Are you sometimes turned off when a movie's premise looks good, but it has subtitles?

I love foreign movies with subtitles. It solves the problem I sometimes have with hearing a soundtrack clearly.

Watching Kon-Tiki now. It helps that I love Norwegian accents.

Finchè non sono blabbing le persone dietro di me, io sto bene

(As long as the people behind me aren’t blabbing, I’m fine….)

I get turned off if I am watching an anime, and it has an english dub.

Not at all. I watch a lot of foreign films, and I always prefer to hear the actors’ own voices. That means I need to see subtitles.

The ones that seem weird to me, though, are the ones that apparently are dubbed in the original. I have seen this several times in Italian movies and don’t understand it. Some characters’ speech is in sync, meaning that their speech is in Italian and matches their lip movements, and some doesn’t match. Sometimes, by watching closely, I have been able to figure out that the character is actually speaking English, but the voice has been dubbed in Italian, and then English subtitles (which don’t necessarily correspond to the English speech) have been added. I find this both baffling and very hard to watch.

Subtitles > Dubbing

Not at all. If not for subtitles, I would not have seen the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, Amelie or Babette’s feast. I watch a lot of foreign, subtitled movies on Netflix, but you can’t be eating dinner while you’re watching, or you’ll miss some of the dialogue.

I can’t really explain this, but about 2 nights ago, I was watching a subtitled Korean movie and I kept turning up the volume so I could “hear” it better.

@Kardamom The musical soundtrack and general audio are also part of the experience, so turning the sound up makes perfect sense.

About two years ago our daughter was in Paris and had a snack at that little diner which was the focus of a lot of the movie ‘Amelie’. She said that she “tried to be casual and cool about being there….but it wasn’t easy..”

On the contrary, I keep subtitles or closed captioning on all the time.

Otherwise, it would take me four hours to watch a film while my son is awake.

Yes especially if I am doing something else at all and can’t look at the screen 100% of the time.

I love subtitled movies, and of course my wife loves them.

I’m fine with subtitled movies at home, where I can sit close enough to the TV to be able to read them. If I’m in a cinema, and I’m not in the front few rows, I don’t have a prayer.

@Mama_Cakes You’ve just described my fiancé. lol

Yes, but I usually manage to overcome that and see the movie anyway. And more often than not I’m glad I did. There are so many fabulous silent films (like The Passion of Joan of Arc) that it’s a shame to shun them.

I feel the exact opposite, I really enjoy foreign films, I tend to favour them actually.

Nope, I don’t mind subtitles at all.

@Kardamom Totally agree with you on The Dragon Tattoo trilogy!

I can handle a few subtitles, but not a whole movie. I’m not there to read – I’m there to watch and listen to the movie. If I want to read, I’ll get a book and read it.

Nah, if a movie seems interesting but just has subtitles, I’ll be glad to watch it. In such cases I often appreciate being able to hear it in its original form. I actually really hate translated movies, so if they’re originally in French or English, I will watch them in their original tongue. Of course if it’s in any other language, I’ll have to read the subtitles, but that makes it interesting.
I also find it really interesting how some translation can work. I like super violent Japanese movies, and they way they write the subtitles just is not how one would say the stuff in English. Now I have no idea if this is because that’s as close as the language gets to to either French or English equivalent, or if it’s just because the translators suck. But it’s fun, either way.

And out of nowhere, I have to say, English movies do such a crappy job of translating their stuff to French. No one in either Québec or France would ever speak the way some of that stuff is translated, haha.