbed bootlegs!!??!!

Patrick McCart · Mar 22, 2004

That really stinks.

In the Spanish class I'm in, we watched Like Water For Chocolate... the professor thankfully had the original Spanish audio and English subtitles on.

You'd think that the original language would be really important in a foreign language class...

Dennis Pagoulatos · Mar 22, 2004

Your professor is obviously a slack-jawed troglodyte and should be beaten to death with plastic spoons for such treachery! (yeah, it might take a while, so what?!)

Not that this is any excuse...BUT: Chow and Michelle are obviously very uncomfortable speaking Mandarin in the film, since it's not their language (that would be Cantonese), at least it always seemed that way to this high-five'in white guy...and was corroborated by one of my Chinese friends (who looked on with amazement that someone who doesn't speak either Cantonese or Mandarin could notice that). I guess that means I'm a really cool guy, he he he.

-Dennis

Yee-Ming · Mar 22, 2004

Bizarre. A bit like someone in China studying, say Shakespeare , in the Chinese translation...

What Dennis said. I speak Mandarin, although not Cantonese, and having watched CTHD in the original Mandarin, it is obvious to Mandarin speakers that Chow Yun-fat is struggling with Mandarin, Michelle Yeoh less so but still a little awkward. Zhang Ziyi, on the other hand, being from China, has no difficulty.

And Matt, HK does produce legit DVDs you know

ThomasC · Mar 22, 2004

At least some of the movies are taken from the university library, so I don't know.

Kwang Suh · Mar 22, 2004

Who knows? Maybe he thought the Chinese was spoken so badly that he couldn't handle it. I know some of the Chinese people that were in the theatre with me when I saw the movie were either laughing, going "what the hell is he saying?" or wincing.

Jesse Skeen · Mar 22, 2004

I took a so-called film class 10 years ago where they screened everything on VHS! DVDs didn't exist yet, but I already had a laserdisc player so in writing assignments I'd bitch about the awful picture quality- they had 2 speakers but it sounded like a mono VCR was hooked up to them. The movies we watched on our own I always made a point of indicating I watched them on laserdisc! I pretty much trashed the class at the end-of-semester evaluation! Yes, I am an elitist bastard.
(The teacher got additional demerits from me from stopping the tapes during the end credits.)

Yee-Ming · Mar 22, 2004

Not really a valid excuse IMHO. Say you're from Quebec, you're not going to watch Prince of Thieves on the French dub just because Costner's accent is so horrendous, are you? Or for that matter any movie featuring an American actor trying to be a chirpy Cockney.

Also, I'm assuming not everyone in Thomas' class speaks Mandarin; for that matter Thomas, how many actually do?

But I must confess something as I get off my high-horse here: I tend to watch Hong Kong movies in Mandarin... :b but I'll die before watching one with an English dub!

ThomasC · Mar 23, 2004

No one knows it well enough except for the professor.

streeter · Mar 23, 2004

Good that you walked out. I'm surprised that you were the only one - You should have coaxed some of your fellow students to do the same.

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