Kolja and Caos Calmo/Czech and Italian Jack and Sarah/Subtitle headache

I went to see Kolya last night entirely on a friends recommendation. I fact I found out later that it was on the recommendation of a friend of a friend. So I wasn't expecting much. What I got was a Czech Jack and Sarah. But where Sarah is a five year old boy who doesn't speak the language and Jack is a fifty year old womanising musician who married the mother in a sham for money. And replace posh bit of london with hard times in Russian controlled Czech Republic. It is the grandmother who dies and the mother escapes to west germany. As the boy is russian the Man's mother won't help him so he turns instead to the long list of notches on his bed post. The old bloke changes his ways and the boy grows to love his step father. The film is obvious but never gets cheesy and doesn't bottle it with the ending.

Instead of leaving the cinema after watching the film like normal people me a my friend hung around for a bit to eat. As we were finishing eating a showing of Calm Chaos was starting. Why not? we thought. Strangely this film can also be described in terms of Jack and Sarah. After a trip to the beach with his movie star brother, during which they both save a woman's life, italian Jack returns home to find his wife dead and his distraught daughter asking why hand he not answered his mobile. Italian Jack seems to handle the whole thing very well except for promising his daughter to wait for her outside the school gate all day everyday. Although people notice this is a bit odd no one appears to want him to stop it. While italian Jack keeps his cool everyone else around him seems to be losing it. We see this through an increasingly bizarre series of meetings mainly in the park outside his daughters school. The peak of the weirdness comes in two scenes. When italian jack returns home to find his brother smoking crack, argues about it and then joins in, and when italian Jack has gratuitous and uncomfortable sex with the woman he save at the beginning. What I'm getting at is that this film seemed to just be a series of odd events with nothing particular to say. Also 50 year old Czech Jack had more charisma then italian Jack.

One good film followed by one not so good one, both sharing parts of their plot with Jack and Sarah. And both having crap subtitles. I'm not talking about the accuracy of the translation (I don't speak Czech of Italian) but the way in which they are displayed. Normally I have no problems with subtitles and I'm still sure that they are a million times better than the best dubbing. But why did both films choose a font so tricky to read at speed? Anyone who word processes anything will know that there are certain fonts for showing your style and certain fonts for reading. So I'm left assuming that the font selection was deliberate as a means of conveying style or meaning. But this doesn't add up either. Firstly I think what's being said will convey more style than the way it's written so make it as readable as possible. Secondly I doubt any film worth translating sticks with just the one style all the way through. Finally I'm sure that any statement you are trying to make with your font style will be lost in the course of the film as there is nothing to compare it to.

So, film makers, distributors or whoever is in charge of the subtitling of films. Choose your fonts carefully, that is if you want people to know what the actors are saying.