Uncensored Hot Dog On Dog Gay Interrracial Action!

It seems my video was removed from YouTube because it was too sexual or too gay! You can download the original here.

There is also a growing photoset on Flickr.

Ennio Morricone: 79 Years Old, Still God

This is what I shot yesterday in Vienna:



(He can also do techno.)

This is also a subtle reminder that I moved from Google Video to YouTube (owned by Google, linked to your Google account).

Note To Warner Bros.

When you create expensive website for your expensive movie, be sure to check the spelling on the title page.



(Taken from sweeneytoddmovie.com.)

More Than Meets The Eye

I've got to share share this with you. This is how my invitation to Transformers premiere looks like:



It contains several more or less usable goodies some of which do a good job of transforming (play the video):



I have no idea how expensive this is and how many of them they made but I;ve got a feeling that if they could have money to put one extra Transformer in the movie (small one)...

P.S: There were some rather nice hi-res renders on the CD.

Hasta La Pizda, Jew

(This is taken from the current update of this infrequently updated page of mine about movie translations which probably no one reads, so I'm putting it here, too.)

Translating Borat:

Of course, I practically had to make up many new words and grammar for Borat to use (with lots of help from Tomas Baldynsky).

The joke at the dinner with the confusion about "retired" / "retard" cannot be translated and had to be replaced with something similar. After trying out several things, we settled on "emmental" / "mental". I.e. "I worked in construction, I am now retired" had to be changed to "I import cheeses, eidam, emmental..."

We changed the name of of Borat's son from "Huey Lewis" (who is almost unknown over here) to "Kessel Buntes" (the popular Communist Germany entertainment show was called "Ein Kessel Buntes").

"I am like the movie star, Dirty Harold. Go ahead, make my day, Jew." - This famous Dirty Harry line is totally unknown over here, mainly because it was translated differently in different releases of the movie (and not always correctly). In Czech, Borat says "I am like the movie star, Schwarz Nigger. Hasta la pizda, Jew" (where "pizda" is slang for "vagina"). Coincidentally, I originally thought "pizda" is much less vulgar (I only knew it as meaning "ugly woman") and was surprised when Disney dubbing supervisor didn't let me use it in "Cars". :)



Finally, one of the most baffling episodes in my translation career: I wanted to accurately translate the faux "Kazakhstan Anthem" at the end of the movie. However, the dialogue list didn't contain its text and only said "for translation, use the text in the rodeo scene" - which I couldn't do because the anthem in the rodeo scene is much shorter than the one at the end of the movie. I sent several e-mails to Fox and even asked at IMDB.com boards. No answer. Then I tried to translate the whole anthem just by ear. After I've done that, Fox issued a memo to all foreign distributors saying that "The anthem at the end MUST NOT BE TRANSLATED" and my translation had to be removed. Bizarre...

I Am Stupid

After having hard time with translation of the Fountain, I was rather proud of the result, only to find that I translated the (written) phrase "Divine Words" as "Divine Worlds"! Stupid...

The only excuse I have is that the picture from which I translated looked like this:



Surprisingly, several people also objected to my translation of "Behold!" as "Ejhle!" (said by a 16th century man who is alone in the scene, to himself). I have no clue why. I think this is exactly the right translation in this context.

He Doesn't Sleep, He Waits

Finally, the legend comes to life.

Although I seriously doubt this project is currently much beyond the "trailer stage"...

Famous Director Miis

This page contains rather skillful renditions of famous film director as Miis (Nintendo Wii avatars). The author even takes requests!

Ghosts of the Underground

Turn off your lights and watch this "documentary" (I use the word "documentary" very loosely) about ghosts in the London Tube.

Chucky's video

This is an expansion of this idea...



The second attempt is here. He really doesn't seem to enjoy it very much, I guess he won't be winning any Oscars for cinematography.

Darren Aronofsky thinks he's really smart

I just finished translating The Fountain and it was hard. There is not much dialogue in the movie but it's made complex by the fact that same dialogue is repeated in different scenes, sometimes with slightly different meaning. Also, let's face it, it's not clear what is happening in the movie and if, in fact, some of it is "happening" at all...

What you probably know even if you didn't see the movie is that Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman both play three different characters with similar sounding names - from 1500, 2000 and 2500. This is stated in the trailers and in the press materials. I think even this is not that simple. [Spoilers in the rest of this paragraph, if you didn't see the film.] My interpretation is that the only stuff that is really "happening" are the scenes from year 2000. Everything from 1500 is taken verbatim from Izzi's slightly abstract book (it definitely isn't historically accurate AT ALL) and everything from 2500 is taken from the last chapter of the same book which Thomas finished at Izzi's request shortly after her death.


I am sure there are many more interpretations possible and I even had conversations with the subtitle editor (whose real name is "Anna Karenina"!) about what the sentence "Death is the road to awe" (repeated three times in the movie) means. She thought "awe" stands for "humility before God", I thought it means "something wonderful amazing". And I don't think either one of us is stupid or doesn't understand English.

This is a complex film that generates some powerful feelings in the viewer. But I am not entirely sure what exactly those feelings are. What is certain is that love is a many splendored thing and if you love someone, it might be nice to be with him forever.

But I am not sure this is exactly the kind of message I need to hear right now.

"The Fountain" is being released in the Czech Republic in March 2007.

P.S: After much deliberating with Anna, we settled on "road to greatness".

Coming soon from Michael Bay

You are not beautiful unique snowflake

Several days ago, I finished subtitle translation of Fight Club for Czech TV. Of course, I wanted to base this translation on the subtitles I translated for Czech theatrical release 7 years ago. Originally, I just wanted to adjust my old subitles a little bit because I always assumed Fight Club translation was one of my "masterpieces".

I was rather surprised at how many mistakes I found in my old translation!

Not "godawful mistakes that completely prevent you from understanding the movie" like there are in the video dubbing of Fight Club, but serious oversights nevertheless. For example, I originally thought that "ground zero" refers to the time of explosion or that "I was hugging the walls" means that the hero actually embraced the walls. In Fight Club, there are isolated sentences that don't make much sense themselves and you have to put them in the context of what characters think and believe. Only then you can try to translate them. And, by the way, I still think Fight Club is very good movie, but for slightly different reasons than 7 years ago...

This reminded me of the horrors I experienced when I recently read my first movie reviews in the Cinema magazine (from 1993!). At that time I thought "How fucking cool I am, I write for Cinema, beat that!" Now I see that the editor maybe saw some glimmer of promise in my writing and published even the shitty stuff I wrote at that time (I had no prior experience with writing reviews, much less any education in this field).

Remember. No matter how good you think you are, you can be better (at least if you are younger than 60 or 70, probably). The fact that 60% or 99% of other people are worse than you doesn't change a thing about it.

BTW, this post's title is a quote from Fight Club.