After watching Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping with a big group of friends we found out that more than half of us hadn't seen Reservoir Dogs yet. So we watched this. With a German dub...
Everyone knows RD is a great movie, and an exceptional first movie for an exceptional filmmaker. So I decided to use this movie to talk about dubs.
Because I live in Germany and most of our population speaks German, Germans were raised with watching all movies dubbed. Every movie from America, every TV-Show, everything not in German is translated and dubbed.
That's great growing up. As a kid you can watch everything, don't need to be able to read or know another language.
But you also get used to the dubs.
I stopped watching dubbed versions probably a year ago, now I only watch them if I really have to. And soon I started to realize how shit most dubs are. Especially older dubs.
So just having seen Reservoir Dogs in German (because the English is hard to understand and subtitles are distracting ... ) I wanna list why dubs suck.
In the 90s, many voice actors were not as good in saying English names, so when someone mentions Joey, it just sounds horrible.
As you might now, most of this movie is set in a warehouse, with some scenes in a big bathroom. As you all know, in these kinds of rooms there is some sort of reverb on the voice. Since they don't record the dub in a warehouse or a bathroom they put the reverb on it afterwards. And I feel like even I could make a better effort at making it sound real.
Of course, Tarantino is known for his great dialogues, and for getting great acting out of his actors.
Here, someone else is directing the voice acting, so like in many other cases, you can't really judge a dubbed movie by the acting because the voice is very important to acting. And instead of the dialogue sounding real and true, it sounds really weird because no one talks like that here. Because English people talk different than German people, so many things are lost in translation or are translated in a way that it doesn't sound real. I've never heard anyone talk the way they talk in this movie.
Also, everything, not only voices, but also walking and just every part of the sound just sounds ... off. It sounds like it's all been recorded in a studio... because it has been.
All in all, dubs are really bad once you stopped seeing them regularly. Suddenly, everything sounds shit. Luckily in recent years, dubs got better and better, so by now it is bearable to go to the cinema, I don't have to search for the original version-screenings, I can still enjoy recent movies without having to barf.
I just had to get this all off my chest, thank you for reading through.
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