Recently, a coworker enthusiastically recommended I read "The Kite Runner," so naturally I picked up the motion picture adaptation at Blockbuster. We only got about 15 minutes in before turning it off. Offensive language? No. Gratuitous sex scenes? Please. Bad acting? Hardly. The subtitles were written in a thin, pale yellow font laid over the scenes. And considering it's a movie partly based in the Persian desert...well, you can understand my frustration. The following doesn't come close to a prime example, but it's the only screen cap I could find in an online pinch. I present to the jury Figure 1 of 1:
Paul and I tried our best to decipher lemon chiffon key dialogue laid over sand hills, pale tablecloths, crisp white shirts...all further complicated by a moving camera. But after squinting and piecing together the broken text for what I consider a reasonable amount of time, I had to return to the DVD's setup menu and see if there was an English-dubbed version. Nope. Well there's a waste of 4 dollars and a movie I would have otherwise found culturally enlightening.
This kind of carelessness maddens me to no end. And I'm watching it on a larger high-definition TV with a contact prescription I had updated two months ago, so it's not my eyesight. Can the DVD authors, the producer, the director, the intern, maybe watch 5 minutes of it to see if the text is decipherable to the average U.S. American? No? Well then here's what you do:
As with most films these days, the movie's presented in widescreen. Thus, large spans of black emptiness frame both the top and bottom of the picture eager for a purpose. I believe it's actually called letterbox. The name seems apropos, so let's go ahead and put the text there. That way, the dialogue is clearly legible. And with the exception of black, you can present text in any color of the rainbow. Switch up the colors, play with fonts, all caps, no caps, whatever. Plus it makes your movie look prettier with text-free frames. It's really a win-win for all involved.
For directors who've anticipated the audience's need to understand the movie through dialogue and have formatted the text accordingly, thank you! I'm going to start keeping a list of offenders, though. Don't make it any harder than it has to be for Americans to experience cultural diversity through film.
So, I guess this means I'll have to read the book now.
1 comment:
Hmm, I too rented instead of read. But I didn't have any problems. Maybe this is why the movie did so bad?
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