Kill Pig Day and MORE

Marc Scott is a budding video maker based in Taiwan.  Catch his latest work entitled "Kill Pig Day" at the link below:
http://www.vimeo.com/10602546

Marc's Taipei Film Network has plenty more video links.  Check them out: facebook

On subtitles and dubbing

Subtitles happen to be very accepted in Taiwan as a way to bridge the gap between Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka speakers. This is not to mention helping people understand the Cantonese spoken in HK movies, as well or the myriad of English, Japanese and Korean shows and movies.

They also have the added benefit of allowing people to watch TV with the volume off. To see this, watch the people looking at silent TVs through windows or in noisy public places where you wouldn't be able to hear due to the background volume anyway. Gyms are a good case in point. With all the whirring and thumping machines, TVs for exercisers to watch attached to their machines have the sound turned off. Though I wish I could read the characters fast enough!

This being said, there are also the occasionally dubbed shows. One of the most hilarious, from a Western point of view, is a Taiwanese soap opera I saw with a Korean star. She acts in Korean and has her part dubbed while all the other stars speak Mandarin! Why you may ask? Because she has star power and the pretty face, in this case, goes farther than the words. I won't say anything about the quality of the acting...

I can speak for many English speakers when I say that we, by and large, get turned off by foreign language films with subtitles. And the English language movie producers and distributors have noticed. Many a foreign film have been remade in Hollywood English for that very reason (Femme Nikita, The Ring, etc...).

Speaking of subtitles, if you want a good laugh, the clips that I include in this article are a classic. The link below is to Revenge of the Sith subtitles from a Chinese pirated CD which feature "a direct english translation of the chinese interpretation of what the script was saying", that is, translated from English (no subtitles) into Chinese and then translated from that Chinese back into English (with English subtitles as if we need them!).

http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html

Strangely, I am captivated by these subtitles.

Borat Poster in MRT

Yeah! Ba-le-te is here!

Nice touch with the statuette. But will it be enough to get Taiwanese into the theaters to see it?

(Strange: It says it opens 3/23. I guess that's the right opening day.)

Borat Finally Makes It to Town

Borat has finally made it to Taiwan and Asia in general. Taiwan will open March 31. The big question is, will Asians get the humor?

http://www.varietyasiaonline.com/content/view/680/

I wrote a piece earlier about Borat which is a good backgrounder about lost in translation cases as well as explaining why it takes so long for these films to get to the island:

http://islaformosa.blogspot.com/2006/12/santa-is-coming-to-town-but-borat.html

Can anyone take a picture of the Chinese version Borat poster and send it to me? I'm gonna go out and see if I can find it today...

Santa is coming to town but Borat still hasn't

Well it's almost Xmas here in Taiwan and things are really gearing up for the holiday with all the regular 'junk' on display (Xmas trees and Santas that is...).

One thing that hasn't arrived (and actually, I thought, might never arrive) is the Borat film. It's due to hit theaters sometime in January a full few months after its release elsewhere. An why is this?

Well first and foremost it is a translation thing. However, that can't account for such a lengthly delay. It quite possibly has to do with securing the rights to movies.

Two strange cases come to mind. The first is Gangs of New York which took almost a full year to arrive, went to the theater (literally the (1) theater) for a week or so and then disappeared. It had already been out so long that it had been released on video by the time it reached the island!

Another case was the Austin Powers series. Although they were released fairly promptly in Taiwan, they disappeared quite fast too. Why? Well because they weren't funny... to the Taiwanese. Word jokes are always hard to translate. I think the translations for those movies would have been a nightmare!

So it got me thinking of another possible reason that Borat is soooooooooo late in Taiwan. Could it possibly be that some panel screened it in advance and were waffling about if the Taiwanese audience would even find it entertaining or not. I would love to know the process by which films are chosen, rated and distributed in Taiwan. More later on this... maybe.

A final note to the approval committee or whatever: the longer you wait to get these movies here, the worse they will do at the box office. The demand for pirated copies of this flick is ferocious in the expat contingent in Taiwan. The 'sharing' rings of Borat bootlegs have been off to an early start for some time now! Good luck making money! Maybe try straight to DVD instead.