Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Talk about surreal.
I was watching "Saving Private Ryan" on tv the other day, and halfway Kilian joined me.
I assume most people already know that Saving Private Ryan is an award-winning movie set during the 2nd World War about a group of American soldiers who are sent to retrieve another American soldier because his 3 other brothers had died in action and that soldier therefore had earned his ticket home. Incidentally this show featured alot of blood, alot of gore and alot of vulgarities, alot of which were more often than not directed at German Nazi soldiers.

So picture this :
I'm watching a movie with people killing Germans while eating ice-cream with my German housemate.

I told him that that would be something to tell my grandchildren about, and he agreed saying bygones were bygones. So as a matter of fact it didn't feel awkward at all, as a matter of fact it enhanced the movie coz he actually did real time translations during the movie.
Not sure if anyone remembered the scene in Saving Private Ryan where this cowardly soldier did not have the guts to move from his spot and therefore give his comrades badly needed ammo, and they ended up dead, one of which had a very slow painful death as the knife was slowly pierced into his heart as his strength to keep the German soldier at bay waned. If anyone remembered that scene vividly like i did, they would probably also remember the German soldier who was laying his weight down on the American soldier pinned below was hissing unintelligable taunts at the hapless soldier, and why i say watching the movie with Kilian enhanced that scene was because the soldier was actually saying:
"Give it up. You cannot win. It will be less painful this way, trust me, you'll see."

Kilian also mentioned it was much more fun watching Saving Private Ryan here in New Zealand despite already having watched it before because when he watched it back in Germany, it didn't feel authentic because the movie had been dubbed into German, so it was particularly revolting to hear supposedly American soldiers in the movie yelling anti-German remarks in German. I pondered on this because i had taken for granted that movies were the way they were because in Malaysia and Singapore movies were rarely dubbed.
I suddenly feel very lucky because of that, since i very vividly remembered what Shivram told me about the horrors of watching Spiderman 2 that was dubbed into Tamil, where at times what the character said in the movie in English had to be translated into a far longer sentence in Tamil, resulting in that character talking into another scene where another character's mouth had already started moving in reply.
I miss the cheap movies in Singapore, yes cheap despite the price increase, compared to NZ anyway where a weekend ticket is NZ$14.50, which is about S$17.50, or worst still, i miss the even CHEAPER movies in JB =/ both the big screen and the CDs *snigger*

Dr@n|xX at 2:22 PM