Tuesday 4 August 2009

You Know What Really Grinds My Gears?

People who refuse to watch a film just because it has subtitles!!!

This weekend we started screening COCO BEFORE CHANEL to big audiences (thanks to the fact that nowhere else in Aberdeen is showing it... cheers Vue & Cineworld!), but there was a small percentage of customers who decided against seeing it when they discovered it was in French with English subtitles. "I came in to watch a movie, nae read one" - sample customer.

Now to be fair to them, the advertising campaigns on the TV seem to have glossed over the fact it is subtitled, but I am urging these people not to be put off by having to make that little bit of extra effort while at the cinema. Why? Because they are missing out on a whole world of fantastic films by limiting themselves to the movies that come out of the UK and USA. The quality of films from France, Asia and Mexico in the last few years is worth a thousand TRANSFORMERS 2 or SCARY MOVIES.

Since CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON made a breakthrough in how UK audiences saw foreign language films in 2000, these are some of the excellent films that people have missed out on because they are subtitled:

BATTLE ROYALE, PAN'S LABYRINTH, DOWNFALL, TELL NO ONE, THE LIVES OF OTHERS, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, RINGU, INFERNAL AFFAIRS, etc, etc.

So please, check out these films in your local independent cinema when they are released (it's why we are here after all) before they are remade by Hollywood (like any Asian horror film or Let The Right One In). After all, they won't all turn out like the Oscar-winning THE DEPARTED!!!

1 comment:

  1. And let's not forget Amilie which made Audrey Tatu famous!! It's subtitled, and so is the excellent 'Subway' another fab French film, as is the BBC4 serial 'Spiral', a belter of a French police drama. If you watch it enough, your brain starts filling in dialogue, so you think its in English rather than whatever other language it is... I saw Crouching Tiger 3 times at the Belmont and by the end I couldn't remember if it was the dubbed version or not!!

    Keep up the good work, Dallas, the Belmont is the star of our cinema history!!

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