SIFF 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?)
How akward!
You get what you pay for. (I have a million copy-editor jokes, but only copy-editors think they're funny.)
Closed up, definitely. This is wonderful.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
Comments Closed
Comments are closed on this post.