Movie Night

After Lydia went to bed last night, Dave and I sat down to watch the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Dave had purchased it earlier in the week from a place that seemed legitimate and didn't appear to be selling pirated goods (we've seen plenty of those types of places, generally set up in garage-like spaces; we think that they're set up that way so they can just pull down the door and reopen as completely different store in a matter of minutes).

Dave had confirmed that, while the text on the DVD box was written in Chinese, the movie was in English. Fantastic! We haven't watched any movies besides Disney flicks and High School Musical (versions 1, 2 and 3) since we've lived here, so it was very exciting for us to settle into a movie night that that didn't involve any singing...

But wait a minute! The movie was in English, but suddenly the actors were speaking Hindi and Chinese characters were running across the bottom of the screen. Clearly, the use of Hindi was part of the movie, but the subtitles were not helpful! We re-checked the DVD box...it did say "English version"! Dave tried to find a way to change the language (kind of hard when the menu was in Chinese characters) to no avail.

Then we realized the problem...the DVD box also said "with Chinese subtitles." In the original version of the movie, there were English subtitles during the Hindi-speaking portions; in the version we bought the subtitles were supposed to be in Chinese. In other words, there wouldn't have been an issue with the subtitles with pretty much any other movie we could have chosen, we just happened to pick a movie with another foreign language in it.

So, what did we do? We went ahead and watched the movie with the actors speaking in Hindi and Chinese characters running across the bottom of the screen. Dave provided a very loose translation based on seeing the movie before. The whole thing was rather ridiculous...and funny.

As I think about it, this movie watching experience is pretty reflective of our everyday lives in Hong Kong. On a daily basis we are clueless as to what a majority of people are talking about and we certainly can't read at least half of what we see. We just watch people and try to figure things out; and, one of us can usually explain to the other what's going on. It, too, is ridiculous and (most of the time) funny.

I should note that Slumdog Millionaire was a great movie. I may be the last person to see it, but if you haven't watched it, I'd recommend it. However, I won't loan you our copy - I think we'll pass it along to one of our Chinese speaking friends.