Save Me…… from the bleedin’ obvious

The Oscars are upon us once again this Sunday with no less than ten films up for Best Picture this time round and with a total of 24 awards for all manner of acting, design, directing, script writing, editing and for the bloke who made the best costumes.

In fact, if there were an Oscar for best self-congratulatory back-slapping then the Oscars itself would win it every year.

Among those in the running for the awards this time are The Descendants featuring George Clooney, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy starring Gary Oldman, The Help with Jessica Chastain, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with Tom Hanks, silent movie The Artist, Terence Mallick’s The Tree of Life featuring Brad Pitt and Midnight in Paris directed by Woody Allen.

Even If you’re only remotely interested in cinema you’ll probably have heard of at least a few of these films if nowhere else but on the TV news, in the newspapers or on the internet. You might have even seen a few of them!

But if you’re Spanish, right at this moment you may well be scratching your head at a few of those names. And here’s why.

It’s not surprising, I guess, that when some English-language films come to Spain, their names are changed so that, I assume, they might be more appealing to Spanish audiences. Some film names may be expressions in English that simply don’t translate with any sense into Spanish. Some may be word-play or idioms that again don’t cross the linguistic barrier intact. Fair enough, you might think.

But here’s my problem. It is my humble opinion that a disproportionate number of the new names given to these films lack any sort of imagination and are often laughably literal.

Let’s take some of the films up for Best Picture this Sunday. The Artist and The Descendants both cross over unscathed. But Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – the film version of the TV series of the John Le Carre novel about attempts to uncover a mole deep within the British Secret Service – becomes...yes, you guessed it, The Mole.  Where’s the mystery or intrigue in that? At least the original name – derived from the names given to the suspects by the spy master - creates some illusion of conspiracy and suspicion. To borrow the slogan from a well-known DIY company, the Spanish name “does what it says on the tin” and nothing else.

You might think I’m being a little harsh here. So then, Exhibit B your honour. Recent Adam Sandler comedy Jack and Jill, about a man who dreads the annual Thanksgiving visit of his twin sister Jill, has been renamed Jack and His Twin in Spanish. So what’s that about then? Well, it’s about a bloke and his twin. Oh, right, ok. 

And I’ve got plenty more where that came from. Take Keanu Reeves’ 1991 gung-ho surfing action cop thriller Point Break. A point break is a surfing term which refers to the point where a wave hits rocks or a raised shelf which juts out of the water. You could argue, with at least some semblance of seriousness, that it is an ideal metaphor for the way that Reeves’ character juts his sizeable FBI cop frame into the “wave” created by the surfing dudes / bank robbers. You see the cunning way they link the subject of the film to the title?

Bollocks to that, think the Spanish film re-namers. In Spanish its name is They Call Him Bodhi. I imagine the conversation between the film execs who came up with that went something like this. 

They’re sitting in an office looking at the script and one says to the other “So, what ‘s it about then?” “Well, it’s about a punk cop who learns to surf in order to catch some bank robbers who spend their time surfing,” says the other. “Who’s in it?” says the first one. “Keanu Reeves is the cop and his character’s called Johnny Utah. Oh, and Patrick Swayze’s in it too,” says the other. “What’s his character called?” says the first one. The other pauses for a second, looking down the cast list on his script. “Er, ah yes, here it is. They call him Bodhi” he says triumphantly. “Bingo!” says the first one.

Need more examples? Let me wheel out Exhibits C, D, E etc. etc. etc. Gene Hackman’s 1972 thriller The French Connection about a maverick cop’s attempts to smash a drug smuggling operation between France and the US is thrillingly, if not slightly obviously, renamed in Spain Against the Drugs Empire.

1999’s The Insider, a thriller which tells the true story of a tobacco industry whistle blower who suffers threats, stalking, million dollar lawsuits and a wrecked marriage in a bid to tell the truth, becomes the massively understated The Dilemma in Spanish. The title gives the impression he’s sitting on the couch scratching his head trying to work out what to order on the Chinese takeaway menu.

Then there’s 1979’s edge-of-your-seat horror flick Alien, which tells the story of how a creepy acid-for-blood alien creatures wipes out a crew of seven people on a mining ship in deep space.  In Spain it becomes Alien: The Eighth Passenger, just in case you forgot how many people were on board. Imagine a conversation between friends deciding what to see at the cinema on a Saturday night. “Hey, there’s a great movie about an alien space monster that attacks the crew of a space ship. Do you wanna go and see it?” “How many people are in the crew?” “Er, seven I think, because the Alien is the eighth one apparently.” “Nah, it sounds rubbish. Now, if there had been ten people on board that would have been a thriller!”

Kevin Costner’s 1997 post-apocalyptic futuristic thriller The Postman about a nomadic survivor who delivers letters among isolated and scared communities, encouraging them to stand against a tyrannical warlord, becomes Messenger of the Future (It’s about a bloke in the future who delivers messages, obviously).

Others include Ben Affleck’s terrorist-steals-nuclear-bomb thriller The Sum of All Fears which becomes Nuclear Panic; 2005’s Brokeback Mountain which becomes In Forbidden Land; 2004 remake The Manchurian Candidate which becomes Messenger of Fear (are you seeing a pattern here?); 2010’s Inception which bizarrely becomes Origin (origin of what?); 1994’s prison drama The Shawshank Redemption which becomes Life Imprisonment (Where is he? In prison. How long for? Life) and 2000’s Robert De Niro comedy Meet The Parents which becomes Her Parents, while its sequel Meet The Fockers becomes His Parents and its sequel Little Fockers which becomes Now They’re the Parents. It’s about parents, just in case that’s not clear.

And I haven’t even got on to the subject of how 99 per cent of all films are dubbed into Spanish when they are shown in cinemas here. There are millions of people in Spain who have never even heard the real voices of Tom Cruise, Sean Connery, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep and others. But that’s for another time.

If I’m to be completely objective, it’s only fair to sign off with an example of how it can sometimes work the other way too.  And for this, I only need one exhibit in evidence; Samuel L Jackson’s 2006 action thriller Snakes on a Plane. I'll leave you to guess what that's about.