Film Mona Lisa Smile

Wendy and I went to the UME theater at Xintiandi. The film is named Mona Lisa Smile by Julia Roberts.

Late Movie

It was the latest show of the day. It started at 11:10 PM. I am lucky to live in a city that there is a theater serving film as late as 11:00 PM. Of cause, we were really tired after we got out of the theater around 1:20 AM in the morning of today.

There are only 8 persons in the well equipped theater. So the film was almost exclusive for us.

Credit: Sony Pictures

Original Movie

It is worth noting that many American movies are shown in original language – English – in theaters with Chinese subtitle. I often watch movies but didn’t watch any translated film yet. What does it mean? Is it an indicator of internationalization, or the lose of local language? I don’t know.

9 thoughts on “Film Mona Lisa Smile”

Showing foreign movies in their original languages is of course by no means an indication of losing the local language :-) Outside China and Asia that is how most of foreign movies are played. Video and Audio including voices are two major components of a movie. They are presented best in the original forms which are preferred by both movie artists and audience. There is no perfect translation and dubbing, let alone the high cost.

Not long ago China was one of a few countries where almost every foreign movies was played with dubbing. It was because of not only the traditional way showing froreign movies but also the censorship. Movies often had to be cut to meet the requirements from the government. Sometimes the cut was so much that some of dialogs had to be changed to patch up the broken story. Of course, the dubbing came handy in those situations :-) So foreign movie translation and dubbing became an industry and had its own form of art. Several major movie studios had big translation and dubbing ficilates. The most famous one was The Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio where several voice actors became very well known in China with their voices heard in various foreign movies.

Interestingly, while nowadays it is used less for foreign moview, dubbing is used quite often in Chinese movies — those Hong Kong movies with original dialogs in Cantonese. For many Chinese people Cantonese sounds just like another foreign language :-)

JH, exactly! Exactly! I totally agree with you. The dubbing (I just learnt this word) happens all the time. There is very hot debat of whether this industry should still be there. It is very bad for the audience that no matter how fantastic the audio and voice of the original movie and how variable the environment (in mountains, in a factory, or in forest) is, the dubbing is always produced in the same room, which never match the quality of the original movie – it is impossible in terms of financial cost for the voice actors and the studio also follow the original movie to really go to those places.

BTW, the blog is very educational for me because when I point out something strange outside China, there will be some readers jumping up – “hey, China is the very few countries in the world that ….”.

It happens to the Sender Pay SMS business module, (while it is receiver pay module in other countries), and the dubbing I talked about. This opened my eyes. :-D Good. Good.

Isn’t dubbing the way only changing the human voice and not touching any background sound? That is what I have assumed. And I know any original film is also dubbed by actors and actresses in studio after the scenes is finished. For those are familiar to foreign language seeing original movies is likely the nice fashion to brush up language skills at the same time enjoying it, on the other hand, for those are not familiar to foreign language reading subtitls seeing moving pictures must be a tired way to enjoy a foreign movie.

Although I was mainly talking about translation dubbing for foreign movies, technically in film-making dubbing is the process of adding or replacing a soundtrack for a movie. It is usually used in the post production stage to add background sound, special effect sound, music and dialogs into the final movie release. However, many dialogs these days are so called production sound which means they are recorded live when movies are being filmed. It has been preferred by most directors because it sounds natural and has perfect lip synch.

Thank you, JH.

I have learned a lot this time.

Dubbing/Subtitling form an integral part for transfer of culture across the globe.Some countries prefer Dubbing & other Subtitling though the effort & talent required for both is at par.

Of late films have started using “sync-sound” technology whereby dubbing is not required in original language production as most is recorded “live” on sets.Sometimes dubbing is required after complete shooting of the film.One can always debate that the actors original performance gets diluted but there are times when they better their performances also.

Foreign language dubbing/subtitling always help to educate the masses in the long run.Often the quality of dub/sub is bad which is why the general perception is bad amongst most people.Once there is professional approach & competent people in the field it will ensure language/cultural transfer of highest quality.

Lawrence Vishnu

CEO

Media Movers, Inc.

http://www.media-movers.com

Dubbing/Subtitling/Voice over