Today I dubbed two “romantic” films into English. One was based on The Da Vinci Code and the other was based on Sin City. They were both painfully bad but for very different reasons.

Let me first state that not all “romantic” films are bad (you do know what I mean by “romantic”, don’t you?). True, most are terrible, but every once and a while a production company takes pride in their project and develops an interesting story, writes a decent script, uses creative camera work, and hires actors who can actually act. I was not so lucky today.

The Da Vinci Code was you average, run of the mill, bad film. The dialog was dense and boring and so were the actors. Why they decided to shoot the film in English using nothing but illiterate French actors is beyond me. So it didn’t really matter how good the dubbing actors were; every time someone spoke on screen, there was a two second pause between every word and the “actor” had the glazed look of a deer staring into headlights. Now imagine a four minute static conversation about the Vitruvian Man along these lines. I couldn’t finish this one fast enough.

In all fairness, Sex City may very well end up being a halfway decent film. The version I was forced to watch, however, was laughable. The director of this film obviously understood something that the director of the other film didn’t: namely that all of these crappy films will eventually be dubbed into seven different languages and then packaged together onto one DVD to sell all over the world. Therefore, sometimes there is no original version! This was the case in Sex City. There were actors speaking together in English, French, Russian, and German – sometimes just mouthing their lines – but all totally mumbled with very bad sound quality and occasionally drowned out by the director shouting instructions from off camera. I especially liked it when the actors pathetically made the sound of their gunshots with their mouths (of course, to be overdubbed with sound effects later). These are the things that won’t make it to the final commercial version – thank goodness. I like to think that I’m just doing my part to bring a little bit of happiness into this world.