PC Translations

I’ve been writing some more extensive thoughts about the film at my new blog. Rather than reposting it all here, I will link you to those articles:

Star-Crossed Lovers
With the Bible in One Hand, and Shakespeare in the Other
Mute Testimonials
When Art is Overtaken By Popular Culture

The themes of postcolonialism and the interaction between traditional art and popular culture are nicely represented in the interplay between Shakespeare and Bollywood in the film.  It was a very enjoyable movie, and I think it will stay in my mind for a very long time.

When the Spanish film Pan’s Labyrinth came to Singapore, I missed it (I was overseas). I was really glad to see, upon my arrival in Shanghai, that my friend had the DVD. I enjoyed watching the show over the weekend.

Pan’s Labyrinth isn’t quite what I had expected. It is more concerned with the “real world” of war and politics than your typical fantasy story is. The fairy tale elements are clearly in place simply to parallel and illustrate what is going on in “real” life. It is almost as if the fairy tale is simply there to help this young girl try to make sense of her world.

The fairy tale creatures were neither as amazingly beautiful nor as horrifying as is typical for a fairy tale. Sure, in some parts they are disgusting, but at no point does the viewer actually feel “oh boy, she’s in for it now.” The real fear occurs in the real-world events.

What I particularly enjoyed in the film was the paralleling of the doctor’s decision in real life, and the girl’s in her fairy tale setting. I thought it made a very important point about the choices we all have, even when we feel that we have none. It was protrayed quite beautifully. On the one hand, it felt a bit simplistic at times, but on the other, it was moving in its simplicity.

Illumitoon has released Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo cartoons to be shown on the Cartoon Network. Right now you can check out the Official Website! Take a look at this site and you can hear about their trade-in program that they are offering to customers who were not satisfied with the DVD version they have purchased. The reason some customers were not satisfied was that some of the DVDs came with “dubtitles.” This means that the films were dubbed with English voices, instead of using the original soundtrack and placing subtitles at the bottom of the screen.

Here’s what is so cool about it. Some users didn’t like the dubbing, preferring to hear the original soundtrack instead. So, Illumitoons is allowing those customers to trade in their dubtitled DVDs for DVDs with original soundtracks instead.

I have watched a fair number of Japanese anime films, though I am not exactly an afficiando.  I often watch them with the kids in my life, my nephews or godchildren especially.  I enjoy some of them and find anime an especially artistic medium of popular culture. Japanese anime has come a long, long way since the old Speed Racer cartoons I grew up on. The detail that you’ll find in anime films these days can really be incredible. I thought that this one was especially good in this department.

Check out the website and see what you think.

This is a sponsored post. If you’d like to write sponsored posts too, click on this tab.

How could a film be more delightful than that? It is quirky and odd, and disjointed here and there, and just… well, fun.

I found myself laughing out loud in several places in the film. It is a real riot, and it is so lighthearted and fun. It seems that there are so many times that a movie fails to make me think much unless it is a dark and brooding, but Amelie engages the mind while delighting and entertaining too.

If you’ve not seen it yet, don’t miss this movie. It really is excellent.

Hawke’s Hamlet is not my favorite of those I look at in class (Gibson and Olivier being the others, and now adding in the Chinese production The Banquet). I think some of the performers are too self-conscious. But it isn’t just that. It is also that, in many ways, the language isn’t fully believable in the setting, which is sad. Normally, I am perfectly fine with keeping the original language in a modern setting, but it just wasn’t quite pulled off in this version. (It’s some of the same feeling I get from Romeo + Juliet.)

I liked some things about the film though. I liked the film-within-the film, and thought it was a nice adaptation of the original play-withing-the-play. And the “To be or not to be” scene was pretty nicely done, set in the action section of a video rental shop. That makes for a nice contrast with the inaction Hamlet is sucked into.

In a previous post, I wrote a review the recent Chinese big-budget adaptation of Hamlet, The Banquet. It was a very well-made movie, and has been on my mind often since I watched it toward the end of last year. I loved the scene where the Hamlet character did a prolonged consideration of the importance of masks and making a mask of one’s face. I thought it was an excellent demonstration of the importance of theatricality in the play. It translated very well into this film version. I actually liked it much better than Hawke’s performance.

That said, Hawke’s performance, and the whole film, has something to be said for it. I think it is an interesting film to consider in a study of the play and its adaptations onto the screen.

I am not usually a film noir afficiando. But I did have fun stopping to catch this one, and it was certainly better than sitting through hundreds of game shows while I waited for my flight.

I don’t think I could ever get to be a real film noir fan either. But one thing I did notice, particularly as I thought back on it with this blog in mind (it is, after all, supposed to be about translations and things), was how easily film noir translates from one culture to another. While it is true that it has its conventions and all, it still is an easy to read genre, relatively speaking. It isn’t that hard to break the code, so to speak.

Perhaps that is why it can’t survive. A code too easily broken ceases to be interesting.

Recently, after watching Babel with a friend, she bemoaned the fact that all these circuitous narratives, seemingly disjointed but ultimately connected by odd circumstances, and spanning cultures… how all these sorts of films (that are so popular these days) have to have a dreary, dark outlook on things. Crazy Stone is the exception. I found it an excellent counterbalance to all of that. Wonderful film, and hilarious too.

The story line of the film is outstanding. I think the actors do a great job of pulling that together too.

But part of what really intrigues me is the overt political message involved — a message of peace and even more, a message that there is only one China. But, what is intriguing is not the overt message, but how that message is undermined in the film. While the overt message is that one China is desirable, at any cost, it seems to me that the subtext is “well, yes, and we know what it will cost… the blood of our people.”

I wonder that the film has not received more political posturing as a response, but somehow it seems that this message was more or less ignored.

One of my Chinese friends gave me an idea as to why it might have been ignored. “We are so desensitized to that set of messages that we don’t even notice them anymore,” she said.

Ah.