Author: Michelle

One of the things that makes it worth learning a foreign language well is that it opens a whole new world of movie viewing. No, I am not talking about watching foreign films, although that’s also great. I am referring to watching movies dubbed into a foreign language.

It’s not just watching a movie, it’s a whole analytical audiovisual experience.

When I saw “An American Werewolf in London” I was with a date who was from Venezuela. When the CCR song “Bad Moon Rising” came on, everyone laughed. Except Jesus. His English was pretty good, but not very colloquial, and he’d never heard the song before. I explained, and he got it, but nothing kills funny like an explanation.

The first American movie I remember seeing when I lived in France was “Ghostbusters.” The voices didn’t fit the characters, none of the jokes or gags worked in French and I’d only been in France a few weeks so I was missing a lot of the dialogue. It was terrifically bad. Rick Moranis in French is just a wrong thing. I laughed my ass off, but I didn’t actually hear any of the jokes in English until the 90’s. At one point, Bill Murray turns to Dan Ackyroyd just when Sigourney Weaver turns into a giant hell hound and says “so she’s a dog.” I wondered if they’d said dog or bitch, because the French word for a female dog means both, then I wondered if calling someone a dog in French had the same connotation of ugliness that it does in English and I totally missed the next round of gags.

There are several problems with a movie that is dubbed. The first is the actual voices of the actors. Imagine John Wayne. Very distinctive, drawling voice. In France, he was dubbed by an actor with a suave voice who also voiced many other male stars of the era. Charlton Heston, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, John Wayne. All the same. At times there would actually be movies where it sounded like all of the roles were being played by the same person. You have to be able to ignore that the actors all sound wrong to survive watching a dubbed film.

I watched a John Travolta movie once, and I would swear that it was dubbed by Gerard Depardieu. I was so busy trying to figure out if it was really Depardieu doing Travolta that I couldn’t keep track of the plot. I have no idea what the movie even was.

When a movie is dubbed, I can’t approach it like a movie I want to watch and enjoy as the director intended. It can still be entertaining, but it’s more like watching a parody of the actual movie. I pick apart the voices, i wonder who else I’ve heard them as, i wonder if a joke was as bad in the original version as it was in the dubbed one. To really watch a movie, it has to be in its original language with subtitles.

Subtitles still have translation issues. That’s a whole other thing.

When I was writing about music as meditation the other day, I kept mis-spelling the word meditation. Every time I wrote it, the word came out as medication. I did it every single time I tried to write meditation. Meditation? Medication.

I did it just now, too. More than once.

Finally, I decided that it was a clue that I should use it as part of the post, and I did.

Freudian slip or just a common typo?

Both.

Ideas come in strange ways. They sneak up on you and sometimes they don’t wait long for you to notice them. You have to be paying attention. You have to be willing to get up at night and write them down. You have to be willing to recite them to yourself in the car over and over until you can stop and write them down. (Note to self: turn Siri back on and learn to use it.) You have to look at things a little sideways and kind of squinty. You have to have a tolerant workplace who doesn’t mind a little idea scribbling during work hours in small doses. Friends and family who don’t mind when you get out your phone and start writing yourself a note while you’re out for drinks.

It’s fun, mostly.
And it drives me a little crazy.

Ultimately, it’s good for me on many levels. Since I have convinced myself that I have to do this everyday, it forces me to pay attention because I have to feed the blog.

Granted, that’s a crutch, but it spills over into other areas. Paying attention might become habitual. Don’t hold your breath. Oh, right–breathing goes along with paying attention.

If only I could pay attention to making sure the kitchen is clean. Too bad. Can’t. Have to think of something to write in the blog tomorrow.

It takes blood and guts to be this cool
But I’m still just a cliche’
–Skunk Anansie/It Takes Blood And Guts To Be This Cool

Thunderbolts and daggers!
–Jane Austen/Sense and Sensibility

Not being a cliché can be a challenge. Sticking out can be a problem for survival, even in a species with advanced survival skills like Homo Sapiens. This makes it unbelievably convenient and easy to slide along in life without an original thought or act to your credit. In fact, in environments like schools and businesses you are rewarded for conventionality. Sometimes it seems like the pull of life tugging you toward blandness is almost impossible to resist.

When I feel like I’m blending in a little more than I am comfortable with, I say something weird at work. Actually, the saying something weird part pretty much guarantees that I never reach a state of comfortable anonymity at work. Since I tend to say something weird pretty much any time I use words, I stick out any time I am talking. Does that make it a good or a bad thing that I usually don’t talk very much?

Defining conventionality, or rather unconventionality, is a little slippery. If someone points up at the sky and says “what do you see up there?” a conventional person might answer “a big fluffy cloud” or “it looks like it’s going to rain.” Someone unconventional might see anything up there. A fetus. A platypus eating a beaver. Jesus descending from Heaven to kick some ass. The snow in Montana. Anything.

Someone unconventional might not care that much about things like normal standards of grooming or hygiene. They might have flexible notions of time management. They might have a system of logic that is different than most people’s. They might be willing to do things without thinking about them very much. Or in spite of having thought about them too much. Maybe they’re an out of the closet atheist in a town full of Baptists. Maybe they’re willing to speak their minds even when other people are going to disagree.

Being cool is also hard to define. It’s harder to be cool than it is to be unconventional. I guess. I am pretty sure that I’ve never been cool, although there are people who are very insistent that I am. So one thing we know about “cool” is that it’s subjective. All of the cool people I know are also very unconventional, so there is a ton of overlap.

I have a lot of questions about defining cool.

Should cool just be? Or is it acceptable to try to be cool?
Does it take blood and guts? Yes, it does take metaphorical blood and guts for the part of cool that involves being different. No it doesn’t for the kind of cool that involves being a jock and knowing where all the good parties are. In my opinion only the “being different” type of cool really qualifies. Subjective. It’s my blog, though, so my opinions are given a lot of weight here. It’s funny how the cool kids mostly aren’t anymore, though, isn’t it? Some of them are very nice people, but not cool.

The coolest people in the world were probably never considered so by anyone they grew up with, so cool is something that you maybe have to grow into a little. Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Billy Zoom… I’ll bet they were a bunch of rejects and geeks. Billy Zoom plays multiple instruments and is into amp repair. I’m pretty sure he would have been a band geek. Patti Smith? Tall and gangly. Awkward. A little homely. Into poetry. Probably viewed as a total loser in school.

Billy Zoom never seemed to be trying all that hard. His guitar spoke for itself. Patti? Eh….there was a lot of working really hard at finding used copies of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and making sure she was poor. Spending that last dime on coffee and pie at the diner. Not a lot of people would dispute that she is cool.

Cool can tolerate being a little bit of a poseur, especially when the budding cool person is still just a kid.

So if you’re one of those people who feels like it’s a sin to deviate from standard in any way? I pity you, and advise having your head shaved.

Go on. It’s medicine.

PS No, it isn’t your imagination. I just sort of stopped writing without a graceful exit. I feel like reading. Right now. Sooooo, I was done and I stopped.