Wednesday 19 March 2014

Pourquoi?

...and still, sort of, on the subject of working out where stories go wrong...

It was brought home to me recently how much of a snob I am when I found myself watching the Euro-drivel that is Salamander.  Like Britain's car parks, this fails to work on so many levels.  Why are the sixty-six senior figures holding material in their bank safes which can be used to blackmail them? why not simply burn it all?  Why does the inside man not simply empty the safes himself rather than mark them for people tunneling in from the sewers?  Why doesn't the perpetrator simply send it all to the police or the press if he's after the effect of the information going public - resignations and suicides - not money?

But my point is this: if this weren't subtitled I wouldn't be watching it.  Okay, so in part it's down to trusting the judgment of the good people at BBC4 who have to fill their Eurocrime slot somehow.  But, really it's snobbery.  To put it bluntly, I know that the best, possibly only way to get to watch Midsomer Murders is to dub it into Danish the subtitle it.

So why bring it up here?  Well, we're awash with subtitled crime, but I'm really struggling to think of any decent foreign language sci-fi, SE Asian monster movies apart.  And it was Jules Verne who (partially) invented the genre.

Any suggestions?

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