Aaaargh! Again! Here I am, as I often am, trying to watch a Netflix movie with subtitles. (It’s Rabbit Proof Fence, don’t know if the subtitles are throughout or just here in the beginning, but they’re here at least.) And like they often are, the subtitles are stuck in the widescreen bars.
WHERE I WOULD LIKE TO PUT MY WIDESCREEN TV TO GOOD USE AND NOT SEE THOSE BARS AT ALL BECAUSE I CAN HAVE THE IMAGE FILL THE SCREEN!
But noooo. I can’t do that. I have to watch a really, really widescreen movie in a little black box on my TV because some asshole decided to put the subtitles down there! I can’t expand the picture because I don’t speak any aboriginal languages, or Mandarin, or Swedish, or Cantonese, or Korean, or German, or Kiswahili!
So fuck you, bad subtitlers. Also fuck those of you who do a brand new DVD and put white subtitles on a black and white movie. Fuck you hard.
Would it be so hard to have DVD know I want to widescreen it? I mean, that might be a dumb question, I dunno. But why not be able to put the subtitles in the black for people with regular TVs, so they can see them better, and put them in the picture for people like me? We watched the first 15 minutes of 2041 only seeing the top line of the subtitles. We thought it was a very poetic movie.
That’s an excellent movie. We were particularly fascinated with the tracker.
Mr. Stuff likes the subtitles down in the black, so he was happy. I have no opinion, and also no widesreen TV, so the problem is moot for me. You’re right, though – you’d think with all the stuff they can do, they’d be able to set that as a preference.
What a coincidence! Yeah, it was great. But the thing with a movie like that is, you put it on widescreen zoom when people start talking English, but then sometimes they switch back or you’re not sure if you just didn’t understand or if it was a foreign language, and then you have to go back with the little itty bitty box if it was important.
It might be worth throwing in here (just in case you don’t know) that the film is the subject of much controversy which I don’t know enough about to comment upon, other than perhaps to say that there does seem to be some basis for the charges of gross inaccuracy made against it. The film’s entry in Wikipedia and links off that may be of interest.
Wonderful, sad movie, and I love the soundtrack by Peter Gabriel.
It’s still happening in the theater. I saw Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima the other night. It’s in Japanese, in almost black and white (firebombs and, I think, flashbacks, are in color), and has white subtitles, WITH NO BLACK EDGING! Seeing it in the theater, and sitting in the 2nd row, I had no trouble reading the subtitles, but if it’s not fixed for the DVD, expect a lot of howling, because half the dialogue will be unreadable to English speakers who don’t understand Japanese.
Thank you; I always wonder about the accuracy of movies “based on” real events. I’ll check out the Wikipedia entry and links. The special features on the DVD said the director was Australian, and portrayed him as concerned about telling the story correctly.
Thanks, I’ll check that out. You’ll be horrified to know that most of what I think I know about Australia comes from movies and a small handful of books, so the movies better be right. Seriously, between, say, Gallipoli, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and Crocodile Dundee, there you go. Still better than New Zealand, which has to get by with just Whale Rider. You guys might want to consider vetting all movies you make very carefully, because it’s a long plane ride to where you are.
Yeah, but he means modern day New Zealand. We pretty much only have Whale Rider and, um, Once Were Warriors to judge modern day New Zealand by.
You know, there are Australians who would like nothing more than to discredit Rabbit Proof Fence and soft-pedal how harshly the aborigines were treated, just as there are those in America who would like to sweep our treatment of the Native Americans under the rug. I wouldn’t take EITHER side as the 100% truth, but I would be especially wary of white Australians debunking anything Abos say. Sorry, but accuracy is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.
I work for a subtitling company. Don’t hit me :D-- we didn’t do that movie.
Where I work, there are at least three levels of review at which problems should be caught. For the issues mentioned so far, I think it’s a combination of someone not having checked for those specific issues and someone deeming them not worthy of changing. Either way, repositioning and coloring the subtitles as to be both readable and aesthetically pleasing aren’t difficult at all.
I keep misreading the thread title as “I put subtitles in the wrong place!” and therefore expecting this thread to be about someone who is mad at herself for making a stupid (but time consuming to correct) error, screaming at her co-worker who made the stupid mistake, or venting about a boss or client who failed to explain where the subtitles were suppose to go. NOT actual movie subtitles.
My understanding is that the movie has major differences even from the book it is based on in crucial areas. The book was written by one of the half caste aboriginal participants. So the movie isn’t accurate even according to it’s own “source”.
Interesting. My initial reading of Wiki and a couple of links pointed more toward disagreement over whether or not the forced relocations were really as widespread and disruptive as some claim they were. IOW, pretty similar to claims that Jim Crow laws weren’t that bad or that the claims of Nazi genocide are inflated.
And I keep misreading it as “I pit subtleties in the wrong place!” I keep thinking it’s about people being too subtle and the OP not catching it because it’s out of context.
No biography is going to be 100% accurate. Plus, I know that movies often have to change things for cinematic benefit, such as compress time. For example, according to the movie and from what I’ve read, the girls were caught and sent back to the school, and at least one escaped AGAIN and made the same trip along the fence, but it’s been so many many years since I saw it I can’t think of any others. I went to a screening where the director, Philip Noyce, was there to answer questions, but I was so in awe of being in the same room I don’t remember now what he said. I do believe he said that there was plenty of anecdotal evidence that the government encouraged marriage between whites and Aborigines, which might sound nice (especially compared to the anti-miscegenation laws and attitudes in the US), but it was with the hopes of “breeding the black out” of the race. That’s totally uncited, sorry, I just remember hearing it. But that’s why the girls were taken in the first place IIRC. They were already of mixed blood and they were going to be needed to be available to make babies with white men, so their children would be closer to white. It was a long-term plan.
Getting back to the subject of subtitles, Google Video now lets you add your own subtitles to videos you upload there. I’ve done several and it’s pretty cool. Do-it-yourself-subtitles, awesome! I love technology.
I wouldn’t mind if all subtitles in all movies appeared as white letters on a thin horizontal black band across the bottom of the screen, so they could be legible no matter what the background color or lighting conditions. I saw Letters from Iwo Jima last night, as it happens, and there were a few times when it was difficult to make out the subtitles (particularly, I noticed, when the subtitles appeared against an ocean or wave backdrop).
Yeah, that would be great, but the bottom of the actual picture, not the bottom of where the picture does not need to be. The point is, more and more people are getting widescreen TVs, and if the subtitles are in the widescreen masking then you watch the movie in a little box - you have to put it on 4:3, so you have boxes on the sides, and boxes top and bottom. This is dumb when you could expand it to fill the screen.
Seriously, between, say, Gallipoli, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and Crocodile Dundee, there you go. Still better than New Zealand, which has to get by with just Whale Rider. You guys might want to consider vetting all movies you make very carefully, because it’s a long plane ride to where you are.