zeprosnepsid said:
1. What deters you from watching foreign films?
2. What are your feelings on dubbing versus subtitling?
3. What kinds of foreign films are you most likely to watch? (action/horror, intellectual/art, comedy....)
4. What would most likely get you to see a foreign film? (a name director/actor? trailer or other marketing? word of mouth?)
5. Are you more likely to watch foreign films on DVD than in theaters? Why?
6. Who are a few of your favorite foreign film directors (preferably still living) if you have any...
I'm prefacing all this with some general information to put things into context for you.
We're in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where even Hollywood movies are foreign films.
Local films are all in Sinhalese or Tamil, neither of which I understand (much to the chagrin of everyone else I try to interact with her) and neither of which come either subtitled or dubbed. But since I'm from Canada, I don't actually think of Hollywood movies as foreign...
There's only one store in the entire country that we're aware of that sells legal copies of movies (Odel Department Store), they have perhaps a hundred titles in stock, and they cost about ten times as much (they sell at standard North American prices) as the pirated movies that are available everywhere else (DVDs - Rs.170-300, or US$1.70-3.00 about). Prices vary depending on where the movie's from - Hollywood movies are cheaper than Bollywood (Bombay, aka Mumbai, and in Hindi) and Mollywood (Madras, aka Chennai, in Tamil) and other foreign movies. We can get foreign films from just about everywhere in the world, and we've watched them. Taxi & Taxi 2 from France (far better and far far funnier than the Holllywood version with Queen Latifah), Thai movies with Tony Jaa (excellent trishaw chase scenes which are highly amusing), Hong Kong films with fantasy kung fu, Chinese and Japanese films, and the list goes on. The selection available to us for foreign films is far far far better than what I've ever seen in a major Blockbuster in Canada. My hubby already had a lot of foreign films when I arrived, but the selection has increased since I got here, so we've been really lucky. Oh, and he was addicted to them already, so I had no choice but to become exposed and addicted.
1. If it doesn't have subtitles or if it's not dubbed, I won't watch it. My husband doesn't feel the same way - even if it's in a language he doesn't understand, he'll still watch it if it's good. But then, this is also the man who learned Hindi and Tamil so he could understand the dialogue rather than having to read the subtitles.
2. It really depends. If the dubbing was a decent job, I'd probably prefer that, but my husband wouldn't because he understand something like 4 1/2 languages whereas I'm at 1, so he understands most of what we buy where I need the subtitles. So subtitles are fine. But sometimes, the subtitles are delayed by a half minute or so, or the subtitles aren't translated well and so miss a huge chunk of the joke or what's going on. Sometimes, the subtitles aren't even close to what's said, and occasionally (like one James Bond movie), the subtitles included actually belong to an entirely different movie altogether (really, can you see James Bond saying "Confucious say red roses are red are...")
3. Not a fair question for us. We watch more than a hundred movies a year, and we buy 30 + at a time, every other month. (No decent television programming.) We're both junkies, and we don't like watching the same thing all the time. We'll watch just about anything if it's half-decent, although I don't watch graphic or horror. Our preferred genres, however, are science fiction and Bollywood, even though Bollywood isn't a genre, but Bollywood movies tend to be very engrossing, more so than Hollywood movies.
4. We watch a lot of foreign films anyway. We actually do a rotation of 1 Hollywood, 1 Bollywood, 1 Hollywood, 1 Tamil, 1 Hollywood, 1 other foreign. (We're both OCD, so classification is high in our lifestyles.
) So you can see that every other movie we watch is foreign. Big attractions can be the director or actors (like Tony Jaa, Amitabh Bachchan, Hritikh Roshan, Saif Ali Khan, Shahrukh Khan, Preity Zinta, Rani Mukerjee, Vijay Dutt, Ajay, Michelle Yeoh, and so on) or it can be recommended to us by the staff at the DVD store (after all the movies we've bought there, they have a pretty good idea what we like, plus it seems like they watch pretty much everything, so they tell us when something is particularly good, interesting, or not to bother with it.)
5. DVDs at home. We haven't been to a movie theatre since I arrived 2 1/2 years ago. We're both antisocial homebodies, the nearest theatre is a half hour away, and a DVD costs the same as one seat at the theatre. We have a home entertainment system, so pretty decent sound. Hubby's pushing for a bigger tv.
We have no reason to go to a theatre.
6. Favorite foreign film directors would be something hubby would remember. I don't pay as much attention to director's names. Favorite foreign actors, now... That's easy for me to list.
Good luck with your article!
Laurie, 38, Colombo, Sri Lanka (formerly Canada)
