OK, so it took me a couple days to remember to bring this up, but here’s the result of the discussion at lunch about Jaws with my German colleagues:
[ul]
[li]They felt the most literal translation of the movie’s original title into German would be Kiefer. However, this word is ambiguous, as it also means “pine”. A couple colleagues said that if they had heard about a movie called Kiefer, their first thought would be that it must be a documentary about trees.[/li][li]They were similarly agreed that the next-best translation would be Maul. However, they dismissed this as a movie title as it “doesn’t sound threatening enough”.[/li][li]One colleague remarked that the actual German title, Der weiße Hai (“The White Shark”), was probably chosen due to its similarity to Der weiße Wal (“The White Whale”), which is how the title of Moby Dick is often translated.[/li][/ul]
I agree - there’s nothing quite like the word “jaws” in German. Jaws itself is not a common word, but it is known, referring to the separate parts of the jaw. “Jaw” has an an equivalant, kiefer, but jaws doesn’t. Maul is probably the next-best guess, but still doesn’t quite work. And the name Jaws itself would be mispronounced in German.
Pick up a rhinoceros? If I could do that, I wouldn’t be stuck working at the Customer Service desk.
Pick up a rhinoceros? Oh, I don’t know, sounds like a recipe for a backbrace to me.
Pick up a rhinoceros? OK. . . Is that your horn or are you just happy to see me?
Pick up a rhinoceros? OK. . .Nonsense, I think you have a perfectly LOVELY horn, and if anyone has problems with your weight, it’s THEIR problem, not yours.
Heck, I could’ve told you Germans don’t think “maul” sounds threatening enough.
As could anyone who’s seen (T)Raumschiff Surprise. (This is a German Star Wars and Star Trek parody film from a few years back where one of the main villains, Jens Maul, is so named because Germans found Darth Maul’s name so risible. The actor makes a point of adopting ridiculous jaw positions for the entire film.)
I’ve never got the appeal of westerns either. Ironically, since I’m obtaining very old ones for some older people I have seen more in the last year than in the rest of my life, at least one a week. After a while they just seem funny if you look for the ridiculous side.
I really doubt if anyone who lived in the Old West could understand it would become Romance !
Since Jaws, which I never saw, is mentioned, can I mention the sheer lack of Shock Horror in announcing that sharks don’t do nearby swimmers any favours. Avoiding where they swim is usually a given — except for pearl divers, but they have other problems, like being pearl divers.
Hippopotami are the most dangerous land animals, but it would be difficult to sell an exploitation movie called Hippo !, if only that it is absurdly easy for most of us not to live where they live and we don’t care much about those who do.
They were jokes, created by the folks at TopFive.com, which started in 1994 and is still going today as www.humorlabs.com. Their thing was to create a humorous list every day, like Top 10 lists on David Letterman. (Amusingly, TopFive’s lists always had way more than five items on them.) This particular one was “Top (however many) Chinese Translations of American Movie Titles” or something like that. It went viral, and various media sources picked it up and reported it as truth.
Dude, they made **and *sold a film called The Attack of the Giant Moussaka. It’s about exactly what it says on the tin. They also made not one, *not twobut *three *films about killer tomatoes. Which in turn spawned a TV series, a comic book, a novel, a video game AND a remake is apparently in the works.
Do not underestimate Hollywood.
Just saw this movie over the weekend. Rest assured, there were no carpets in evidence… 
I agree with the OP. The female protagonist, Adele, is not the only character who smokes in this movie. When the story begins, Adele is only fifteen years old, yet she and her peers light up during breaks at school. (I went to high school in the USA in the 1980s. Students at my high school could smoke outside, too.) Today, it is rare to see any character in a movie or TV program smoke unless the story is set decades ago.
Do French teens really smoke so much?
If you watch a lot of Chinese martial arts films, you start to gloss over that. It’s seems like a crapload of films use that and Pai Mei.
Oh, yeah … I’m thinking Lucy here.
Small aside, hippotamus is a Greek-derived word, so the plural doesn’t use an ‘i’ as a second-declension, masculine Latin noun would.
Content: I saw Shaun of the Dead at the Trocadero in Piccadilly when it came out right around Easter-time that year. Loads of people in the audience, everyone laughing up a storm throughout.
Saw it when it came out in the US later in the summer, fairly full theatre. Dead silence when ‘Can I get any of your cunts a drink?’ was said, and a group of people walked out, going ‘tch’ in disgust at the vulgar language. Not much laughter at subsequent jokes as well. Very grim.
I think you’re underestimating just how recent the “Old” West was. The era referred to as the Old West ended sometime between 1890 and 1900, depending on who you ask. The first “Western” movie came out in 1903. Most of those stuntmen in those very old westerns you’ve been watching were, themselves, cowboys who had lived through the era (if not the actual events) they were portraying for Hollywood. Even earlier than the movies, the frontier was a common subject for (usually highly fictionalized) stories in the penny press, or the subject of popular songs. Buffalo Bill invented the “Wild West Show” in 1883, and toured the capitols of Europe with it.
The people who lived in the Old West could not only anticipate that their era would be romanticized, in many cases they were the people doing the romancing.
Where in the US were you? I saw it at an outdoor movie screening here in the northwest US, and it received pretty raucous laughter in many places.
The venue probably did make a difference. This was at an evening showing in a cinema on the east coast. Maybe only 20 people were there.
I’ve never thought of smoking as an indicator of low intelligence, even in modern films. It’s all context-related:
Cigarette in holder = fancypants socialite
Cigarette in bed = just had sex
Cigarette at desk = stressed worker
Cigarette on a break from work = this character is about to show an attitude different to what we have seen in scenes where they’re working
Cigarette being lit in slow motion = this character is going to soon be seen taking no shit from anyone
Cigar while seated = rich guy
Cigar while walking about = tough guy
Cigar in a bar = celebrating
Pipe = intellectual
There were a couple of European films I’ve seen that simply blew my mind, for different reasons.
Ma Vie En Rose (My Life In Pink) was a Belgian film about a young boy who wished he was a girl. In 2014 in the US, we’d call him a “trans girl” and let the chips fall where they may.
But apparently in 1997 France this was a big deal. He and his family get a lot of hate, and eventually… well, I don’t want to spoil it, but let’s just say that his sexual identity causes problems for the family.
The problem for me was that I thought western Europeans were supposed to be so much more tolerant and advanced than the U.S. when it came to such issues.
There was also a bit of child discipline in there that confused me. There was a scene where some hateful graffiti had been spray-painted on the family’s house; I don’t remember the exact French or its exact translation, but the words “Bent boy get out!” appeared in there. The trans girl asks her dad what a “bent boy” is, and Dad proceeds to mercilessly beat an object, saying “This is what a bent boy is!”
Was he threatening the kid with a beating? Or was it some bit of culture that went over my head?
The other was A Ma Souer (or something very similar); The Fat One or The Fat Sister in English. There were a couple of scenes in there that are basically child porn. Apparently the French have a vastly different view than Americans when it comes to kids and sex.
In my experience with Chinese films the comic relief is always a lunatic. Perhaps comedy just doesn’t translate so that’s the only characters I know for sure are supposed to be funny, or perhaps the lunatic is an important archetype and that’s the most convenient comic relief.
In America the lunatic is always the killer, or occasionally wants to set captive animals free.
I watched the first *Taken *recently, a large part of which takes place in Paris, and I had to chuckle when undercover Liam Neeson went to the place his daughter had been taken away (SPOILER !)… carrying a big ol’ brown paperbag full of groceries, notably a pair of baguettes sticking out for extra Frenchness.
Yeaaaah… we don’t do paper bags. At all. We either bring out own canvas wheeled trolleys to the supermarket/corner grocery store, or they hand out white plastic bags (used to be free, now for a few cents. Ostensibly because “the environment”, cynically because cents add right up). But not paper, never paper.
Also, everybody’s a Philistine who buys supermarket bread. I don’t care where you live, in the entirety of France’s territory I guarantee there’s a bakery within walking distance of your home where they bake fresh bread.
Those don’t hand out paper bags, either :).
(The most amusing part is that the building he walks into really **does **look like a genuine Haussman hotel particulier, and of course there are plenty of panorama shots of Paris. That don’t look like CGI. Which means the crew brought their own New Yorkese paper bags across the pond, specifically so that Liam Neeson could look like he’s in foreign places but not *too *foreign :))