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Saturday, June 7, 2008

Jar City

posted by on June 7 at 10:59 AM

Saw Jar City last night: two thumbs up! An entertaining, chilling, slightly magical police procedural. Made me want to move to Iceland.

But what I want to talk about is the poorly punctuated subtitles. There’s nothing more distracting in a film. I was repeatedly ripped out of the thriller’s grip by ellipses with two dots rather than three and misplaced quotation marks. Maybe it’s an affliction of a former copyeditor; maybe it didn’t bother any one else.

What was most galling was the akward typo in the final frame’s giant caption: “English sub—titles by [Name Withheld].” Jeeezus. Awful proud of mediocrity. Proofreaders aren’t that expensive.

(“Subtitles” should be closed up or hyphenated, not interrupted by an emdash. That was obvious, right?)

RSS icon Comments

1

How akward!

Posted by Eric F | June 7, 2008 11:16 AM
2

You get what you pay for. (I have a million copy-editor jokes, but only copy-editors think they're funny.)

Posted by six shooter | June 7, 2008 11:23 AM
3

Closed up, definitely. This is wonderful.

Posted by Fnarf | June 7, 2008 11:25 AM
4

It's bad enough that they didn't close it up, but to use an em-dash. Sheesh.

My pet peeve is white subtitles in a black-and-white film.

Posted by keshmeshi | June 7, 2008 2:19 PM
5

As a aid-wearing deafy addicted to subtitles (one really does miss much without them) I totally understand/feel for you. That's gotta suck. It's bad and kinda funny when the news does it...in a film made by responsible adults though...lame.

Posted by catnextdoor | June 8, 2008 12:23 AM
6

Just the other day I was watching one of the old "Brokeback Mountain" Internet parody videos, which kept repeatedly showing titles containing the word "fish'in"; I wanted to puke.

Posted by MarkyMark | June 9, 2008 12:11 AM
7

... wow, you guys really have no lives ...

I watched the movie too. I disagree that it mattered.

Now, the eating of sheep heads and other things might have warranted a tad bit of warning for the mostly veggie crowd that watched it ... but SUBTITLES? ... no.

Posted by Will in Seattle | June 9, 2008 12:40 AM

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