I'm still waiting for a definitive version. Sort of like the Mei-Ah version of Hard Boiled that was refleased last year.

Until then, I'll just hold on to my Criterion LaserDisc.

How are the subs on the Mei-Ah disc versus the Criterion?

i never found the Criterion subs very accurate. they READ nice and sophisticated for dialog that really isn't. the choice is whether you want the literal translation or a nice-but-not-as-accurate translation.

I can't speak for the Hard Boiled Mei Ah, but I can speak to a comparison between the Criterion subtitles on The Killer and the ones on the HKL disc.

The HKL disc have subs that tend to be more literal, but this doesn't make them "more accurate" - in fact, the more literal subs tend to be, the less "accurate" they are, when you're talking about a professional translation.

And example:

In the HKL version, Danny Lee's partner tells him:
"Staying alive is important"

In the Criterion, he says "watch your ass."

The HKL is actually a pretty close literal translation. Another version of the film subtitles this line in its most literal way "life is important".

The Criterion is the least "literal" subtitle here, but it's clearly the best for English audiences, and the one that conveys the tone most correctly of the original Cantonese dialogue.

"Life is important" is a saying similar to "watch your ass", and it means the same thing. "Life is important" in English sounds strange and kind of silly as a saying that one cop would say to another - nobody would speak that way. But "watch your ass" sounds just right - natural. It's expressing the same sentiment in the SAME WAY that it is taken in the Cantonese context, where the literal "life is important" would be a common saying that wouldn't sound funny or out of place at all in their context, and have the same meaning.

Quite simply, "life is important" is something that sounds very similar to a Cantonese ear as "watch your ass" does to us. So the Criterion subs are more "accurate", because they are getting across the information in the same kind of colloquial way, and with the correct tone of dialogue that the two men are supposed to have.

The HKL version is just a literal translation that doesn't mean anything to an English speaker, and sounds kind of goofy - it fails to carry the flavor and tone of the moment in the film over.

That's probably why John Woo himself approved the Criterion subtitle translation for these two films. The intent and tone is more important than some literal translation.

What I think subtitles are supposed to do, ideally, is not literally translate the language, as there's too much colloqualism and other things there to deal with. Just imagine what "I'm gonna fuck you up." or "What the fuck" would literally translate to in some other language - the actual meaning of those phrases would almost certainly be completely different if taken and heard/read literally.

Even as an English speaker, if you really listen to some of our colloquailisms, such as "I'm gonna fuck you up" - picking them apart, they sound very strange, and almost non-sensical. What does that mean? You're going to fuck him? Up? It makes no sense - but we hear it so much the phrase has a different meaning to us than the actual component words do - and we "hear it differently" than what the actual words are saying.

Languages are full of this kind of thing, which is why translating them literally does not work at all when doing subtitles. Subtitles shoudl translate the correct information in the same flavor and tone as was intended by the filmmaker to his native audience to the target audience for the subtitles.

I think Criterion did that very well on The Killer and Hard Boiled.

However, I dislike most of the "new and improved" subtitles on the Criterion editions of Kurosawa films.

Not sure about you, but I don't watch a Woo film for dialogue... I watch them for the virtuoso action sequences and overwrought melodrama.

I owned the Criterion at one point, but found there was no need to have two copies of the film. The Criterion transfer is vastly inferior and far more distracting than any subtitle 'problems'.

The $8 HKL disk is definitely worth a purchase by any fan of action cinema. :thumbsup:

Different strokes, I guess. I own both discs still. And yes, the Killer is an action film, but the Criterion subtitles far more accurately portray the film noir mood and hard-boiled tone of this moody story, and the "mood" is one of my favorite aspects of this film.

The HKL version often blows this mood by its cartoony translations which are stripped of the actual tone and intent of the original film.

I'm certainly a stickler for film quality - as a filmmaker myself, it is painful to watch something I've done when it's being badly projected or shown in a diluted form.

However, I would trade picture quality for an accurate tonal translation in the subtitles any day. One may give you more resolution, but the other is the complete change of all the good dialogue and subtlety in the film! Filmmakers work hard to put those subtleties in there, and all subs lose them to some degree, but good subs versus really bad subs is a no-brainer - I'd rather a film of mine be projected in a lackluster fashion to a foreign audience, but with good subtitles that accurately give them the intent and tone of the dialogue in the film I made, than show them a great-quality print with subtitles that detract from that hard-fought tone and subtlety.

As I've said before, picture quality merely affects the PRESENTATION of a movie, but subtitles affect the actual CONTENT of that movie! In a perfect world, I'd take content and presentation, but in an imperfect situation, I'd rather have content than presentation.

One is affecting the actual film, the other is just affecting how the film looks. That's why I think subtitle translations are so important, and why I think they should be looked at more closely in DVD reviews, which completely ignore an aspect of a DVD release that has more impact on a film than any other factor.

i dunno -- i'd prefer the best video and audio presentation available. though subtitles are important for a foreign film, i'd have enough intelligence to figure out the context of a conversation, even if it's filled with "odd-sounding" cultural references. in that regard, i think many here prefer one of the newer transfers (either HKL or IVL) over the legacy Criterion edition (which is still good, but probably could be better if done today).

i think nates's a bit enamored with the Criterion subtitles! though you probably watched this version of the movie a thousand times (and are so familiar with the subs), you'll probably hate any other version if presented differently. which is understandable! but for the record, the Criterion subs are way off and lot of detail is lost because of the generalized context. heck, the Disney character names don't even really exist in the movie -- that really bothers me the most whenever i watch this version. oh well, to each his own!

Interesting, Darmok - actually, the Criterion subtitles DON'T have the Disney names! Maybe we're thinking of two different things?

The FOX/LORBER version has the Disney names, Mickey Mouse and Dumbo - I don't like those subs, either.

And yes, I am a stickler for the best subs - I think it affects the viewing experience more than picture quality does, as different subs change the story, tone and content - but that's probably because of how I'd want people to experience my own movies. :)

To each his own certainly - but I think subtitle translations should get much more attention than they do, because they are so important to a film. A quick comparison of several lines in a DVD review between different versions or releases of a film would be very helpful, but I don't know anybody who does this.

And yes, I love the Criterion subs for The Killer and Hard-Boiled, but I hate their new Kurosawa subtitles.

ah yes, you're right. the Criterion had them as Butt-head and Numbnuts.

i have to make time to watch my new IVL version. you'd think with all the versions over the years somebody'd get it right. here's hoping...

What is IVL?

Intercontinental Video / Fortune Star - a company from HK, they have been releasing many top HK movies - among them A Better Tomorrow Trilogy, Once Upon A Time trilogy, Jackie Chan's Police Story Series, Project A series, and many more.

I believe they're also the one releasing Shaw Brothers movies?

I'm pretty sure the Fortune Star disc uses the same subtitles from the HKL release.

Bleh...

How does the Universe Laser version of _The Killer_ compare to the others?

anyone have the uncut Taiwan version?
 

and can attest to its goodness, badness?

I have the Criterion laserdiscs of both of Woo's masterpieces (Hard Boiled cost me $225 when it first came out), and I think The Killer is one of the extremely rare instances in which a dubbed version of a foreign film is preferable to one with subtitles. The original video release of the film is dubbed, and it is dubbed excellently. If I had a choice, that's how I would watch it.

The dialogue in these movies truly is secondary, and some of the talk in "The Killer" is unbearably bad (the last twenty minutes, with all the treacly dribbling about friendship, and the "Mickey Mouse" and "Numb Nuts" references, are vomitous), but some of the better dialogue, cited above, was obviously translated better by Criterion than by HKL.

Incidentally, isn't the line "I always save one bullet, either for me, or for my enemy" instead "I always save one bullet, either for me, or for the other sucker", or is the latter the translation in the dubbed version? Whatever the case, I find the slight alteration much more effectively bitter and cynical.

May I ask, which versions of The Killer and Hard Boiled are anamorphic R1?

this is what i was going to ask -- so much talk about subtitles, what about dubbing? or is that not an acceptable way to watch a foreign film for a fan?
i know that after watching my crouching tiger superbit dvd both ways it was a very tough choice for me. the dubbing added so much to the beautiful flowerly language used, but the english voice actors lost so much of the awesome acting by chow yun fat and michelle yeoh etc.

so anyway, just to be clear, the best version of the killer that is actually attainable right now is the r2 hkl version? and which version of hard boiled is the best and attainable?

thanks
dan

The only R1 versions are the Criterion & Fox Lorber.
Both are non-anamorphic and OOP.

Is DVDTalk's server having a brain-fart? Anyway:

That is exactly why I absolutely refuse to watched dubbed movies. I want to hear the actor's voice, even if it's a language I don't know. Language is more than just words. Take away the actor's language, and, to me, that's a LOT of their performance. I've seen Crouching Tiger once; I don't know Mandarin Chinese; but I remember many moments of Chow and Michelle speaking, especially at the end. I remember THEIR voices, their expressions, the way they emoted with THEIR voices and faces not some disembodied artificial voice-over.
Watching AKIRA subtitled was a totally new experience, and made the American English dubbing sound lame (to me). I love the actors in Akira, so taking them away is changing the movie. I think the points natesfortune made about subtitles and language are spot on.

I hope someday a new edition of The Killer can be released with Criterion's subtitles.

Off-topic: why is the Criterion Hard-boiled 1.77:1? Strange.

anyone who watches an English dubbed of a foreign movie is not a true movie lover and doing a serious dis-service to the movie itself.

The packaging on mine says that it is 1.85:1
But according to DVD Beaver it is actually 1.92:1

Oh yeah, you're right...sorry. So it's 1.92:1, "overmatted". I see that almost all of those DVDs have different aspect ratios. I suppose it should be 1.85:1, or what? There must be a reason Criterion cropped it at 1.92:1, as it is Criterion...

The DVD Beaver review here claims the Criterion is 1.85:1, and the screen caps don't look significantly different in framing than the HKL release.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare/killer3.htm

I'm not sure where inri222 saw that 1.92:1 designation.

I don't have the Criterion disc, but assuming it is really 1.92:1 there are a couple of possibilities. It may actually be windowboxed with bars on all 4 sides of the frame (hard to tell from the DVD Beaver screen caps), or Criterion may have been forced to shave a tiny bit off the top and/or bottom of the frame if there were visible print damage there. They had to do that for their laserdisc release of Blade Runner. You wouldn't notice the difference if it weren't pointed out to you.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Egon's Ghost
Off-topic: why is the Criterion Hard-boiled 1.77:1? Strange.

I was talking about Hard Boiled being 1.92:1, not The Killer.