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lizardman posted:There's definitely a "thing" in the west about appealing to kids' mischievous sides (and making teens more comfortable watching) with kid/family movies. See: DreamWorks face, "angry Kirby", etc., that simply doesn't fly in Asia. I remember hearing in Japan they had to push Lisa as the star of The Simpsons because folks would be too put off by Bart's behavior. It works the opposite way, too. I remember John Lasseter in an interview commenting on how in Spirited Away the perception of Chihiro to Japanese and U.S. audiences profoundly alters the context of the story, despite the fact that Lasseter and his team worked very hard to maintain Miyazaki's vision (as opposed to many distributors who see adapting a foreign movie to a new audience as a bottom-line affair where anything is subject to change). In Japan, Chihiro is a spoiled brat, a product of her parents' own presumptuous rudeness. In the U.S., however, the style with which Chihiro is treated and raised by her parents is actually far more common. The difference is subtle, because the arch of the character remains fundamentally the same, but the effect is that Chihiro's experiences appear even more unfair in the U.S. version.
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Jun 4, 2014 21:18
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This is quickly going to become one of the best and most important threads in CineD. Is there anybody with a greater knowledge of martial arts films who can discuss the extent to which American imports of these films frequently get the 'spirit of kung fu' lost in translation? I remember a podcast interview with Ric Meyers about precisely this topic, but I've been fruitless in locating it.
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Jun 5, 2014 21:22
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acephalousuniverse posted:It's probably not really appropriate for the thread but I think about this paragraph from the Wikipedia page for The Producers and laugh to myself like, once a week. This is absolutely appropriate. Cracked had a pretty good introductory write up on title changes in different cultures: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-insane-ways-movie-titles-are-translated-around-world/ It's really interesting to think about all of the 'implied franchises' that end up getting created this way.
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Jun 5, 2014 23:58
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wdarkk posted:I think my favorite has to be the Italians changing all giant monster movies to King Kong, even though they know he's not in there (because they changed the poster to add him). Italians love their giant gorillas. But the most surreal one is the one that basically looks like King Kong crossed with Godzilla, as if they thought, "Eh, we gonna lie true our teeth to deez kids, buts thats no reasons for deceptives advertisings!" Uncle Boogeyman posted:The classic example is the Italian "Zombi" franchise. What makes this even more interesting is that occasionally you get U.S. specialty DVD companies "carrying on the tradition" of blatantly lying about their product. I have the Shriek Show 25th anniversary DVD from Media Blasters,* but around the same time Blue Underground was just starting to get traction as a pretty great exploitation, seedy foreign film re-distributor, so they also had their own release with the added benefit of getting the rights to both Zombi 3 and Zombi 4. But they also acquired the rights to a complete unrelated '80s zombie movie called Killing Birds, and release it as Zombie 5: Killing Birds. *It's really not a very solid film. It manages to somehow be even more uneven than Dawn of the Dead, though it does work as an interesting kind of quasi-prequel. I also have no intention of parting with it just because the packaging is beautiful and looks good on my shelf. The really dumb thing I did was give away the one-sheet that came with it.
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Jun 6, 2014 22:33
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:If you're referring to Zombi 2, I actually think it's a minor masterpiece. I urge you to revisit it. The tropical island setting is hugely effective and was extremely influential within the Italian horror scene, and the Fabio Frizzi score is one of my favorite movie soundtracks ever. Lol, I've tried it four times all the way through and no dice. At the most it keeps me morbidly curious enough to keep coming back, and those first twenty minutes are some of the best I've seen in Italian exploitation. But that was Dawn of the Dead's problem, too, for me. When you sit down and watch both films, you realize that the preamble is actually more interesting than what comes after. I'm not putting down Fulci, and I've only seen one of his other films (Don't Torture a Duckling, which I really got into). And watching the DVD special features I really appreciated that screenwriters Elisa Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti decided to combine both the contemporary and 'classic' concepts of the zombie. It's certainly an important film, because it's really the first one that explicitly connects the flesh-eating ghouls that Romero invented to the concept of the 'living dead.' But as with Dawn of the Dead, I think it's another case where 'significant' doesn't necessarily translate to great cinema. Uncle Boogeyman posted:I love the Italian film industry. It's so joyfully sleazy. Italian exploitation is like the Bart Simpson of international cinema, a "shameless burlesque of irrepressible youth." But, I could go on and on, so, I'll make an effort post:  That, my friends, is the Japanese poster for Monster King Godzilla, the Japanese dub of the international market re-edit of Gojira. Most of what I'm about to write is apocryphal, so just know that I'm printing the legend. The movie apparently did quite well, but anybody who has seen Godzilla, King of the Monsters! already knows that it basically replaces the documentary perspective of the original and has everything channeled through Raymond Burr's perspective. There's a good deal of film that is told simply through Burr basically watching Gojira without subtitles and having his guide translate for him. Thus, when the film was translated back into Japanese, often times it comes off as if the translator is blatantly lying to Burr about what people in the movie have actually said.
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Jun 7, 2014 00:10
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So, I've officially seen the U.S. theatrical cut, Romero's extended cut, and the European international version, and, honestly, I have to say that I think I prefer the foreign cut better. It's interesting that Argento's minor changes, while subtracting from Romero's intent, especially in the opening scenes, overall have the effect of calling attention to things that I hadn't noticed in either of the 'preferred' versions of the film. Obviously, there's the greater presence of Goblin's score, which actually fits perfectly with the nightmare comic book tone of the film's production design, and brings a lot of life to a story that really is much more episodic than your standard horror film. But Argento's tighter editing also allows those episodes to feel more like the natural progression of these characters as they attempt to run away both from anarchy (represented by the zombies) and fascism (represented by the martial law implemented by the U.S. government). It didn't occur to me until watching this version of the film that Romero's film doesn't actually work that well as a satire of consumerism. On the other hand, it brilliantly captures the hypnotizing appeal of violence and destruction. The national guardsmen escape martial law, the news people escape mediated lies, but they ultimately can't help but take a little pleasure in having the freedom to kill indiscriminately, the zombies giving them the opportunity to act out literally that which already takes place via martial oppression and propaganda.
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Jun 14, 2014 21:41
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penismightier posted:And why not? I guess because so much of its imagery -- while there's the connection between the zombies consuming and consumerism -- seems to be far more preoccupied with the cycle of violence which is already a more prominent feature of Night of the Living Dead. It's not necessarily any of our extant consumerist structures that 'feed' the zombies. Indeed, the zombies, like the living, go to the mall, even if they have nothing to consume. One can argue that 'window shopping' and social interaction within a mall is a reflection of consumerism in and of itself, of course. But perhaps the reason those previous cuts of the film didn't resonate with me was because I was too preoccupied with that consumerist imagery. It's certainly an important part of Romero's film, but I'm actually now starting to read it as just one part of a broader criticism that he's making of human nature. Consumerism as represented not only by the zombies frequenting the mall, but our protagonists finding sanctuary within consumerism, seems to actually be a reflection of the same violence and conflict portrayed on the talk show, the raid, the hunting down of the zombies. They all serve as kinds of stages for the elimination of death. The mall is another stage, but it's only a stage. Consumerism doesn't make the zombies want to consume, nor does it make Roger have a nervous breakdown. Consumerism responds to the desire for 'eternal life.' The appearance of the living dead catalyzes the collapse of Order (which, because the movie starts in media res, is implicitly non-existant). On one side, the government insists upon the total elimination of the dead. But people still cling to the wish of life's permanence, the ability of humans to transcend death, which makes the body sacred. But both sides -- the materialist and privileged, and the spiritualist underprivileged -- doom themselves to an intractable, violent opposition which only replicates death on an even grander scale. This doesn't mean that neither side has useful information to offer. But what the government bureaucrats don't understand is that eliminating the corpses won't eliminate death. And what the Old Priest doesn't understand is that 'stopping the killing' will also not lead to salvation, eternal life. Romero contrives a scenario in which the only moral action is to destroy oneself, to embrace the ultimatum of death. By turning to gun against one's own brain -- the vessel of our desires, our delusions -- like the young national guardsmen who kills himself minutes into the raid, one rejects the living death that is obscured by political propaganda, irresponsible journalism, racism, and consumerism. Regardless of Romero's intent, I don't think consumerism is the be-all/end-all of his film's subtext. Rather, I think the mall functions as kind of the 'last stage;' late capitalism is the ultimate realization of our naive clinging to living death.
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Jun 14, 2014 22:21
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Though merely an element, wouldn't that strengthen that particular motif? I mean "consumers as mindless zombies" is a surface level observation, but there's a lot more going on textually, as you say. This is why I connected it back to my experience of the theatrical, Romero, and Argento cuts. The way I tried to frame my initial observation was that I think the unique structures of all three versions of the film have their own pro's and con's, and that one of the pro's of Argento's faster-edited, more musical, streamlined version of the story is that, at least to me, it seemed like the connection between 'human nature' and 'consumerism' was more fluid and natural. I'm contrasting this with Romero's more protracted, plodding pacing and editing style. For instance, both the theatrical and Romero cut of the film have the closing credits play over images of the mall itself accompanied by 'elevator music.' Argento axed this and put in some very generic credits. While the latter is kind of a boring creative decision, it seems to summarize the differences between the cuts. I find that Romero's vision is too on-the-nose, that his intrigue with consumerism isn't necessarily as exciting or engaging to me as Argento's more generic fascination with the living dead. But I don't want to derail about my own arbitrary reading of the film(s). So I'll open up a question: Can anyone else think of a foreign cut of a film that they felt was superior to the original? Whether in terms of how the script is translated, what images foreign distributors may choose to excise?
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Jun 17, 2014 17:51
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:The eclectic carnivalesque of Romero's cut with less Goblin and more library music is much sillier but also much more apocalyptic, there's a real exuberance a lot of similar films don't have (just as many post apoc Road Warrior ripoffs would never allow their hero to do something so uncool as eating dog food). The anarchic license to take lives is the primary source of thrills for a lot of characters in Dawn of the Dead, and it's filtered by acculturation. In some cases, it's a duty, in others, a wild, undisciplined urge - we have tribes of cops, bikers, city folk, good ol' boys, slum dwellers, etc. seeking different ends in an orgy of slaughter. That's actually a very interesting reading because, if anything, I think Argento's brisker pacing helps to make this apocalypse more presciently chaotic. And if I could pick an adjective for Goblin's compositions throughout much of the film, it might have to be "carnivalesque," especially during the good ol' boys section. But thanks for tying the film back to PA's socioeconomic turmoil, and the broader national crisis of the time. There's a very palpable element to Dawn, just like with Night, that despite the clear comic book exaggerations, that what one is witnessing is not at all different from 'reality.' I think that that apocalyptic gnosis isn't lost and is, in fact, helped by Argento's additions and excisions. I think they make for a more subtle film in which "the anarchic license to take lives" isn't lost on the spectator because Romero already does such a good job of establishing these things through the characters' actions.
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Jun 17, 2014 22:08
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