Comments | chrisconlon: Six From '76: Movies of the Bicentennial Year, Part 3

chrisconlon

Six From '76: Movies of the Bicentennial Year, Part 3

Jun 05, 2011 20:55

Seven Beauties. Starring Giancarlo Giannini, Fernando Rey, and Shirley Stoler. Directed by Lina Wertmüller.

Seven Beauties was the first foreign language film I ever saw, although at the time I didn’t actually realize it was a foreign language film.

How is this possible? I first saw Seven Beauties (technically a 1975 film but not released in the U.S ( Read more... )

Comments 4

marktlancaster June 6 2011, 18:09:40 UTC

This is one I've never heard of, but I'm definitely intrigued. I'll be looking to see if Netflix carries it (NF is blocked at my office, due to the availability of streaming video on the site -- very inconvenient!)

chrisconlon June 6 2011, 18:15:56 UTC

Netflix definitely has it, Mark, and you'll see from the reviews there that I'm not the only one in love with this Italian masterpiece. Get ready for a wild ride, man!

marktlancaster June 6 2011, 18:27:05 UTC

Excellent! And I'll be sure to watch it in Italian. I've done a complete 180 in the last five years or so with regard to foreign language films. I used to only watch dubbed versions, saying "I want to watch a movie, not read it". But one problem I often encountered was that the dubbing was often clearly not in the sound-world of the film, so I was distracted by thoughts of unseen actors in a studio reading these lines with an eye on their own screening of the film. It was in situations like this that I gradually got used to "reading a movie" while at the same time viewing it. Now, I don't even look to see if the DVD has an English dub track. I do still have a problem with foreign films in a theater, though, because I occasionally will miss dialogue due to watching the scene, or miss the scene due to reading the dialogue, and it's nice in that situation to rewind a bit and take a second pass.

chrisconlon June 6 2011, 18:33:28 UTC

Of course, subtitles are an imperfect solution to the language problem, but it's the best anyone has ever come up with. There is only one foreign language film in the world that I deliberately watch dubbed instead of subtitled these days--it's STEAMBOY, the wonderful Japanese steampunk animated feature. The thing is, the whole story is set in an alternate-universe England, and all the characters would be speaking English anyway...in that sense the original language, Japanese, is actually wrong!