Today's Must Read: Icons of Fright details the dumbing down of Let the Right One In by way of simplified subtitles (thanks to H-E for pointing this out). Plenty of screengrabs prove their sharp point. Eli got staked!Why would they do this for the DVD release? The film was plenty successful in its initital form. If the distributor felt it should be dumbed down shouldn't they have just waited for the American remake to do that deed? American remakes are efficiency experts at just that. They always get the job done!
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9 comments:
I'm confused, I recently saw this on netflix and the subtitles were the same as the movie. There were two different sets of subtitles for Americans and a dubbed English version of the movie. But I played it in English Subtitles rather than American Narrative Subtitles.
I want to buy this and I hope it's the same one that I saw.
Nikki
Apparently it was a copyright issue with the subtitles; I'd heard about this but I hadn't seen a comparison.
I checked around,It seems like a few people have gotten the right subtitles. But everyone else is so busy complaining that the haven't checked their DVD to see if it was different or not.
Europe rulz!
Wow. How upsetting.
Looking right now at my copy from Netflix: it lists "English subtitles", "English narrative subtitles", and Spanish subtitles. I'm surprised that the default audio is dubbed English.
I'm not sure what the "English narrative" option is supposed to do; I thought it might be a hearing impaired version with sounds described (e.g., [class laughs]), but after about 10 minutes the only words it's displayed are the newspaper headlines. Uh, if a person can follow the spoken Swedish, wouldn't you think she'd be able to read the headlines without an English translation?
Still, I'm looking forward to this film!
I knew the jig was up when they didn't translate the Morse code "S-W-E-E-T" like they did in the theatre. The movie had a little less personality when I watched it on dvd. Now I know why.
I sent an email over to a DVD news/review site called The Digital Bits, linking them to the site you posted. They contacted Mongrel Media who released the film, and Mongrel Media gave this response:
"We've been made aware that there are several fans that don't like the version of the subtitles on the DVD/BR. We had an alternate translation that we went with. Obviously a lot of fans thought we should have stuck with the original theatrical version. We are listening to the fans feedback, and going forward we will be manufacturing the discs with the subtitles from the theatrical version."
"There are no exchanges. We are going to make an alternate version available however. For those that wish to purchase a version with the theatrical subtitles, it will be called out in the tech specs box at the back/bottom of the package where it will list SUBTITLES: ENGLISH (Theatrical), SPANISH."
I'd like to say thank you to Bill Hunt who runs The Digital Bits and routinely holds studios' feet to the fire on these types of matters.
Yeah I saw it on netflix too and I wanna buy it as well. I think it's a great movie. The english subtitles seemed fine to me.
Tress
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