So, my uncle has been after me to rent EASTERN PROMISES for, I don't know, several weeks now. My uncle and I aren't very close, really, but I appreciate it when pretty much anybody wants to spend time with me, so I stuck PROMISES on my NetFlix queue and told him when it arrived.
Then a day passed. And another. And another.
After I'd had EASTERN PROMISES for a week without watching it, I felt I was wasting my money (what's worse, I had a second movie tyranist wanted to watch with me that I've also sat upon for way too long), and considered sending it back.
But tonight, I saw my uncle returning from driving his fiancee home and told him, "You, me, tonight, EASTERN PROMISES." He looked at the clock (it was one a.m.) and tried to get out of it, but finally broke down and I put it on.
It was an interesting and complex movie, made more complex by the intricacies of the Russian Mafia, and the abundant Russian dialogue spoken without subtitles. But about two-thirds of the way through the picture, during a baffling five minute scene spoken entirely in Russian, I got a chilling thought: what if this was not how we were meant to be watching it? I grabbed the DVD remote, flipped a switch . . . and suddenly, there were subtitles for everything that was being said.
Eegah. We watched it through to the end, getting quite a bit out of the last half-hour, but I gotta wonder how much better the film would've been, had I not made the stupid mistake of not flipping on the subtitles. Dobra utra.Rish "Mid-Western Promises" Outfield
P.S. You know, not all of this week's STOTW should go to me. In my view, the DVD should automatically include subtitles unless you tell it to leave them off. Not the other way around.
1 comment:
The same thing happened to me with the film "Passion" It started out and went for about five minutes in all aramaic, before I realised I had to push the subtitle button on the DVD remote to get the subtitles. Then again, I didn't need subtitles because I speak aramaic.
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