Lost in Translation

So, that was your buddy in the wood chipper, eh? I rent Fargo last night on DVD. Northern LS, on her way to Fargo, had never seen the movie. While the two of us yuck it up at the plodding Minnesotans, Gill just looks confused. He simply doesn't understand what is funny about the whole thing. To him, they are just speaking English; the scenes are just generically American. Some things just can't be translated.

It reminds me of some of the more bizarre moments of movie screening in Israel. Seeing a Pedro Almadovar film (with only Hebrew subtitles) was an exercise in speed-reading that left me exhausted and nursing a headache (not to mention confused about major pieces of plot development that I had missed because of not being able to read fast enough). At least we don't dub movies: nothing quite prepares you for sitting in a hotel room in Frankfurt, watching an old rerun of Hogan's Heroes—dubbed in German.