subtitles

Fuck You Eddie!
$11.98
Flashback to the early '80s. Worth purchasing if only for the liner notes! (If you're just discovering the likes of Social Distortion and the Adolescents, you'll learn a lot from the liner notes. Trust me.)

Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (Alphabet City)
$35.00
This is a book for fans of film--in particular, viewers that enjoy non-native language movies and have an interest in how they are subtitled. Many subtitlers may find this interesting, of course, but in fairness it's not written for professionals in the field. This is not a criticism. The book's strength is it accessibility for the casual reader.

'We need to make sense of the foreign on our own terms,' authors Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour write. 'Subtitles offer a way into worlds outside of ourselves.' To that end, they collected essays and interviews from every area of the subtitling industry. Professional subtitler Henri Behar has an endearingly gruff and pragmatic moment, as does director Claire Denis in her discussion of the subtitles for Friday Night. Amresh Sinha's essay on how subtitles can make one's own language foreign is particularly insightful. Jorge Luis Borges' early film reviews alone, as translated by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu, are worth the price of the book.

Much is made of the design, and rightly so, but the essays would be just as compelling in a standard trade paperback format. The publisher has done the material justice, however, by creating a book as fascinating to hold in one's hands as it is to read. It's not entirely convenient for most bookshelves, but that's a quibble compared to the binding, quality paper, and cinematic faux-widescreen design.

There is something here for every film fan. Like all great anthologies, the book observes its theme without seeming to do so. The essays come at right angles to each other, but all oddly fit the primary goal of the text--to expose readers to this little-understood area of global cinema. In that regard, the book is a remarkable success.

D. Bannon is author of The Elements of Subtitles: A Practical Guide to the Art of Dialogue, Character, Context, Tone and Style in Subtitling

UltraMan TIGA: Prophecy of Evil (13 Original Japanese Episodes With English Subtitles)
$34.95
I got the original series Ultraman sets, out on DVD. My son, age 4, blasted through those episodes in about a month. I quite enjoyed them myself, since they brought back found memories of coming home after school and watching Ultraman as a kid.

I was leary of buying these 1990's versions of Ultraman to watch with my kids because they are in Japanese - no dubbing. No problem, my 7 and 4 year love watching them even without understanding the dialogue. The plots are pretty basic and formulaic, so my 4 year old gets the gist without beng able to read the subtitles. Caveat: A small number of the episodes are a little scary for the 5 and under, so screen them with junior.

What Remains of Us / Ce qu'il reste de nous (Original French Version with English Subtitles)
$39.99
77 minutes. Filmed in Tibet. The young Tibetan from Montreal captured a short message from the Dalai Lama to the people of Tibet and brought it on a small DVD Player to Tibet. She showed it to monks, pilgrims, and young students. It was heart-rendering watching the faces of the pilgrims as they watched the video, wild-eyed in amazement, some prostrating and sobbing, many hearing their spiritual leader's voice for the first time.

Having visited Tibet several times myself, I found this documentary very balanced. In addition to showing the older devout pilgrims, it also shows young giggly students who don't seem to know anything about their culture.