Sound It Out

I love a good sports documentary. The great thing about sports movies which are based on true events is that often they will include a short documentary in the DVD's bonus features section telling a truer version of details without all the Hollywood rewrites. Since nothing is more dramatic than real life, it should come as no surprise that I often find these mini-movies more interesting than the feature film I just finished watching. What is even better is if I actually care about the subject, so as you can imagine I thoroughly enjoyed a documentary about the 1992 Bronze Medal-winning basketball team entitled, "The Other Dream Team." The movie goes into all the hardship the people of Lithuania had to suffer through while under communist rule and how the basketball team (for a small country, Lithuania has a habit of pumping out exceptional basketball players) was seen as a rallying cry for country once it regain its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union. I especially liked that they made a point to focus on the tie-dyed shirts which were the team's calling card due to the fact that they had been sponsored by the band The Grateful Dead. I had one of those shirts as a kid and still have it to this day, refusing to throw it out even though I never particularly liked the look of tie-dye and if I tried to put it on now it would just rip in half. This documentary has been on several times in the last couple of weeks and I find myself watching a few minutes of it every time I pass by.

There is only one real problem with the movie and it is that is large chunks of it are in Lithuanian, which I do not speak. I think this is better for the film because these guys are obviously going to be able to speak more fluently and express their thoughts better in their native language. But it also created a problem because there are a lot of people who don't speak Lithuanian, so most of the movie needs subtitles. Now, I am not the kind of person who thinks that just because a movie has a lot of subtitles is automatically bad but I will admit that I think they take away from the general viewing experience. Whenever I am watching a movie with subtitles at the bottom of the screen I feel like it pulls all my focus there and thus I am missing all the action in the rest of the screen. Normally this isn't a problem because subtitled movies are never known for being action-packed and the filmmakers want you to focus on the words more than what the actors are doing, but in this case you feel like you are missing a lot of action. There are a lot of shots of basketball games which you can't focus on because you are busy reading the words of the people talking about the basketball action you aren't watching. And just like the play on a basketball court the words come fast and furious. If you are a slow reader there are going to be some sections you are just going to miss.

This is why I think the subtitle voice-over is the way to go. You know what I mean - instead of typing the words along the bottom of the screen you have the translator say them for you and then put that audio over pictures of the person who is speaking in the foreign language. That way people can go back to listening and taking in the entire picture, rather than glancing up at the action as soon as they finish the sentence on the screen and then immediately lowering their eyes when the text changes. Admittedly, when the voices and the lips don't match up it takes a little getting used to at first, but once you distinguish the various voices it gets easy enough to follow along. The other good part is that you never have to worry about the text of your subtitles blending into the background of the scene. Again, that isn't a worry in most foreign films because they are usually about some goat-herder from a war-torn country who loses both his family and his gay lover to AIDS before ultimately dying tragically and those movies tend to have one background color, which is gray. But in this case it was a lot of brightly colored athletes moving at a high rate of speed and on more than one occasion the font would match something behind it, at which point you stopped watching a movie and started playing a speed version of Wheel Of Fortune while trying to guess the word to complete the phrase.

Now, it is entirely possible that they had to go with subtitles because they interviewed a lot of people for this movie and there just weren't enough people who spoke Lithuanian and English well enough to translate an entire movie and it would have been confusing when 3 people had the same voice. Still, I think that would have worked out better because it would have eased the contrast between the people who needed subtitles and the people who didn't. It was honestly pretty jarring to go from 10 solid minutes of people speaking a language I didn't understand to suddenly hearing English again. It almost felt as though my brain was getting a quick rest in those moments and that's the real issue because movies are normally all about being able to turn my brain off. That has always been my real problem with subtitled movies - you can't really relax and enjoy them because you are always worried that turning to your friend and making a smart-ass remark will result in missing a key plot detail. On top of that documentaries (even the sports ones) have a tendency to take themselves a touch too seriously, so the combination of not being able to relax plus feeling like making smart-ass comments is disrespectful about something many people may not think is a joking matter  is usually one strike too many. The good news for this movie is that I care so much about the subject matter I was willing to overlook those two things. If you can find a copy of this movie I definitely would watch it if I were you, just make sure you've rest your eyes first.