h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Run Lola Run is a great movie, I have seen it three times. I also thing Groundhog Day is great too, I have seen it dozens of times.

Time is one of the things we don't get to mess with much in the real world. This makes it a prime plot twister. Since no one has experienced anything but our "normal" time. It can also be manipulated in strange ways and not conflict with what we know, because we can't manipulate it.

A friend of mine has Run Lola Run on DVD and I saw a bit of it dubbed in English, most of the movie we watched with the subtitles. It is far better with subtitles.

But I enjoy watching movies in languages that I don't understand without subtitles. I don't like dubbing at all.

I really like people to have their own voices.

I too hate dubbing. It is deplorable. When I saw life is beautiful, with dubbing, I almost puked. Luckily, I've only seen run lola run in her native language, with very small subtitles (not those ugly yellow ones I usually see in European films)

Yes, I rented out the DVD and watched it in both english and German and I have to say I found it infinately better in German

The English dubbing on Lola Rennt while slightly bad is in no way as awfull as that on German TV where films seem to be dubbed by just three people (man woman and irritating "child" voice )

I would say that Lola Rennt bears far more resemblance to "Sliding Doors" the dire Gwenyth Paltrow vehicle of a few years back which also touched on the chaos theory theme - needless to say Lola Rennt is far superior!

Dire! Ye Gods, give me strength!

*Gets out Uzi and robots*

You think Sliding doors was better than dire?

Sliding doors isn't dire. It's not as good as RLR.

If I had seen Sliding Doors I might of mentioned it, but unfortunatly I missed that one So how long before there is a dodgy American remake of RLR?
BCNU - Crescent

Thinking about time:
10 years ago Berlin was separated into two worlds. So much has changed during this period. You should come to Berlin to explore the locations the movie takes place. I want to thank the people, who made it possible to show this movie in the US and UK. Passing by the places whith incredible speed and lots of red hair, you can actually feel the changes this city has been through. Wow.

After borrowing the DVD from a friend, I attempted for eight hours to get it working on a new machine, connected to the big projector, hoping to show this incredible and wonderful movie to a friend. While on the third attempt to get working player software (why does all PC DVD software suck? It's a conspiracy, I tell you...) to view the movie, with subtitles, some bizzare freak of accidental settings caused the sound to flip into English Dubbed mode. I sat aghast for a few moments, wondering at how badly the dubbing had mangled the meaning and artistry of the movie, before my motor neurons returned to normal, allowing me to lunge for the mouse and prevent that monstrosity from assaulting my ears any further.

German. With subtitles. Please.

After watching it once, you don't even need the subtitles anymore.

Lola Rennt claimed my soul for a week. It obsessed me. After seeing it for the first time, I ran everywhere for days, unable to stop myself. It has catapulted into my ten favorite movies of all time, and the soundtrack still remains on high rotation in my 'programming background music' list. Just hearing it raises my heart rate.

Lola taught me the joy of running. I especially fell for the implicit message that every decision and action causes whirlpools of consequence. Every tiny choice closes doors we will never know about, but opens others through which we run.

~ Orinoco

I AGREE that dubbing is bad. In Germany they dub everythng. The cheap run-of-the-mill American "comedy series" to the big budget films. Apparently the German public want that. But there is a strong movement (at least in the press) against this as people are travelling more and via the new media having more opportunities of seeing the films in their original version.

I read recently that some wildly successful American TV series, bought for loads of money, suffer so much from the translation that they end up being shown at midnight on some minority programme, because they didn't catch on.

On the other hand, the translating and dubbing has incredible powers:

It can even make Australians look as though they can act.
I have seen series in Germany and then gone back to England and seen them there in the original where they seemed rather hollow with weak story lines.
Peggy Bundy and Rose of the Golden Girls are classic examples of characters being completely changed.

No wonder people send it all up by changing the words completely sometimes and making comedy sketches out of it!

It's so frustrating when you can read the lips of the people speaking and see what they have said and then cringe at the terrible, unsuitable translation. Not surprising though, as the translators must be being paid to turn out this stuff by the ream.

They try and use the same actor to dub the same people each time, although that means the same guy might be doing Leonardo di Caprio and Marlon Brando (not in the same film!). Or it's even funnier when the same person talks with a high voice in one film and a deep one in another. Or when they try to give them accents. And when it really matters what accent they are talking in in the original (Crocodile Dundee, Notting Hill) .... forget it. How is a German supposed to know all the nuances and "in" jokes about English, Australians, Welsh, Yorkshiremen, or whatever. Let alone all the allusions in, say, The Simpsons, which are even beyond a British English speaking person - we can't know every single baseball player's scores and fielding position since 1920 and join in with all the jokes.

Who else sits and yells at the telly in Germany and wishes ALL films were shown in both languages??

Germany is a huge market for movies and tv-series. Most of it comes from the States. But most people don't speak English fluently enough. So there is a great demand for dubbing, not for subtitles.
I'm always amazed about the differences between American and German TV-culture. I know that "Frasier" runs on prime-time in the US. In Germany it is on 00.30, where nobody watches it. But compared to the original version it is very well dubbed. Unfortunately most people don't understand all the insider-jokes. But "ER" for example runs at 8pm. So there should be some similarities.
What I hate most is the time-lag. American movies always start in Germany 3-5 months after their premiere in the US. This should be changed because if you know the storie (which you know llatest after 1 month), most interesting movies are over.

Hey... german films dubbed with only three voices?
I guess somebody is mixing up Germany and Russia!

We have a huge dubbing Industry in Germany, with Studios that produce the same quality as the american ones (or does anyone think an american movie's audio track is a live recording?).
Most english speaking actors' german voices are famous german actors (eg. Sean Connery is dubbed by Mario Adorf). I know quite a lot of people who make a living by lending their voices to actors. And if there are 7 children in a movie scene, there are 7 actors to dub them.

I'd say 80% of the "big" movies are really well dubbed. But it's really cool among young people to say "I prefer it in the original version", forgetting that without dubbing they wouldn't have seen all Bond movies before they were 12 years old.
It's like saying "Their first album was better than this one". Cool.

I prefer watching english movies in english, too. But if it's japanese or czech, i prefer it to be dubbed.
I HATE subtitles! I want to WATCH a movie, not READ it.
...and if a movie is bad just because it has new voices, it was probably crappy anyway.

There are 2 small cinemas in Hamburg that show original versions. For over 2 million people! And they are almost never sold out.

Without dubbing, non-german movies would be accessible only to an elitist, small part of the population.
As a large part of the european population speaks german (D, CH, A, FL), it would be a great financial loss for the production companies not to dub a movie. They know it and that's why they dub.

(...o.k., sometimes they do make funny mistakes! want some?
in one movie, they dubbed "see you later, alligator" with the exact translation of the phrase: "tschüs Alligator". this is like saying "good bye crocodile" in english and of course absolutely not funny.
in "Chaos City", M.J. Fox said (about himself and Heidi Klum): "We just spooned! We didn't fork!"... that was translated with the correct words for spoon and fork: "Löffel", "Gabel". I had to translate it to english to understand the pun.
a common mistake is to translate the american "gymnasium" with the german word "Gymnasium" (which means a school type like a "College").
Or "two billion" with "zwei Billionen": a german billion is an english trillion. 1.000.000.000 in german is "eine Milliarde". Really confusing.....

... i met Don Johnson's german voice this week. Nice guy.