@ford_dent said:
As a side note, this was the first film I've seen since I moved to Germany. I'm very impressed with the quality of their dubbing! The dude who voiced Jude Law's character was particularly good.
They still do that? I would say it's borderline offensive to the art. As a film fanatic, half of what I go to witness is the craft of acting. To me, this is as silly as dubbing a album would be.
I think dubbing is quite an interesting area of film and film history. I'm not a fan of watching dubbed films either but I think we might be victims of our era on that one. Films from the 60s and 70s, particularly European ones, seem to frequently have been dubbed in all versions. I think this is partly due to the limitations of technology. I believe I'm right in saying that the reason Herzog had to redub all the dialogue in Aguirre: The Wrath of God is because they couldn't get a good recording on site due to the noise of the river. Supposedly, neither the German or English versions feature the voice of the star, Klaus Kinski, because he demanded too much money to go back into the studio.
There were also occasions where films were dubbed over because the international nature of the production made it necessary. In Once Upon a Time in the West, the female lead (Claudia Cardinale) had all her lines dubbed over by someone else for the English release, along with a number of other actors. I think I'm right in saying that in a number of spaghetti westerns, Italian actors would actually say their lines in Italian and have the English dubbed over.
Even now, lines will often be switched in the edit, usually by inserting the voice from a different take, or perhaps a later ADR session, and putting it on top of a reverse shot of the actor. It's hard to disagree that you lose something of the performance in those older films, though.
I watched two films today: John Wick which I thought was OK. Maybe not as revelatory as the reaction to it suggested. I quite enjoyed the silliness of the weird, super sophisticated and regulated criminal world that it created, but thought the action sequences got quite samey. It was fun, and on Amazon Prime so I can't complain.
Also watched Bad Moms, which I remember thinking looked OK when it came out, if only for Kathryn Hahn. I was very wrong because it's actually complete trash. Part of it is just that I find Mila Kunis a very irritating presence at the best of times, but it's not just that. It totally dodges any of the hard questions about its subject matter, giving them the most milquetoast treatment possible, whilst still having huge stretches of heavy handed moralising. The "villains" of the piece are so cartoonishly horrible that the struggles of the protagonist(s) never feel real or relatable. Their problems never seem to actually be stopping them doing what they want to do, and when they do decide to become bad moms, they do it in the safest, most PG-13 way possible. At the end of the film it tries to "rescue" the main villain by giving her a bit of human emotion, but this comes literally out of nowhere and seems like a cynical attempt to copy the format/structure of Bridesmaids almost exactly. That is something of a running issue with the film, but it never comes even close to getting past the very surface of what makes Bridesmaids great. It feels like a germ of an idea desperately scrabbling around for a plot, papering over the cracks with a lame attempt at right-on politics. I honestly enjoyed Dirty Grandpa more than this film.
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