TV News: Not much. Netflix floated an ad into my stream that reminded me that Season 2 of Monster (the one where it was the Jeffrey Dahmer story) is coming, and it is now called Monsters, and focuses on Eric and Lyle Menéndez. At least not cannibals whose victims families are strongly opposing the series.
TV Shows Watched: Before I list, I fully acknowledge that I watched more TV here than I did collectively Monday-Thursday. That’s how insane my week was. The Lady In The lake: S1E7 (Apple Plus) with audio description, Women In Blue: S1E5 (Apple Plus) with audio description, Evil: Series finale (Paramount Plus) with audio description, That 90’s Show: S3E1 and S3E2 (Netflix) with audio description), Name That Tune: Most Recent (Hulu) No Audio Description, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Thursday Night’s Episode (Paramount Plus) no audio description, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire: Most Recent (Hulu) with audio description, and Emily in Paris: current Season, Episode 2 (Netflix) with audio description.
Podcasts: Where Everybody Knows your Name (Interview: Jeff Goldblum), 538 Politics (politics), and health Hacks with Dr Mark Hyman (Why are you so tired?)
Youtube: The Oscar expert (current Director/Screenplay Oscar Predictions) and FishJelly Film Reviews (Review: Alien Romulus)
Movies: nice Girls (Netflix) with audio description, and The Killer (Peacock) with audio description.
I felt rejuvenated. I don’t need to work every Friday, and this Friday was a much needed break. I absorbed my television. I just want to make a small contrast, which really has very little to do with the audio description. We’re talking about dubbed performances. I don’t like treading into these waters. I believe we need more English Audio Description on more films, which is different than a company localizing an international project with dubbed voice actors and then adding audio description to that. I think the contrast here is Apple’s Women In Blue, which doesn’t even have the best dubbing I’ve ever heard, but in the same day it far surpassed what Netflix has on Nice Girls. That dubbed voice cast is not good at all, to put it mildly. It created this painful experience, as I listened to people who seemingly had no idea what project they were reading for, and people trying to interpret comedy who weren’t the initial comedians, or even comedians themselves. Women In blue, has a very homogenized sound to it, like we went and found a bunch of suburban white ladies to play Mexican female cops, but they are doing a slightly better vocal performance, and it is why I’ve been able to watch five episodes, or essentially five hours of that, but if I had to watch five hours of Nice Girls, I’d probably be dead.
And why do i even bother bringing this up? Because shitty dubbing is what these major international directors fear will be added to their films, and why we don’t have audio description on something like Alfonso cuaron’s Roma. Basically, cuaron probably grew up watching some really terrible dubs, and doesn’t realize that there’s some really great work being done out there. If we keep undercutting the great work done for films like All Quiet On The Western Front or Society Of The Snow. Some other films have dubbing specifically through the audio description track, like The Zone Of interest, or TV’s Shogun. It almost feels like there’s some acting school out there producing voice actors specifically for dubbing films, and they are telling them to do the worst possible line readings that make no sense. Then, we never take into any sort of consideration how we could culturally at least attempt to have representation in these fields. As the melting pot of the world, we have people from all over, and plenty of people who speak English, but still maintain an ethnically appropriate accent so it doesn’t sound like we keep importing films and handing them to the Real Housewives of wherever. We can and should make a better effort here because as ana Rut form, dubbing isn’t just for the lazy people, it ends up being an accessibility feature. Blind people deserve good actors too.
