With Parasite’s Oscar wins including Best Picture there has been increased focus on the debate between subtitling and dubbing. (Parasite was subtitled.)

Subtitling preserves the original dialog track and vocal performances of the cast by presenting the dialog, often not in a verbatim form, as text usually along the bottom of the screen. Night Watch, a 2004 Russian urban fantasy film presented its subtitles in sometimes floating and dissolving text to convey the seductive nature of a character’s voice.

Dubbing removes the original dialog track from the audio and replaces it with a spoken language track for the intended audience, in the United States that is usually English. Often the original actors are not employed in this replacement but rather specialized voice actors provide the new dialog. In rare cases dubbing may be used to replace an actor’s dialog where the film is not being translated into a new language. In Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes the director replaced all of Andie MacDowell’s dialog with Glenn Close because he was unhappy with the quality of her voice while in Flash Gordon, due to conflicts with the producer Dino De Laurentiis, Sam J. Jones’s voice, who played Flash, was replaced entirely in post-production. These examples are the exception and not the rule as dubbing is most prominently used for translation.

Some cinephiles consider subtitling a purer form of the film experience, preferring to hear the original performance while many people, usually more casual film viewers, like the ease of dubbing.

I prefer subtitling myself but I would caution people to refrain from snobbery towards those who enjoy their films dubbed. There are a variety of reason why dubbing may work better for some people. A key aspect of enjoyable film watching is the suspension of disbelief, when the reality of the story unfolding on the screen if fully accepted the movie becomes like a waking dream for the viewer. There are people for whom the act of breaking their reverie with the image to read the text shatters that delicate illusion keeping the story and the characters at an emotional distance. There are people who are competent readers but not quick ones and the pace of subtitled dialog can be stressful again shattering the suspension of disbelief.

Dubbing also has troubling issues. Often the voice of the dubbed actor doesn’t match with the body of the on-screen talent. In the 1976 movie MidwayJapanese star Toshiro Mifune’s voice was replaced by Paul Frees, a good actor with lots of good performances to his credit but his amazing baritones voice was an ill fit for Mifune. A second issue with dubbing the trouble synchronizing the dialog to the actor’s lips. When the languages are closely related, such as German and English in Das Boot, where most of the onscreen actors performed their own English language dub the mismatch can be minimized but for languages widely separated across the globe, such as Japanese and English, the lack of synchronization can produce an unintended comical effect.

There is no perfect or ‘right’ answer and I say watch films in the manner that makes the experience most pleasurable to you and don’t worry or judge others for their differences.

Sunday night I got online and hunted around to see if any of my streaming services were offering up 1981’s The Howling. After one false sign that it was currently on Shudder, it wasn’t’, I moved to my fall back movie for the evening and re-watched get Out.

Jordan Peele’s first film has been described by the writer/director as ‘sociological horror’ with a tag line that I think many minorities could associate with, ‘Because you’re invited doesn’t mean you’re welcome.’ If follows Chris as he goes for a weekend with his girlfriend Rose back to meet her liberal and ultimately sinister parents. Chris, who is black, stands out quite a bit in the white New England suburb where Rose’s family lives. Both a horror and a science-fiction film Get Out won an Oscar for best original screenplay, a rare feat for a genre film.

This is a movie that fired on all cylinders when I watched in during tis theatrical run and I can gladly announce it still does a few. While Peele’s follow-up film US is a masterpiece of mood and tension that story and world-building doesn’t hang together for me as effectively as it does here with Get Out.

Martin Scorsese is one of the best living film makers and has produced films that will be studied and heralded as classic for decades to come but The Irishmanisn’t one of them.

Adapted from the book I Heard You Paint Houses the film proports to tell the organized crime life of Frank Sheeran, the titled Irishman, a teamster and his telling a hitman through which the most infamous mafia action occurred.

Let me get this out of the way, I don’t the story from this mafia Forrest Gump. There’s no documentary or corroborating evidence to support these wild claims and it all strikes me tall tales told by a braggart. So, the film as history is in my opinion bunk but how is it as entertainment?

Far too long.

I have no issue with long movies and there are several that live happily in my library. Endings are critical to stories be they film or prose and knowing when to end is vital. The central relationship in The Irishman is between Frank and Teamster Union President Jimmy Hoffa. Without getting into spoilers the relationship naturally ends with Hoffa’s unsolved disappearance and yet the film continues to roll for nearly an hour. No other relationship in the film, not with either of Frank’s wives or his estranged daughters, or with his friend and mafia boss Russell Bufalino carry the emotional weight or character arcs that come with Frank and Hoffa. The scenes with Frank and Hoffa provide a character arc that should provide a sense of completion, that informing us that from here there is no more character growth for Frank that really matters. Instead we meander through the waning years of his life, in prison, out of prison, the slow decay that come with age, all without any sense of meaning, purpose, or message. The film is narrated by Frank and throughout its run time we return to the nursing home where he spends his final days as he visibly tells us his life but there is no one he is telling it to. The author of the book isn’t present, there is literally no one to hear this fabrication save us.

Reuniting with many of his famous collaborators Scorsese shows is brilliance as a filmmaker. The faults in The Irishman are entirely in its scripting and its editing. Cut down to two or maybe two and a quarter hours this would have played as thoroughly entertaining fiction but at its present length it is a meandering mess.