I tend to like science fiction TV shows and movies. While I will watch non-SF stuff, anything with even a bit of a science fictional angle to it will likely draw my attention and interest more. However, such shows and movies quite often tend to be filled with action scenes with lots of yelling, suspense scenes with characters whispering to one another, or quickly spouted technobabble.
It’s not unusual for me to miss some bit of dialogue or at least be unsure of what was said. If I’m watching a tape or DVD I can always back up slightly and play bits over again, possibly turning up the volume in an effort to better make out what was said. Sometimes I’ve found myself going back so often it begins to hinder my enjoyment. (And lest anyone wonder I really don’t think my hearing is that poor—my problems usually seem confined to scenes where there is some obvious reason for the dialogue to be harder to decipher such as loud background noise or multiple characters talking over one another.)
One thing that helps alleviate that situation for me, though, is subtitling or closed captioning. (A quick rhetorical aside... Why is it called "subtitling" on movie DVDs, but "closed captioning" on TV shows?) Most folks I know find closed captioning to be distracting, even annoying, but I often find it very helpful as it will usually just reinforce what I’m hearing and minimize instances where I have to play bits over again.
That’s the general part of the introduction, now the more specific part...
Back in 2000 I saw The Cell (starring Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn) in the theater. I had seen the preview (and similar TV ads) for the movie for months before and frankly I hated the preview. It had absolutely no dialogue and was all weird visual images. Granted, the images looked “cool” and all, but I would have liked some sort of dialogue in the preview so as to provide a context for those images. By not including any dialogue at all the preview gave me the impression that the movie was going to be one of those "visually stunning" stylistic pieces of crap where the writer(s), producer, director think "Hey, won’t this effect look really cool?" or "Wouldn’t it be neat to do this?" without seeming to give much thought to the relevance of such scenes to the actual story being told (assuming there is one).
So going in I thought I would hate the movie, but I was willing to give it a chance since a friend of mine wanted to see it (and I was at least semi-curious, I’ll admit). It turned out that the preview bore no actual resemblance to the movie at all and I actually enjoyed the movie. There was indeed a story and a reasonably good one, I thought. In fact it very closely paralleled parts of a novel I once read and liked a lot, Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels (1990). In that book a psychiatrist is enlisted to study a mass murderer from within via a process which lets him enter the minds of patients.
In The Cell Dr. Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) is similarly able to enter the minds of patients and is also enlisted to mentally infiltrate a serial killer, one who happens to now be in a comatose condition due to his extremely rare type of schizophrenia. The man’s m.o. is to abduct a young woman and place her in a hidden cell which is automated to flood in 40 hours or so, drowning her. He seems to derive sexual pleasure from each victim’s fear and even their actual deaths. There may even be some necrophilia involved. The rub is that his last victim (potentially) was only recently abducted and so there is a limited time remaining in which to save her. Thus Dr. Deane must unravel the mind of a comatose deranged killer and gain information that will lead FBI agents to "the cell."
It was one of those rare times when a movie surprised me in a good way. Now, I’m not saying it’s a great movie, by any means. And if you’re not into science fiction or anything slightly "weird" then I’m sure it’s not for you. (But that’s not really the point of this blog entry, to give a review of movie that’s seven years old now.)
I recently picked up The Cell on DVD for a mere $3.99. I figured for that price I wouldn’t mind seeing it again. As I explained, I pretty much activate the English subtitles as a matter of habit when I watch a DVD, especially anything sci-fi-ish. In doing so for The Cell, however, I never expected the movie to turn into a comedy! The subtitles are very poorly done, sometimes hard to follow, sometimes even ridiculous and bearing little to no resemblance to what is actually being said.
Apart from maybe a couple minor lines of no real consequence here and there just before or after noted scenes the following is the actual dialogue—as best I can determine, but it’s gotta be very close—from a few scenes 15-20 minutes into the DVD of The Cell:
On a highway overpass above a ravine with a very shallow stream FBI agents Cole (Dean Norris), Lee (James Gammon), Ramsey (Jake Weber), and Novak (Vince Vaughn) gather to examine a roadside crime scene...
Cole: Skid marks appear to match the tire tracks from Reno.
Ramsey: Looks like he scraped the rail and lost some paint too.
Cole: It’s on its way to the lab already. [Then with a directional nod of his head...] Dumped the body over there. [They walk over to the edge of the overpass and look down.]
The scene shifts to the ravine below as they examine the body...
Cole: Do they all look like dolls?
Lee: Every unfortunate soul.
Cole: What’s that?
Ramsey: Some kind of collar—part of his methodology.
Cole: What, he puts it there?
Ramsey: He makes it for them—makes him feel they belong to him.
Novak: [A short distance from the others, looking at the shallow stream...] Is the water always this low?
Cole: Yeah, this time of year.
Novak: Get me a coroner’s report right away.
After a short mostly visual dream sequence of Lopez’s Dr. Deane the scene shifts back to the agents, this time in a local diner as they meet there to discuss the coroner’s report which Lee brings to the table...
Lee: Hot off the presses. [Pause] Match on his semen. [Pause] Water in her lungs shows high levels of chlorine and rust. [Yet another pause, then in a surprised tone...] What, pray tell, is this? They say they found some dog hair? [Looks at Ramsey next to him...] From a canine unit?
Ramsey: No, there’s no canine unit.
The agents soon leave and visit a lab to followup on some of the info from the coroner’s report, specifically the dog hair which is from a rare albino dog. This allows them to track down the killer at his home where they surround the place, mount an assault and enter only to find the man face down on the floor unconscious. The man is taken out on a stretcher as Novak watches.
Novak: [Giving instructions to an underling...] Make sure he stays cuffed. I want two men on him at all times. I don’t want anyone to treat him but Reid. Not so much as a thermometer up his ass, understand?
And now the English subtitled version of the same bits of dialogue:
[Note: Any italicized bracketed comments are mine (i.e. not actually subtitled), but I'm leaving them in (from the same scenes as laid out in the section above) just to provide context for the conversations.]
The scene is a highway overpass above a ravine with a very shallow stream...
Cole: We try to get the tyre tracks for checking.
Ramsey: Looks like he scratched the rail and lost some paint too.
Cole: That’s what he left here. [Then with a directional nod of his head...] Talk about it over there. [They walk over to the edge of the overpass and look down.]
The scene shifts to the ravine below as they examine the body...
Cole: Do they all look like that, Cole?
Lee: It’s real unfortunate so.
Cole: What’s that?
Ramsey: Some kind of a collar—metallurgy.
Cole: Why he put that?
Ramsey: He mixed it for her. Mixed it feels like the lott rum.
Novak: [A short distance from the others, looking at the shallow stream...] Is the water always this low?
Cole: Yeah, this time here.
Novak: Give me a corner report right away.
After a short mostly visual dream sequence of Dr. Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) the scene shifts back to the agents as they meet in a local diner to discuss the coroners report, which Lee brings to the table...
Lee: Hello, professor. [Pause] There’re match on the cement. [Pause] Water in her lungs shows high level of chlorine and rest. [Yet another pause, then in a surprised tone...] Tricky part is this. They said they found some dog’s hair. [Looks at Ramsey next to him...] From a caniyard?
Ramsey: No, there’s no caniyard.
The agents soon leave and visit a lab to followup on some of the info from the coroner’s report, specifically the dog hair which is from a rare albino dog. This allows them to track down the killer at his home where they surround the place, mount an assault and enter only to find the man face down unconscious. The man is taken out on a stretcher as Novak watches.
Novak: [Giving instructions to an underling...] Make sure he stays under custody. I want 2 men all the time. I don’t want them to treat him. Not so much as a mama would possess, understand?
Uh, no actually—I don’t understand. Nope. Not at all. You know, they really should try to hire folks to do the subtitling who aren’t actually hearing impaired themselves. After twenty minutes of such nonsense I finally had to turn them off because it’s supposed to be a serious drama and the subtitles just had me literally laughing out loud at times. It’s almost like getting two movies for the price of one—watch it without the subtitles for the straight version, then turn them on for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version!
To be somewhat fair, James Gammon as FBI agent Teddy Lee does tend to mumble, but the other characters are not that hard to understand. And I've seen errors in subtitles/closed captioning before, but often (and even in some cases in this movie) it's understandable how someone might hear a line with a slight difference. Sometimes I've wondered if the subtitler is working from a script and maybe the script had a late change made to it after the subtitling was done (if that's possible) or maybe the movie/show ended up being edited differently at the last minute. However, the subtitling in this movie is just plain awful. I mean, to go from "He makes it for them—makes him feel they belong to him" to "He mixed it for her. Mixed it feels like the lott rum"???—can there be any reasonable explanation that even begins to make sense?
I sure hope there are no deaf people who bought this DVD on the assumption that they could follow the dialogue via the subtitling. If they try then they must end up thinking "Man, this is one lousy movie!"
The DVD also supposedly offers Malay or Chinese subtitles. I wonder if those make any more sense.
Feedburner
7 comments:
Subtitles came first, because they were right on the film (generally, foreign films.)
Closed captions weren't promoted as subtitles because people who could hear didn't want subtitles on their screen. Closed captioning was something optional (and originally needing a special separate device.)
Subtitles on DVD aren't closed captions, because they don't use the closed captioning device or circuitry.
BUT... some DVDs do have close captioning as well as subtitles, and I've heard that sometimes they actually have a different text feed. May want to check that out on The Cell.
My favorite close captioning/subtitling story comes from watching Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a prisoner of war film. Some of the dialogue is in Japanese, with English subtitles. At the time, I was watching movies with the close captioning on because I was watching while exercising in a noisy way. One line came up subtitled, and with a close caption that said [says something in Japanese] that went directly covering the subtitle, thus giving the deaf viewer substantially less information than had the captioning not been turned on in the first place.
Thanks for the explanation of the diff between the two. I strongly suspected it was a matter of distinguishing between the two different technological delivery means since to me (and I'm sure to most) the result is essentially the same. I tend to use the two terms interchangeably (though I guess I do usually say "subtitles" in ref to movies and "CC" for TV shows, so maybe it seeped in subconscionusly).
Also thanks for the suggestion of trying the CC mechanism, but unfortunately it didn't work. I just tried CC1-4, then TEXT1-4, and even something called XDS, but none of them worked.
I remember trying CC with DVDs when I first tried a few, but never got anything so I assumed I just had to activate the subtitles if I wanted to see the dialogue.
I only use CC on fictional TV shows, not for news or sports because then the CC often covers important information or action on the screen. And besides it's less important that I catch every little word on such broadcasts since there's no long story with an intricate plot to follow.
I bet there are many humorous CC/subtitle stories out there. Well, maybe not many, but some anyway. Yeah, covering up the English translation of the Japanese with the CC [Says something in Japanese] is rather defeating the purpose of CCing. (LOL!)
I seem to remember that during the Hiro/Japanese scenes in Heroes the CC would simply go away and let the subtitling do the talking. Which is of course as it should be. It's possible that there may have been a time or two where the previous line of English dialogue was still CC'd on the screen when the first Japanese to English subtitle appeared. But I'm sure little things like that are always possible and usually not too much of a problem when they do happen.
Generally I've found that good CCing is maneuverable so as to avoid anything else of note in print on the screen (such as credits, existing subtitling, or fictional TV news banners). Another sign of good CCing is when it's reasonably synced up to the pace of the scenes, although with rapid-fire dialogue that can sometimes be problematic.
I just hope that any actual hearing impaired folks who went to see The Cell in a theater with a subtitle delivery system got their money back if it was presented as on the DVD!
Clarification of my comment above... When I said:
"Generally I've found that good CCing is maneuverable so as to avoid anything else of note in print on the screen (such as credits, existing subtitling, or fictional TV news banners)."
I should have said "maneuvered," meaning when the CCing was first being laid out. I didn't mean to imply that I, the end user of the CC system, could somehow position the CCs to wherever I want them on the screen (although that might not be a bad idea for a future option in the feature).
Also, to add one further thing, I can't help but wonder if maybe the subtitler on The Cell was not exactly thrilled with his/her job the day the work was done. Regardless of the reason behind it, at least the end product came out looking more like a result of incompetence or apathy than outright maliciousness. Either way, though, I would think there would be someone whose job it is to test out the DVD at an early stage and make sure all the features seem to be integrated properly. If not, well, maybe there ought to be.
You knew I would weigh in on this discussion. :-)
Closed captioning was invented by WGBH Boston, back in the 70's and there is actually such a thing as Open Captions that you can't remove from your screen (a rarely used technique now days, but I did actually air a show with them, within the past year. There was indeed a top of the TV set decoder (as mentioned above), but now days TV sets MUST have them internally.
There are different ways that captions are handled. One way is live captioning. It just scrolls at the bottom of the screen and you can tell there is absolutely NO finesse going on. Just get the words out (they use a court reporter machine to do this). The other way is by giving them a tape of the show and they caption it at their leisure and put the captions where they do the least harm to the action. I don't think anyone gives captioners scripts anymore, but I might be wrong about that.
Can you tell we deal with captioning here at my day gig. :-)
Hi Angel, And may I say Happy New Year to both you and Nat and your respective families.
Thanks for the additional background info on closed captioning. Yes, I should have realized you would weigh in on this, but to be honest it never occurred to me until I saw your comment come rolling in.
I only started using closed captioning for my own nefarious purposes within, oh, I'd say the last five years or so, so I don't recall anything about the early history of such. I do believe I recall hearing or reading that WGBH pioneered the system and of course those call letters are well known in PBS circles.
I kind of assumed that sometimes the captioning must be done from scripts only because there have been one or two times when I've noticed that a significant section of voiceover dialogue has been captioned completely different from what was actually being said—not nonsensical, but different. (Unfortunately I can't recite specific instances from memory—could have even been Heroes, but I don't know. Or perhaps Men In Trees. Or I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure.) I figured the most likely way for that to happen is if the CC track is laid down from the script and then at the last minute it changes for some reason.
I know the CCing for live shows such as news or sports is done on the fly because sometimes the CCs fall so far behind they just skip ahead to what's currently being said, but I understand why. Sometimes I've even seen backspacing over something that obviously wasn't right. Other times some typoes are grin-inducing.
And when watching late-night talk shows I know they're CC'ed after the show has been recorded because I've seen the occasional punchline captioned before the host even says it.
Another observation I have of captioning issues is that by not having cable TV, just simple free over-the-air antenna reception, I know that strength of signal also affects the caption readability. If I'm trying to watch a channel whose signal has a lot of static interference in it, then the captioning may as well not be on because it either hardly appears at all or much worse, appears as a stream of unreadable gibberish characters. I understand why that is, of course, but as already expounded upon, that should have absolutely no relevance to the simply bad subtitling (not captioning) of The Cell DVD.
So I guess what I really want to know is this, Angel... Can you explain "Mixed it feels like the lott rum" or "Not so much as a mama would possess" in any way other than simple incompetence or apathy????
:-)
It reminds me a little of those times when Jay Leno is doing his "Headlines" segment and he shows something with instructions obviously translated/printed in China where the words are English words, but they don't even approach forming comprehensible sentences.
Oh, and if anyone else out there happens to have The Cell on DVD maybe you could check the English subtitling for yourself and see how it appears, then let me know? The scenes I noted in the main post occur around 17 minutes into the movie, but there seemed to be widespread subtitling mistakes throughout up to that point. I just found those scenes' captions to be particularly funny and yet annoying too because they were undermining the tone of the movie.
I suppose it's possible that The Cell subtitling issues could have been caught and then corrected during another pressing run of the DVDs. Although I don't think it's one of those movies where there's been an initial release, then a director's cut, a special edition, special deluxe edition, collector's edition, unrated version, anniversary edition, etc....
Garbled captions are something that does occur. If seen on the feed itself, the distributer of the program does try to correct it and refeed it to the system.
Sometimes it's just what you say, that the signal is not strong and being the captions are in the vertical interval on line 21, they get corrupted.
Sometimes it can be the set top box (on those old TV's).
Without knowing specifics, I can't tell you about how the movies are captioned, but I do find your examples very funny. :-)
One last followup...
I was out to a Best Buy and a Borders tonight and I looked at The Cell packaging to find that the back cover is laid out differently. As far as I can tell, the special features listed for the DVD all sound like they'd be the same so I don't know that it's any different. However, there's a thumbnail image of the special features menu and that looks to be laid out differently than it appears on my DVD.
Also, and more importantly, the package now specifically lists among the (non-special?) features: "English Subtitles And Closed Captions."
I wonder if that means it's a later pressing of the DVD and maybe (I hope!) the subtitles have been fixed? Or maybe the subtitling wasn't fixed, but they noticed it was implemented poorly so they then added closed captioning to get around the issue. I'd be curious to find out, but I wasn't gonna spend $10 for a movie I just watched.
Maybe the bottom line lesson is you get what you pay for when you dive into the remainder bin for a used $3.99 bargain. Oh well. I still enjoyed the movie (though there are some discomforting scenes, to be sure) and I think it was somewhat overlooked by audiences. It's certainly visually imaginative.
Post a Comment