Coyote vs Odysseus

Last night, I did something I rarely do: I went to see a movie in the cinema on its opening weekend.

This picture has nothing to do with this post. I just wonder what happened to the "I".

In truth, seeing a movie in the actual cinema is reasonably rare for us, and it very much depends on where we are. If I am going to see a movie, I want to see it in English with the voices of the original actors. That means it has to be subtitled in the native tongue rather than dubbed. In some parts of the world you don't have as many English language movies, and if you do, they are almost all dubbed.

Here in Peru, it is possible to see subtitled movies. So this is a good place to go see them. In fact, we have seen two movies in two different theaters during our time in Lima.

The first of these we did not see during its opening weekend. We saw The Odyssey. I'm not here to write reviews, I will just say this. It was okay. It wasn't great, though I appreciated a lot of the visual storytelling. The more or less horrible dialogue offset the visuals, leaving a mediocre movie, in my opinion. But I want to talk about an oddity of the theater.

For The Odyssey, we went to the nearest movie theater to where we living. I noticed at one point, in one of the very warlike, exciting scenes, the sound of distant booms, and the whole screen wiggled like it was shot during an earthquake. At first I thought this was a visual effect that Nolan was using. But then it happened again in a very calm and peaceful scene. That didn't make sense. Why the soft distant boom? Why would the screen shake during this scene?

That's when I realized the subtitles (in Spanish) were also shaking. And those would have been added post-production. So this wasn't an effect Nolan wanted. This was a problem of the theater. I concluded that when one of the neighboring films had loud booming action scenes, the sound system must shake the projector up in the projector room. This wiggling wasn't a visual chosen by the director. It was a design flaw in the theater.

The film we saw last night was Coyote vs Acme and we did go during its opening weekend. That is just not normal for me. But there were two major reasons I wanted specifically to see it during opening weekend.

You might guess that one of them was to desperately avoid spoilers. Good guess, but no. Living as we do, the chance of spoilers is very small (unless I specifically go online looking for spoilers.)

The first reason is that we are about to move from Lima, Peru to Florianopolis, Brazil. There are far fewer cinemas in Florianopolis, so it would be that much harder to see a movie and be sure I could find it subtitled rather than dubbed. In other words: timing.

The second reason was specific to this movie, to Coyote vs Acme. There is a controversy surrounding it. As you've probably heard, the movie was filmed, editing, and finished years ago. Then Warner Brothers decided that rather than release it, they were going to stick it in a vault and take a $30 million tax writer-off. (The movie had cost $70 million to make.) This was incredibly unfair to all the artists involved in the making of the movie. (This wasn't even the first time Warner Brothers did this. They had already shelved a completed movie, Batgirl.)

It was thanks to a huge campaign by fans and the artists involved that Warner Brothers said they were willing to sell the movie to another distributor. Some offers were rejected. But finally an independent distributor called Ketchup Entertainment bought the movie from Warner Brothers for $50 million. It is thanks to this that the movie is finally getting released, about three years late.

This plays at two levels, because Coyote vs Acme is about the "little guy" (Coyote) up against the big heartless corporation (Acme). And that's what we had going on off camera. The little guys were the artists, the big heartless corporation was Time-Warner.

I'm hoping that the opening weekend numbers are great. I hope they show the Time-Warner executives that they were idiots and send the message that unilaterally deciding to quash a piece of art for a tax write-off, while legal, is still a terrible thing to do. I can't make those opening weekend numbers be great. But I can contribute to them in one way, by paying to see the movie during its opening weekend. So I did. (I paid for two tickets. Alrica saw it too. Double the middle fingers to "the man"!)

We had to go to a different theater this time. The one nearest us was only showing the dubbed version of the movie. This theater had no issues with shaking projectors.

I don't want to give any spoilers, but I do want to share an interesting note about the subtitles. At one point in the movie, a character is communicating in Morse code. Another person is translating it letter by letter. The subtitles were also translating it letter by letter, except it wasn't the same letters. Let me explain what I mean: The first letter was "A". So the character on screen said "A". But the subtitles wrote "V". The next letter was "R" and the character said "R". But the subtitles wrote "A". What's going on? The subtitles were giving letter by letter what the ultimate phrase was going to be in Spanish. In English, the first word of the phrase was "Are", but in Spanish the first word of the phrase was "Vas". So when you make subtitles, you have to make a choice. Do you translate exactly what is being said, or do you translate it into the ultimate phrase that it is going to be. Obviously, in this case, they chose the latter, which I agree makes more sense.

I guess the final question you might wonder is this: Did we enjoy the movie? Yes we did. Quite a bit more so than the The Odyssey, but that wasn't a real high bar to clear. We didn't even need any Acme rocket skates or pogo shoes.