Days of Glory Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Subtitles. Some people love them, some people hate them. As I see it, the hate often turns into love once movie-liking turns into movie-loving. It's quite hard to be an insatiable movie lover and be a fan of the dub -- not being bothered by lips that don't synch with voices, and the voiceovers that fail to offer the same powerful inflections as the original.

Unfortunately, while I love cinema, I'm really growing tired of the subtitles -- to the point that I sometimes avoid films if I'm not geared up to read them. But wait -- I'm not suggesting that I'd rather hear it dubbed, but rather the whole world of subtitling needs to change. There are two reasons:

1. Lazy Subtitles

While the words that run along the bottom of the screen are usually saved for foreign languages, they are sometimes pulled out when heavy accents come into play, or tricky dialects. This is fine, and often handy. But it has to be accurate. While it's okay to adjust words to flow when translating, it's not okay to change them when people understand the language.

There is nothing more annoying or distracting than following the subtitles and hearing entirely different words. I don't know how many times my mind de-railed from the plot of Red Road because I'd hear something like "excellent," but the subtitles would say "great."

The same goes for certain words in foreign languages. You can change adjectives and what-have-you, but it's quite distracting when the subtitle powers that be get tired of writing down the same title/name and decide to switch it up. In Indigenes (Days of Glory), soldier's titles would often get switched. I might not speak French, but it's pretty easy to understand titles like "Staff Sergeant."

The World War II movie Days of Glory opens today on 3 screens. That's not to be confused with another movie called Days of Glory, from 1944, or the other one from 1945. Nor is it to be confused with Hope and Glory, Paths of Glory, What Price Glory, Bound for Glory, Days of Heaven, Days of Thunder, or just plain Glory.

In the past, war movies used to be about something. By the titles alone, you could go to a movie expecting to see Attacks, Battles, Bridges, Boats, The Big Red One, Bullets, Dawn Patrols, Dirty Dozens, Fighting Sullivans, Fixed Bayonets, Flying Leathernecks, Great Escapes, Guns of Navarone, Merrill's Marauders, and even Full Metal Jackets. Titles like these make you want to roar and holler and tear around the woods, ripping right through enemy cover with thunder and trumpets driving you on.

I'm a little disappointed with this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar nominees, which usually fall into the 400 screen or less category, but I'm also a little excited. When the category was established back in the 1950s (it was an "honorary" award from 1947 to 1955), the statue very often went to great works of art by great filmmakers. Winners included Federico Fellini (La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, 8 1/2, Amarcord), Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle), Ingmar Bergman (The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Fanny and Alexander), Vittorio De Sica (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis), Jirí Menzel (Closely Watched Trains), Luis Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), François Truffaut (Day for Night) and Akira Kurosawa (Dersu Uzala) -- and that's not even taking into account all the great films that were nominated and lost.

Then, sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Academy started picking other types of films, usually movies with a kind of social conscience rather than artistic excellence that were also lightweight and easy to understand. This resulted in forgettable winners like Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, The Official Story and Burnt by the Sun. The award has not gone to an honest-to-goodness masterpiece since Fanny and Alexander in 1983. The closest we've come was in 1999, with Pedro Almdovar's All About My Mother.

This year could break the long, dry spell.

With only a week away from announcing the Oscar nominations, and with no apparent need to do so, the Academy has pared down its list of eligible foreign-language films from 61 to nine. This is the first time the Academy has shortlisted the category, but the decision to do so falls in line with a number of other changes pertaining to the category.

Those changes, which I told you about last summer, are a good thing for at least two of the nine films. Water and Black Book each would have been disqualified in previous years, but now their language issues are in full compliance with the rules. Of course, had they not made the cut, there might have been some happier countries in Asia or Australia, the two continents not represented (Antarctica may get some love from Happy Feet's animation nomination). It is too bad that Japan couldn't claim Golden Globe winner Letters From Iwo Jima and also too bad for Oz that Ten Canoes wasn't chosen.

IFC Films and The Weinstein Co. have teamed up again (last time was for Wordplay) to distribute the French war movie Indigènes in the U.S., where it will be known as Days of Glory. The WWII-set film tells the story of North African soldiers fighting in the French army against the Nazis, focusing specifically on four men played by Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila. The ensemble cast collectively won best actor honors at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

American moviegoers (me, especially) should be attracted to the film by Debbouse, my favorite one-handed actor, who is best known here for his role in Amelie, in which he played the handicapped grocery delivery boy, Lucien. He also appeared in Spike Lee's She Hate Me. Or, there's always the attraction of the war genre, which never gets old. Jay Weissberg at Variety points out in his review the comparison between this film and Glory, though, in that they both focus on peoples dealing with being treated as second-class soldiers rather than on action-packed battle scenes. Why were the North Africans being treated this way? They fought for the freedom of a country they've never seen and that was itself ruling over their own country. Obviously their allegiances were often questioned.

The release date hasn't been set but is expected to be sometime in late 2006. The film, which also won the François Chalis Award at Cannes (for "best film that captures life"), will get its North American premiere at Toronto next month.