Americans don’t seem to like foreign movies very much. Well, it’s not so much the movies, really; its more the actual fact that they’re … foreign. Lousy foreigners…
One reason for the American aversion to foreign cinema is this whole language thing. We Americans, generally speaking, aren’t particularly skilled at deciphering these foreign lingos and, as a matter of fact, many of us actually have a noticeable degree of difficulty with our own tongue. There are, of course several ways of dealing with this shortcoming.
The first method of compensating for the filthy, shifty foreign nature of foreign language films is the use of subtitles. If the blessed people of the USA can’t understand what the characters onscreen are saying, then by all means put words at the bottom to help us out. Unfortunately, one thing the average modern American seems to hate even more than watching non-American movies is reading just about anything. Reading is dangerous because it might lead to thinking, so people avoid it at all costs and shun any developments that might bring book-like aspects to good ol’ brain-killing cinema. Currently, we Americans are also tossing around a few ideas to burn books and chase down readers with robotic hounds.1
The second compensation method is dubbing. Dubbing is a process by which one removes the original, carefully-crafted, offensively un-American soundtrack in order to replace it with a hastily-recorded substitute in which American actors almost completely fail to match their verbal acting to the physical performances of the now-muted foreign actors–who mostly seem to have had an entirely different take on the characters than their English-speaking voice-over artists did. Oh, sure, the voice actors make a half-assed attempt to make the words vaguely correlate with the mouth movements, which never works out and forces the line-readings to possess a really awkward, stilted delivery. And, as Americans predisposed to viewing our own superior American movies, we’re a bit spoiled and tend to have high expectations for a film’s lips-synching-up-with-the-dialogue quotient. In fact, we tend to yell at the screen in outrage when our fine domestic films fall out of sync or skip. On such occasions it is customary for the theater to offer us a small beverage. But I digress…
The third method is to just Remake the Whole God-Damned Picture. Rewritten by American writers, acted by American actors, and filmed on American locations.2 Hence, La Femme Nikita becomes The Point of No Return, ‘starring’ Bridget Fonda. This method has become very popular in recent years. It has been generally well-accepted by American movie-goers, who no longer have any idea that they’re watching a foreign movie at all. In particular, ever since The Ring became a hit, American studios seem to be creaming all over themselves to get the rights to make American versions of Japanese horror movies. Pulse, The Grudge, Dark Water … There’s been a lot of these J-pop reboots over the past few years. This method also makes a remarkable demonstration of the specificity of Hollywood uninventiveness. Long gone are the comparatively original days when a popular action movie would simply inspire studios to release a shitload of other action movies. Now entire plots, themes, and even countries-of-origin are ripped off.
Yes, The Ring didn’t just inspire more horror movies, it didn’t just inspire more remakes and it didn’t just inspire more remakes of horror movies. No, The Ring prompted the Hollywood system to return to the well and actually whip out more remakes of Japanese horror movies. Hey, it worked once, right?
So if a docudrama about the ingrown toenail of a German-born man living in Istanbul were to suddenly become an unexpected hit, then I guarantee you that by this time next year the market would suffer through the release of at least four additional docudramas about ingrown toenails of German-born men living in Istanbul.
Hollywood is no longer a town where movies are made. It’s been transformed into a great, big, multi-million-dollar Xerox machine.
I remember seeing The Ring in the theater soon after its release. At the time I was as unaware of its Japanese origins as the rest of my similarly ignorant countrymen. The thing that struck me most about The Ring, though, was how damned uneven it was. I mean, there were a lot of really good ideas in it and much of the film really is genuinely creepy, but …it was also …y’know …kind of stupid.
My mind kept trying to break into an involuntary, heckle-happy MST3K mode. This is not a good sign for a movie. To this day, I honestly don’t even know if I liked the film or not. I just kept wondering how a movie with so many great and inspired ideas could also have so many lame, shitty aspects. It was almost as if someone had made a really interesting horror movie and then someone else had come along and f&*ked it up real bad. As if some Japanese people had done something really good and scary and then some American said, “Hey, it would be cool to have a horse jump off a boat.”
This is mere speculation on my part. I still haven’t seen the Japanese version so, for all I know, it might have been really lousy and the American production crew did what they could to save it. Honestly, however, I just don’t have that much faith in the American film industry. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of good movies and I’ve seen a lot of bad movies, but it’s a relatively rare experience to see a film that flip-flops between the two states as frequently as The Ring did.
But, no matter what I have to say about the film industry’s lack of inspiration, there are a couple of foreign films that have somehow managed to garner unexpected popularity in spite of Hollywood’s best efforts to Americanize them.
Take Mad Max. Yeah, awesome movie. But it holds an interesting place in history as the only movie I can think of off the top of my head to have been dubbed into English from English. It was in English already, but Aussies have ridiculous accents. So, some brilliant luminary decided to re-record the dialogue using people who–and this is the key point–didn’t sound like Australians. This way, apart from the steering wheels being on the wrong side of the cars, American audiences would be none the wiser. Looks like an American desert wasteland to me!
Since it started off as English anyway, lip-synch wasn’t so much of an issue; but watch it and you still get the sensation that the wrong voices are coming out of the wrong heads. Well, except for Mel. He dubbed himself with his own fakey American accent. Even though the film was released in 1979 the original, Australian audio wouldn’t see American distribution until 2002.
Another film, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is notorious for its awkward dubbing. But honestly, the funniest thing about the movie, for me, is that Raymond Burr somehow ended up starring in it. Gojira, as it’s known in its nation of origin, is a Japanese movie made in Japan with Japanese actors and absolutely no American TV lawyers at all, a selling feature in most quarters. But to make the film more accessible to American audiences it was decided to give the film an American face.
Enter Raymond Burr as reporter Steve Martin (no, not that Steve Martin). Some new scenes were filmed (without the original actors) and the movie was re-edited to make Raymond Burr look like the main character even though nothing he ever does has any kind of impact on the plot. Mostly, he just stands around looking serious while Godzilla stomps on stuff. And, because the original actors weren’t involved, he has a lot of conversations with the backs of people’s heads.
In terms of the story, Burr is supposedly in Japan to visit his close friend who also happens to be the scientist responsible for the giant Alka-Seltzer tablet that ultimately brings about Godzilla’s demise. The relationship between the two men seems a bit thin, considering that Burr and the scientist buddy in question never actually appear in any scenes together. The closest they come is in a scene where they talk on the phone while the Japanese actor’s face is carefully concealed behind a wall of lab equipment.3
To make matters worse, a lot of the film’s more serious and interesting themes were de-emphasized in the US version to make way for more inexplicable footage of Perry Mason during every single monster attack in the movie. This makes the film a fairly frustrating experience. You can almost pick up the little hints of greatness that have been glossed over.
If you’re only familiar with the Burr version, you should check out the Japanese original. Forget the campy sequels, and if you can overlook some silly pseudo-science then Gojira is actually a genuinely good movie. And, it was just released on DVD, so it’s easily available and you have no excuse for missing it.
But, to the American editors’ credit, it did take me several viewings to figure out the ruse. I saw the film a number of times as a kid and as a teenager and always thought it was kind of weird that the Japanese put an American-speaking actor in their movie. While it becomes pretty obvious once you’ve been clued in to the trick, I must admit that I was probably in my twenties before I ever actually said, “Hey … Wait a minute!”
1 Read Fahrenheit 451, dammit.
2 Or Canadian locations. They’re cheaper. Or better yet, Romania.
3 Because it was a different actor, you see …
Izod shirt. So I did my best to fit in by bobbing my head in unison with my chattering queue-mates and muttered “yeah, this guy is awesome” in response to the their intermittent attempts at inter-cult communication. It seemed to satisfy them; while their head-bobbing was unchanged, I somehow sensed a certain warmth in the bobs following my contribution that was not present in the bobs prior to my dissemblance. At any rate, none of them pulled a Donald Sutherland.
Enough, cruel world, my laptop will die today. Memory and hard drive will be ripped from its quivering body and replaced with evil upgrades capable of hosting the Penguin. My poison shall be SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, or SLED.
