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)

2012

2009
Director: Roland Emmerich
Cast: John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Oliver Platt

Plot: An epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors.

Crust Displacement is Worse Than it Sounds
by C. True

In the special effects department 2012 is the apocalypse movie to end all apocalypse movies. My eyeballs literally hurt during this movie from being forced so wide open for so long. Some of the catastrophic delights you’re in for when watching 2012: earthquakes that leave giant canyons running through LA, Yellowstone National Park bubbling and exploding into fireballs (!), at least 3 scenes where small planes must be flown through either exploding land or buildings and giant tsunamis that take out the everything from the White House to Tibetan monasteries! And it all looks great! I mean really great! Particularly the scene at Yellowstone, in which the earth seems a thin film on top of a boiling soup and huge areas of land rise and fall in liquid motions before exploding into even more dangerous earth-cannonballs of fire and destruction. As you may have already gathered this movie really does shamelessly cram all possible disaster scenarios into one with the loosely defined “Crust Displacement” explanation. At first it’s discussed as crust dissolution, but that’s not quite right and there is some talk about the shift of the magnetic poles but this per se doesn’t really seem to affect anyone. Crust displacement does cause giant tsunamis, sometimes lava explosions sometimes dry explosions and sometimes the much punier giant earthquake. Also some areas of the earth seem miraculously unaffected while others like Hawaii are totally decimated. My suggestion for added destruction is that crust displacement also causes all meteors to be attracted to the earth so we could have meteors falling down while people try to outrun/fly the earth explosions and massive flooding. Trust me it would have fit right in and you would have loved it. The limited scientific explanations really fit the purpose of the film, as the consequences are far more important than the cause (the American People never even hear the words crust displacement).

The great and bad part about 2012 is that all of the catastrophes mentioned above all happen together within the span of probably 30-45 minutes. This makes for an awesome first half of the movie and is probably one of the reasons it seems so much more impressive and disastrous than other movies in this genre. The downfall of this is that we have to put up with a super shoddy plotline full of some of the worst sentimental crap of all time for the second half of the movie. (SPOILER) I don’t see any reason why the President would not take the opportunity to outlive the apocalypse and try to help rebuild his people and society afterwards. But instead he stays and makes crowds of injured people uncomfortable by walking around and saying things like “I’ll find your daddy.” Towards the very end there are some laughable dramatizations of how we just HAVE to try and save those last 400 people. The evil apathetic US leader, played by Oliver Platt, says no, it is not wise to try and save these people because it will probably end up killing everyone and really if you’re showing up for a seat on the Arc that will save all of humanity maybe you should have shown up half an hour early. I couldn’t have agreed more, issue resolved. But instead we have a 10 minute saga about how we’ll lose our humanity if we don’t try and save those people. Well you didn’t try to save the entire Earth did you? In fact only the superbly rich and powerful even know the Arcs exist, so the lets not start worrying about morality now.

No catastrophe movie would be complete without its relatable everyday family you follow throughout, which, in this case, was an exact rip off of the broken family in War of the Worlds. Parents are divorced, son is angry at dad and then son learns to trust and believe in dad blah blah blah. This is the least developed family of any end of the world movie I've seen and that's saying something. They aren't underdeveloped on purpose either, we have to spend a lot of time with them and yet there is never any dialogue or development that makes us wonder who they are or what they'll do after the end of the world. But you aren't going to see 2012 to learn about family values, you're going to watch the earth implode and explode at the same time and in that department I can't imagine anyone being disappointed.