Doblada Roundup

I wrote this in April and never came back to it, but here it is. It's sad to read it now, but only because Ninjavideo is down.


So, I've been out of the loop, like way, way out of the loop. Not in theatres, not online, not following scnsrc, the Pirate Bay, EZTV or even Ninjavideo. I am actually surprised when I return to populated areas and look at movie posters. I would probably have a fit if I were to go to Apple.com right now (supposing I had a good enough connection to even load images, much less video) and browse through their trailers. In fact, the only film watching I've been doing lately has been of movies dubbed in Spanish and of pirate DVD's that could easily have been made from some of the poorest rips currently residing in the ruins of the second kingdom. Sadly, most of the films I've watched in this fashion(usually while taking hellishly long bus rides) were trash, things I'd seen before or things that David and I had been unable to sit through no matter how "bored" we were or how fast they'd downloaded. But there have been a few gems, which I will now summarize, with little regard for chronology, in what I have decided to call the Doblada Roundup.

The first film I watched after landing in Ecuador was Anaconda, a movie I vaguely remembered as being terrible and from the mid-nineties. Anaconda benefits, or at least for me benefitted, tremendously from being watched on an extremely loud bus while a man with a huge bottle of yellow-colored cola and a bag of chips walks up and down the aisle sugaring and salting the captive audience. Forget about your uncomfortable seat, the insane traffic outside, the overactive air conditioner that seeks to turn you into frozen jerky in one extended breath: this is a film packed with action, major actors, digital snakes, brash sexual innuendo and Jon Voight, for Christ's sake. And every male character, as is customary in the translation process of overdubbing, is read with the gusto, machismo and ridiculous emphasis of the most hammed-up Robert Goulet impersonator imaginable, with slight nuances added for gay, skinny and black characters. Jon Voight, Ice Cube, Jennifer Lopez. I laughed for two hours straight, and I could barely make out the translations. A+, thumbs up, great dub.

Subsequent films seemed to follow this pattern of either intense, action-packed violence or lady movies. I got to watch Mandy Moore freak out about marriage and relationships with Diane Keaton and Piper Perabo in the Peruvian desert. I got to watch Stone Cold Steve Austin kill other prisoners to survive while riding through the Argentine Pampas. And also Kate Hudson. And also Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone, Liam Neeson the list goes on and on. We did also see two or three children's films including the frog princess (which was somehow conducive to sleep), the squeakual (I couldn't stare directly into this) and some movie with Richard Gere, Jason Alexander and a fluffy white puppy (which had a faulty disk whose defect I had the pleasure of explaining in to an extremely skeptical woman).

One of the weirdest films I saw in Dub style was a Jonathan Demme movie with a big cast, but primarily featuring the woman from Alice in Wonderland who plays the White Queen (which I saw in 3d, in Quito and Dubbed! out there 3d still costs $4) as a recovering drug addict whose sister is getting married to a black man. The whole family is crammed together in a fit of upper-middle-class angst that seems extremely un-relatable given the comforting elegance of their home and their possessions in contrast with the material poverty surrounding the bus and the fact that we have been explicitly asked not to defecate in the toilets on our bus.

I think this is probably a good movie in English, albeit a serious downer, but dubbing had a really pleasant alienating effect on my experience of watching this film. I was having enough trouble keeping pace not only with the translation but also the weird predicaments that seem to befall Latino voice actors trying to give depth to their overdubs of African American speech, some kind of weird musicality that was part of the film, and the fact that I was crammed into an escalating series of absurd positions designed to negotiate semi-supine comfort with the fact that the air-conditioning vent above me was peeing onto my face, chest and lap.

Most of the films that we watched on the buses were watched with complete, rapt, silent attention, or ignored just as completely. A notable exception to this was an extremely serious film concerning good friends Cuba Gooding Junior and Horatio Sanz, and their experience of accidentally booking passage on a gay, not a straight, singles cruise. I have personally experienced no better way of musing on the question of machismo than to watch the reactions of captive holy week travelers as they confront the height of homosexual stereotypy as brought to you by seasoned SNL alumni and Cuba "Radio" Gooding Junior. This being an American film things eventually got all straightened out and by the end everyone had a properly balanced family based on the ideal relations of capitalist love production. This movie had Roger Moore as well.

To conclude, let me say that while I don't think having a great cinematic experience would be any reason, in and of itself, to ride buses all over South America, if you do happen to find yourself bouncing down a road with your knees impaling the seat in front of you as you are also impaled by some knees, certainly take your opportunity to enjoy some yellow cola and chips and see film in a context and technical style (really shitty tv and insane sound) that is transformatively provocative from the get-go.

(for another blog that updates semi-infrequently and more information on this trip I was on, allow me to plug ---> TrotamundosSA.blogspot.com)