Weekends are always a good time to watch movies around here, and when movies are involved, subtitles are also inevitably involved. This is because not only are Chinese movies generally incomprehensible to Americans because of the speed of the dialogue, Chinese movies are incomprehensible because they usually make no sense at all, and you need all the help you can get to understand the plot. Not that American movies make that much sense to Chinese viewers - take what we watched on Friday night, for example. While Americans may be able to place "Blue Crush" and "Rambo: First Blood" into their proper context (sort of...), for someone who grew up in China on the other hand, trying to figure out what girl surfers on Hawaii have to do with psychologically disturbed Vietnam vets in the Oregon wilderness might be more than a little confusing. Actually, when you start thinking about what those two movies say about American culture... no wonder no one really understands us.
Saturday night we watched "Team America: World Police", whose subtitles tried desperately to stay as PG as they could. The title song was translated into "America: That's Great!" (more or less), while other blasphemous language generally came out as "Good heavens!" Apparently, if you want to hear how Chinese really swear, you need to watch gangster movies from Hong Kong, and then hit the pause button a lot, because when people swear, they swear quickly, and then the fighting starts. I bet I'd surprise a lot of people if I started walking around talking like a Cantonese drug runner... much more fun than what I actually should be studying, which is medical terminology from our field trip to the provincial hospital last Thursday. Off to go remind myself how to say "emergency room" in Chinese...
