AudioShocker

Is it Friday again already? Golly. This week was even faster than the last.

As long time readers of Culturology (that is, Nick (and maybe Neal)) may recall, one of my favorite things about popular culture in Germany is the way they re-title movies, presumably, in order to fit in with German idiom. The classic example of this is 2008's In Bruges, which was titled See Bruges... and Die? in German. Where the English title was subtle and understated, the German title just went ahead and put it all out there. Another great example from that era (you know, back in like, 2006-2008, when movies didn't all suck?) was 3:10 to Yuma, which became, in German, Death-Train to Yuma.

So, on this trip, my most recent return to Germany, I am already defaulting to looking around to see what kind of titles foreign movies have in Germany. But it's been such a shitty year for movies that even the German titles are a let down. One exception might be Get Him to the Greek, though, as it's German title is just Man Trip. And further evidence that Germans want to be able to tell what a movie is about based on its title alone is Avatar's German sub-title, which I like to translate as Avatar: Sallying Forth to Pandora.

So why don't Americans want to know what movies are about? This of course ties in with the internet-era monstrosity that the notion of "spoiler alerts" has become. That somehow, if we know what a movie is about in any specific way, or know what is going to happen in it, then we can't possibly enjoy it. This is juvenile and foolish. So, then, even though we're the juvenile and foolish ones for feeling like the essence of a movie is (the sanctity of) its plot, it's the German titles that come off as stupid, and the Germans as the foolish ones for needing to know in simple fashion why they should bother going out to see a movie.

Though, the American movie industry still seems to make boat-loads of money despite not producing much shit that's actually worth watching, and then sometimes terrible movies (say, The Aang Legend) actually do way better abroad than they do in the States. So we're each and everyone of us--any of us with the social and financial wherewithal to go see movies at all--special little snowflakes of stupidity.