Commentating
Yesterday, I was given the job of reviewing the subtitle template for Martin Scorsese’s Director’s Commentary of the film Raging Bull. On the whole, I find commentaries extremely tiresome, usually because – or so one gets the impression – they’ve just stuck someone in a cubicle with a videotape of the film, pressed play, switched on a microphone and left them to it. This means that you end up with two hours of inane rambling, incomplete sentences, lost trains of thought and generally unsubtitlable material. Most companies pay extra to translators working on commentary subtitles, and you can see why: utterances such as “So yeah, like, we, you know, uh… didn't really know what was goin' on, man, but he just, like, made... Oh, what was his name again?" don’t exactly flow well into 38 different languages.
If there’s more than one person recording the commentary, you’ll get the added bonus of them constantly interrupting each other and neither recalling what the other is talking about. "Hey, remember that day? You don’t? You don’t remember that? Where were you, dude? It was...” And what they do eventually dredge up from the far recesses of history is hardly enlightening stuff: on the commentary for Wicker Park, Josh Hartnett can only come up with one recurrent remark on their time spent filming in Montréal: “Man, it was cold that day.” The three feet of snow on the ground and ice particles in the air would never have given us the slightest inkling.
Actors are usually obsessed with how bad their hair looked in 1973, and how much weight they’ve put on since. Natasha Henstridge in her commentary on Species can barely talk about anything else. Americans also feel the need to gush ingratiatingly about how marvellously everybody else on the film did their jobs. On the worst commentary I have thus far encountered, three 15-year-old girls squealing their way through their excruciatingly nauseating teen-flick Sleepover, just count how many times they shout “Oh, he/she/it was AWESOME!” A shot of vodka with each, and you just might survive to the end of the film without hurling your DVD player out of the window.
This upcoming DVD release of Raging Bull will have no less than three – yes, three - commentaries. One with the cast and crew, one with the “storytellers”, i.e. Jake La Motta and script writers Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader, and finally the Martin Scorsese commentary mentioned above. To be fair, the Raging Bull commentaries have been rather better constructed than most: they’ve asked specific people to talk about specific parts of the movie. However, the “Cast and Crew” commentary somewhat conspicuously lacks the big name that begins with Bob and ends with Niro. In fact, many of the actors who appear on it had very minor roles and were not big names when the film was made. “This is ridiculous – I came here for this”, mutters John Tarturro, who appears as an extra in only one scene. But there is some interesting stuff from the cameraman, music director and soundman mixed in. Nonetheless, given that there’s also an hour of documentary footage elsewhere on the DVD which more or less covers the same material, the whole thing quickly gets mightily repetitive.
One has to wonder how many people actually watch commentaries all the way through aside from die-hard fanatics, of which, to be fair, Raging Bull probably has a fair few. The trouble with the medium of DVD and all the possibilities it creates is that no one has yet come up with the construct “Less is more.” Just one well-made, insightful documentary, with carefully edited interviews with key members of the cast and crew is all you need to show how much (or little) effort went into creating the various aspects of the feature and to highlight the clever little touches that unwitting audiences might otherwise miss. If there were only one extra, people then might actually have time to watch it before taking the DVD back to Blockbusters, instead of leaving all the hours of labouring of (amongst others) the subtitle translators and their stressed-out project managers entirely unread.
REBECCA
If there’s more than one person recording the commentary, you’ll get the added bonus of them constantly interrupting each other and neither recalling what the other is talking about. "Hey, remember that day? You don’t? You don’t remember that? Where were you, dude? It was...” And what they do eventually dredge up from the far recesses of history is hardly enlightening stuff: on the commentary for Wicker Park, Josh Hartnett can only come up with one recurrent remark on their time spent filming in Montréal: “Man, it was cold that day.” The three feet of snow on the ground and ice particles in the air would never have given us the slightest inkling.
Actors are usually obsessed with how bad their hair looked in 1973, and how much weight they’ve put on since. Natasha Henstridge in her commentary on Species can barely talk about anything else. Americans also feel the need to gush ingratiatingly about how marvellously everybody else on the film did their jobs. On the worst commentary I have thus far encountered, three 15-year-old girls squealing their way through their excruciatingly nauseating teen-flick Sleepover, just count how many times they shout “Oh, he/she/it was AWESOME!” A shot of vodka with each, and you just might survive to the end of the film without hurling your DVD player out of the window.
This upcoming DVD release of Raging Bull will have no less than three – yes, three - commentaries. One with the cast and crew, one with the “storytellers”, i.e. Jake La Motta and script writers Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader, and finally the Martin Scorsese commentary mentioned above. To be fair, the Raging Bull commentaries have been rather better constructed than most: they’ve asked specific people to talk about specific parts of the movie. However, the “Cast and Crew” commentary somewhat conspicuously lacks the big name that begins with Bob and ends with Niro. In fact, many of the actors who appear on it had very minor roles and were not big names when the film was made. “This is ridiculous – I came here for this”, mutters John Tarturro, who appears as an extra in only one scene. But there is some interesting stuff from the cameraman, music director and soundman mixed in. Nonetheless, given that there’s also an hour of documentary footage elsewhere on the DVD which more or less covers the same material, the whole thing quickly gets mightily repetitive.
One has to wonder how many people actually watch commentaries all the way through aside from die-hard fanatics, of which, to be fair, Raging Bull probably has a fair few. The trouble with the medium of DVD and all the possibilities it creates is that no one has yet come up with the construct “Less is more.” Just one well-made, insightful documentary, with carefully edited interviews with key members of the cast and crew is all you need to show how much (or little) effort went into creating the various aspects of the feature and to highlight the clever little touches that unwitting audiences might otherwise miss. If there were only one extra, people then might actually have time to watch it before taking the DVD back to Blockbusters, instead of leaving all the hours of labouring of (amongst others) the subtitle translators and their stressed-out project managers entirely unread.
REBECCA
posted by Rebecca Dodgson | 1:42 am
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