They were using US visual shorthand. The brown paper bag with the bread and occassionaly celery sticking out is the archetypical visual denotation of “gone to the grocery store.” I guess the producers didn’t want to confuse the US audience by having Liam use the French method.
Come to think of it, whenever I’m watching a foreign flick I always wonder what visual shorthand I’m missing that would be obvious to the home audience. In one anime, a guy in power armor is shooting down into a subway tunnel and there’s huge billowing smoke clouds. I didn’t know it until later, but there’s a visual joke because in the midst of all this is a prominent sign in Japanese saying, “No Smoking.”
I don’t think it’s a matter of being foreign enough or too foreign. Filmmakers have concerns other than a faithful representation of reality, such as visual shorthand. A paper bag is shorthand for groceries.
Furthermore a guy like Liam Neeson might just looks better carrying a brown paper bag in his arms rather than swinging a white plastic bag by the fingers.
Of all popular media, the movies in general are the least concerned with faithful representation of reality.
Well, obviously - but I don’t think US audiences would have been thoroughly confused by Liam Neeson bringing “home” a few heads of celery and/or a lone leek sticking out of an otherwise nondescript plastic bag, y’know ?
The foreign/not too foreign bit refers to the architecture - Parisian buildings look nothing like NYC, or even Vancouver (which is apparently architecturally designed to look like every *other *city in the world ). So the background suggests that Liam is Not Home - but the foreground implies it’s Just Like Home. Dichotomy. Pedantic Euro Humour.
It’s not that audiences will be confused. It’s that some images are shortcuts for the brain. They don’t use any of the brain’s attention. It makes it a background matter instead of a foreground matter. It makes a difference.
How about the Billy Mack scenes from Love Actually? Most of his story is based on whether his record is going to be the “Christmas Number One” single, and he spends his time promoting the hell out of it for just that purpose. In the US, a Number One record is a Number One record, and having it be on Christmas doesn’t have any greater cachet than having it be in, say, April.
When I first saw this movie I thought the “Christmas Number One” was something the writers had made up for the movie plot. Turns out it’s a Brit cultural phenomenon going back decades.
For the “cultists,” being over the top is a feature, not a bug. It’s the same reason I liked Commedia dell’Arte versions of Shakespeare.
For this thread, all I can think of is a particular manga that made the US news for supposedly sexualizing kids by some here in the US. To anyone more acquainted with Japanese cartoons, they were clearly of age, and it really wasn’t all that sexual, other than short skirts. The comic was clearly horror, yet the news tries to portray it as porn. There was no nudity or even sexual situations in it, seeing as the two characters are straight women.
Completely disagree. Firstly, 1997 was 17 years ago. A lot has changed in that time with regard to LGBT rights- an awful lot has changed in the last decade, I’d argue, in both the US and European countries. Lawrence vs Texas was in 2003.
But I particularly disagree with your bolded claim. It seems awfully optimistic.
Yes. They’re more likely to smoke than adults. Remember: by definition, anything forbidden is cool to idiot teenagers, and every teenager is an idiot (some manage not to do it full-time). Ulfreida, “having a word which literally translates as ‘jaws’” isn’t the same as “having a word which means exactly the same as ‘jaws’”. psychonaut already explained the different connotations of the closest literal translations, do you disagree with his information?
As has been mentioned, the Spanish name was Tiburón (Shark); Mandíbulas would refer to the bones minus the teeth, it sounds as if the movie will be about archaeologists (perhaps they disturb an ancient fossil site where a dinosaur was executed for his evil deeds, bringing him back from the dead? Either that or it’s a documentary on human evolution). Wolverine, also mentioned several times, became Lobezno (wolf cub, which has connotations of “small, fierce, hardy, doesn’t give up because he doesn’t have the fucking concept”) because both Glotón and Carcayú sound like clown names.
Ulfreida, please excuse my snark. And Nava, thanks for explaining it.
For the record: Ibn Warraq was expecting “Superman” to translate into “Überman” or “Übermensch,” as the Nazis had co-opted “Superman” for the Aryan movement. (I think it was something like that). Since “Superman” is a proper noun, it was used for the movie posters.
I understood Ibn Warraq’s point. I was finding the story of the German title for Jaws not believable (nor did it turn out to be true in any sense). Perhaps I expressed it badly.
). So the background suggests that Liam is Not Home - but the foreground implies it’s Just Like Home. Dichotomy. Pedantic Euro Humour.