Shout! Factory / Scream Factory

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

There was some criticism of their subs for City On Fire as well. The person criticizing it and the person who did the subtitles had a conversation about it over at Blu-ray.com. I’m not saying this to be confrontational or anything, I’m just asking, what do you feel wasn’t probably conveyed in the subtitles? Apparently, Hong Kong Cantonese is quite vernacular, so translation may be difficult, especially for a period piece.

I don't know Cantonese (Hong Kong or otherwise) so I'm not qualified to say what was or wasn't conveyed, outside the bits of Mandarin (mainly song lyrics) that the English subtitles seemed to render pretty literally. My objection is purely to how the subtitles read in English, which as a native speaker of the language frequently felt odd in a way that I couldn't rationalize as a deliberate choice. Something I do know about HK Cantonese is that, like all languages, it has different registers for different contexts—from the most "vulgar" street-level slang to highly formal speeches that are basically Mandarin with Cantonese pronunciation—but the only register I got from the subtitles was the sort of unidiomatic English I read and hear all the time from Chinese speakers who learned English as a second language, with plenty of telltale signs to that effect. (This isn't to denigrate ESL speakers in general, many of whom are better with the language than I am, or to imply that they're inherently unable to produce a great translation into English.) It never struck me as though the subtitles were trying to convey something that would be impossible to render in a more natural English, but for a weightier judgement on that score I'd rather defer to those with native-level fluency in Cantonese and English.

[Mr Sausage]

Went to see the City on Fire restoration last night. Obviously I can't judge their accuracy, but the subtitles seemed just fine, ie. they didn't offer a significantly different experience from the other commercially available subtitles I've seen for the film. They're perfectly serviceable if you're an anglophone.

The movie is electric, tho'. It's very much in the spirit of the Safdie brothers, Good Time especially. It takes a more Chinese view of context as fate over the Safdie's more American character as fate, but it too is a crass, urban, energetic story of a man running desperately in place as fast as he can as the walls close in. Hong Kong as a labyrinth with death at its centre. Bracing filmmaking. While I used to prefer A Better Tomorrow, I find Lam's distrust of social institutions more compelling these days than Woo's tragic romanticism. Don't get me wrong, I saw A Better Tomorrow on Monday after decades of not seeing it and it blew me into the back of my seat with its vitality. But Lam's film is just more urgent--less consumed with the tragedy of outmoded concepts of brotherhood and chivalry shattering against modernity, and more inclined to see concepts like family, duty, and even friendship as traps that haunt and destroy.

[Mr Sausage]

So I went to see Peking Opera Blues this afternoon and I didn't notice any unidiomatic or wonky subtitles. Maybe I was just too caught up in the movie to notice? But wonky subtitles are the kind of thing to cut through a movie's spell for me, so, dunno.

As for the movie, yeah, maybe my favourite Hong Kong film. It's the perfect marriage of all of Tsui Hark's various styles, interests, and preoccupations. It moves effortlessly from comedy, to tragedy, to action; from quiet dramatic scenes to boisterous frenetic scenes to intricate sight gags; and at the end even approaches the speed and exaggeration of anime. And it has all of his pet themes and interests: gender bending, Chinese history and culture, animation. Yet despite mixing in so many different elements, indeed fusing several different films into one plot, the thing just sails by, never becoming incoherent, never dragging, never overstaying its welcome. Just a heavenly mixture from an often inconsistent but deeply creative artist.

[captveg]

Seeing Red Letter Media's recent Joe Dante films conversation made me wonder who Warner might license Gremlins II and/or InnerSpace for 4K UHD releases and Shout seemed the most likely, IMO. I can't see Criterion licensing either, though Arrow could also be a possibility. Of course, a Gremlins film may be seen as too commercial an IP for Warner to license out to a 3rd party label.

[therewillbeblus]

I believe Gremlins 2 was on the shortlist of Warner 4K upgrades, so it’ll probably come from somewhere soon. Innerspace coming from Shout! or KL makes sense

[captveg]

Kino would need a deal with Warner first.

[feihong]

I received the disc of Peking Opera Blues today and took a look at it.

Definitely I've never seen Peking Opera Blues look anywhere near this good before, and I'm sure the former subtitles bothered some people. Still, I feel like a LOT of nuance is being lost in a numerous new line translations. The new subtitles clarify a lot of action and who people are talking to, but they also flatten a lot of the texture of the movie. The first is petty: Sally Yeh's character has always been "Pat Neil" for me, and while the subtitles now call her Bak Nau, I just can't think of her that way.

But here are some more substantial examples:

1) When Wu Ma's father character finds Pat Neil trying to disguise herself and perform in the opera, he is in the act of kicking her out of the theater, and he tells her to prepare dinner. In the old subtitles she says to this: "We're having Sukiyaki tonight?" And Wu Ma exclaims" "Sukiyaki? Potato!" And she nods. The new translation reads "We're having hotpot tonight?" "I don't care! Just make some food!"

2) When Tsao Wan interrogates Sheung Hung, she asks how she got into the palace, and in the original she answers: " I don't know. I got in the bucket. It's the bucket that brought me here." In the new translation, she refers to it as a car, rather than a bucket, and she blames the car for taking her to the palace.

I don't know what's a more accurate translation, but in both cases, significant characterization is dismissed in the new translation. Pat Neil dreams "above her station," longing to be an actress, to eat fancy food, etc. Her dad is sick of hearing it, and brings her back down to earth. In the second translation, we don't get anything that helps us infer any of Pat Neil's ambitions, and her dad is a) way more dismissive of her than in the original translation, and b) his dismissiveness doesn't imply the way their diet reflects their straightened circumstances. Sheung Hung talking about a "bucket" bringing her to the palace implies she doesn't know what a car is––reinforcing her provincial roots, lack of experience, and making it more plausible that she would just get in the back of the thing and trust it would remain in place while she hid there. The scene ONLY works if Sheung Hung doesn't realize she's hidden in a motor car. The only way she doesn't know she's getting into a motor car is if she's never seen one before and doesn't know how it works. So calling it a "bucket" makes perfect sense to me––whereas calling it a car makes Sheung Hung seem stupid on top of ignorant, and I really think the film implies she's supposed to be naturally clever, but ignorant of the wider world. That's why the revolutionaries trust her to drug the general's drink, for instance, and why she is able to carry off her seduction of the other general––but why the revolutionaries also know they can buy her cooperation; she's totally innocent of their political machinations.

There's more that bothers me. The bribery of the Ticketing Office is done in the original translation in clever euphemisms. When the Officers find Pat Neil and accuse Wu Ma of harboring a girl in the opera, he argues it's okay because she's his daughter, and the Ticketing Officers ask how he knows it. "Her mother is my wife" is his response. And they want to see the wife. From then on, the bribes they offer the Ticketing Office are referred to as Wu Ma's wife. "How can she be so skinny?" asks Ku Feng, the Ticketing Commander Liu. "She'll be fatter tomorrow" says Wu Ma. All this clever whimsy in the face of danger is removed in the new subtitles, which for the most part disconnect the reference to Pat Neil's mother from the bribe talk. Commander Liu doesn't say "How can she be so skinny?," instead he didactically states: 'This bag is too light." Wu Ma says "That's all I have," and Commander Liu says "I guess it'll be okay." I feel as if it's plausible that part of this new exchange is accurate, but I really suspect, based on the performances and the editing of the scene, like the byplay conflating wife and bribe is meant to be this clever euphemistic exchange. Plus, in Ku Feng's threatening tone at the end of this exchange, when he looks at the bribe and says it's too skinny, it can't be Wu Ma's wife, and then Wu Ma offers that "she'll be fatter tomorrow," we get the sense that Commander Liu is not entirely placated by that promise. Then he asks what's playing in the gallery and Wu Ma says, in the original subtitles, "The Stuber King," which I imagine was meant to be "The Stubborn King" or "The Stupid King"––in either case, an oblique reference to Commander Liu. But the Commander doesn't get the irony. He smiles, still threatening, and says the opera is "a good one," and he goes out to watch the show. There's the implication that he'll watch the show for free, because Wu Ma owes him yet. We don't get any sense in that exchange that the Commander is done with Wu Ma and the theater (in fact, he's not, he continues to harass the theater people throughout the film), only that because he likes the opera, he's willing to allow Wu Ma the grace to get some more money together. The "I guess it'll be okay" in the new version dispels tension in a way I don't think Ku Feng's performance implies, and the Commander settling then and there for the bribe as offered doesn't give us the oppressive sense we're meant to feel about the Ticketing Office's relentless oppression and intimidation. There's also the issue of the cut Pat Neil fight scene, where she goes one-on-however-many against the Ticketing Officers, doing gymkata all over the backstage area of the theater and beating the snot out of the thugs. The most likely moment where this scene would have occurred in the rough cut of the film is after the Ticketing Officers find Pat Neil working backstage and decide to try and clap irons on her. This makes the bribe even more necessary, and it makes very plain that the Commander has Wu Ma and the theater owner over a barrel once the Officers have caught Pat Neil. And it balances more precisely the perverse contradictions of Commander Liu, as a cruel gestapo thug and opportunist, and genuine lover of the operas who knows the various shows well and watches them intently (while the generals just pig out and fool around with concubines while the opera goes on). I realize that scene isn't in the finished film, only partially featured in the ending credits, but if you were to put it in what I think is it's proper place, it seems even less likely that Commander Liu would let the bribe go at a sum he considers minimal, when Pat Neil has just wiped the floor with most of his guys and made an ass out of him. So when Wu Ma goes to the theater owner and exclaims "give me money to save a man!," doesn't it make more sense on the whole that Commander Liu is not going to be placated when he feels the bribe is too small and Wu Ma can't produce anything more. So I just don't think the new subtitle dismissing the debt out of hand can be accurate.

What's more, the new translation seems to go far out of its' way to avoid the idea that woman are prohibited from taking the stage in the film's time and setting. Pat Neil's crusade to break barriers and perform is recast in these new subs as a question of her talent, rather than one of institutionalized sexism. I have a hard time swallowing this change; it seems to me that social restrictions for women are just as much the antagonist of the movie as the Ticketing Office is, and to minimize Pat Neil's struggle as being one in which she just has to get good enough to perform seems entirely beside the point. At one point the incidental dialogue of the opera performers in the new subs refer to Pat Neill in this way: "What is she looking at? She's bad!" It's very ham-fisted, and it robs Pat Neil of her parity with Tsao Wan as leads in the picture. It's as if her problem is that she sucks at opera, and it's only Tsao Wan trying to break barriers and defy gender stereotypes. The more I think about it, the madder I get. The WHOLE POINT of this storyline is that Pat Neil is JUST AS QUALIFIED to play the opera parts as the male performers! She isn't worse than them, she's bucking a traditional prohibition, and enduring the slings and arrows of commonplace thinking, and pushing aside obstacles to do what she longs to do! It's just crazily wrong to recast all of the dialogue around her to suggest that she isn't up to the task! In the earlier subtitles, the casual conversation of the male performers includes stuff like "who wants to see a woman play a woman, anyway?" And they comment on how she's up practicing. "Practicing for what?" they chide her. They weren't saying she was without talent. Of course, I don't know for sure, but I don't believe the film was full of these references to Pat Neil being bad at opera. If so, that's a storyline that doesn't have a real development in the picture, because we never see her perform badly, ever, we see her train Cherie in opera, but it's never suggested this is a case of the blind leading the blind, and there is no moment in the movie where her character triumphs over being sh*t at opera and "gets good." It just never happens!

Then there is the dialogue between the Ticketing Officers and the actor Fa. The new translation really seems to concretize gayness as being Commander Liu's interest in Fa. I don't have the exact quotes at hand, but I seem to recall the original translation had a lot more gender ambiguity baked in, making so that Commander Liu's amorousness was expressed in language which frequently feminized Fa, and Fa responds by throwing up female-gender-coded objections to Liu's advances, until the point where he uses the deeper register of his voice to assert his sense of male identity. It seems clearer in the original version that Commander Liu has either a more fluid idea of sexuality, or, more in character with the earlier discussion of the bribe as a "thin wife" or a "fat wife," looks for a euphemistic way to make his gayness an un-broachable subject except in the most veiled terms. Think of how, much later in the movie, Commander Liu ogles the whipped back of Tsao Wan, who has dressed to look like a boy. There is just a complex sexuality to Liu, which includes misogyny and feminization as aesthetic markers of his kinks and also as elements of the way he projects power onto people. The idea that the Commander would refer to Fa purely using masculine pronouns seems super weird, and again removes the gamesmanship which seems an essential part of the characterization Ku Feng and the writers are giving to Liu. Maybe the translator or the company is worried about the ambiguity of the language and the implications of it here, but there seems to be a concerted effort on the translator's part to remove concepts of sexism and subtle or ambiguous gender representation from the translation, and I think they are rewriting whole sequences in the movie to make the sexual cruelty of Commander Liu just a little more vague and less pointed throughout––when that is clearly the threat he represents. These are the places where the translation seems to make the biggest divergences from the earlier subtitles for the film, as if a prude were trying to sort the ideas of the movie into easy-to-grasp buckets.

I'm trying not to be too frustrated by all this, because I don't know Cantonese and I have no idea what they're really saying. But I have seen this movie in a host of different formats, all with the previous subtitles, and I suspect some annoying choices are being made in the new translation, choices which seem maybe more prudish than ideological––but what do I know. For the most part everything is relatively the same––there's a little more language in general, clarifying action we see happening on screen. It's hard to read it all, as before, because the language rolls by so fast, but attention seems to have been given to matching the amount of speech with the translated language we have to read. I don't think there's really that 1-to-1 a comparison between Cantonese and English, I suspect a lot of these things have to be a little different from language to language in order to account for varied syntax, grammar, cultural and colloquial references, styles of speech, dialect, etc. So I'm again not totally sure what they're trying to do here. And the problem I see is that character nuance seems to be getting lost in the new translation. Was all that nuance there to begin with, or was it a creation of the earlier translators? The criticism I always heard of the earlier translations stemmed from Tsui's brag that he would only pay the translators for half a day's work on a film––the idea that they were grinding these translations out at top speed. But it that was the case, I don't see how they'd have time to make up a bunch of stuff that wasn't there to begin with, clever wordplay that didn't already exist. Whereas the modern translator has more potential reason to alter the translations, to make them more anodyne for a modern audience. It doesn't make the film more subtle, it just removes valuable context, as far as I can see.

[andyli]

I've watched the Shout disc. Granted I've neither used the new English subtitle nor ever used the "previous one", but going by the examples feihong shared in the above post, I'd say the new subtitle can't even begin to compete with the previous translation, and I can confirm that the crime is two-fold: it is as inaccurate as it is bland.

It sounds like the old translation has gone through a lot of thoughts and careful choices. The name "Pat Neil" is certainly hilarious; Bak Nau on the other hand is the plain transliteration but the translator can certainly do better than that if they know the original language. Her nickname is literally "white chick", which is a better choice that can itself get across the overtone. Sukiyaki or hotpot, she's definitely daydreaming suggesting this kind of food when her father only just lost all his money that day to the predatory official, so the father's response is rightly "potatoes!" to pull her right back down to earth. The new translation is simply wrong. He does care not to eat fancy food that particular night.

Feihong, you are pretty much spot on in almost every other case you make. The handling of the "wife" bribery by the old translation is again ingenious. I can't think of a better way to put it, except pointing out the exact wording used by Wu Man is "yellow-faced woman", which can be understood as a subtle allusion to the gold in the bag. The new subtitle only destroys everything that's subtle and funny in it.

On top of the careless inaccuracy and blandness, it's a shame that the new translation feels the need to address the sexism and gender issue from the film's text. It's such a core theme for the film and to strip and toss it out is as much a crime as to DNR the grains out of the image completely.

[videozor]

The Killer is upcoming on Dec, 2 and will also feature "newly translated subtitles" ...

[beamish14]

Pleasant surprise to see Painted Faces in Shout’s upcoming Hong Kong New Wave Classics set. It weirdly toggles between feel-good sentimentality and child abuse, but Sammo Hung is excellent

[swo17]

Noticed some heavily discounted prices on Shout's website:

Trouble in Mind $7.99
Shaw Brothers Vols. 6 & 7 $79.99

[swo17]

Also:

Shaw Vol. 5 $69.99
Larry Cohen set $29.99

[Yakushima]

Also, SHOUT10 code will give you a 10% discount.

[dwk]

This sale on their site exclusive bundles of crap/extra slipcovers and site exclusive limited editions is probably tied to recent layoffs at Shout that included some of the people on the e-commerce side of things.

The extent of the cuts couldn’t be confirmed. Deadline hears they happened last week and comprised about 14% of staff across finance, marketing, operations and e-commerce.

[dwk]

The Exorcist III and Nightbreed UHDs and Blu-ray only releases and the Dead Ringers Blu-ray have been added to Shout's going OOP section.

[jt938]

Seems like they've lost their Morgan Creek deal.

[Lowry_Sam]

In the recent sale I saw Wasp Woman listed for 7.99, but I guess it sold out before I could checkout. I asked to be notified when it became available again & received an email this morning, but when I clicked on the link I got 404 error message. I tried a search, but the Wasp Woman completely disappeared from their website. Bluray.com turned up a 3D version of the movie (BD-R) from a label called eyepop (first available in July). I guess a generic back-in-stock email is sent any time there's a change to the site for a release, not that it actually is available again. Has anyone heard about this getting re-released? Anyone familiar with eyepop 3D releases? Looks only to have a 3d version of movies (many of which were not originally released in 3d).

[hearthesilence]

Plenty of room for improvement for whoever picks up Dead Ringers.

[Lowry_Sam]

Plenty of room for improvement for whoever picks up Dead Ringers.

I would like to think Criterion is getting this back for the 4K as it has never left the channel.

[What A Disgrace]

Shout! just recently released a 4K of the film in a steel book package.

[eerik]

Shout! just recently released a 4K of the film in a steel book package.

There is no 4K release of Dead Ringers. Are you mistaking it for The Dead Zone?

[Lowry_Sam]

Shout! just recently released a 4K of the film in a steel book package.

Dead Ringers or Wasp Woman? Don't recall an announcement for the former on UHD & searches for both turn up an error 404 page.

[Peacock]

All the Shaw Classics sets have now been discounted aside from number 8.

[dwk]

Rumor has it that Shout is shutting down their webstore. Some of their site exclusives (The Mario Bava Collection, Hong Kong Gamblers and Gangsters Collection, and Hong Kong New Wave Essentials) are starting to show up at GRUV

[brundlefly]

All the Shaw Classics sets have now been discounted aside from number 8.

Looks like Amazon is price-matching these, with the exception of 6 & 8, though some volumes are out of stock.