ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!

I've been so in need of amusement that I actually opened my sent mail folder and went through deleting all the crap. There was a lot. But I did come across one or two little forgotten gems ~ like the one a fab friend sent me about Star Wars DVDs.

For those of you that don't live in Asia, you maybe haven’t seen the hyowj industry that specializes in selling knocked-off DVDs. The capital of this industry has to be Shenzhen (China). I don't think I've ever seen a real DVD there. As with it's slightly smaller counterpart in Europe, this business is all about selling as many dodgy DVDs as possible. Recipe for a knock-off:
Get the original or download it from the net.
Fuck up the picture so that it's slightly tilted for no apparent reason.
Translate the entire film to your native Asian language and subtitle it.
For foreigners' ultimate enjoyment, find someone who doesn't speak a word of English and get him to translate the subtitles back into English using only a word-by-word dictionary.
Voila! Get the DVD home, sit back with a few beers and prepare to laff your arse off at the results ~ like this Star Wars effort. Fantastic!

So cos I was in desperate need of something amusing, I went web-trawling and found some interesting results. There's still the amazing site, Engrish.com, all about collecting instances of mis-used English. They now do T-shirts too! I want one! But before you start banging on about not laughing at people who don't know better, I'd just like to say in my defence that people routinely laugh at my Chinese, and it's all swings and roundabouts.

But the outright winner, in terms of effort, results, and just plain deadpan-iness (I want that word added to the Oxford English Dictionary, please) has to be Flubtitles. They go through dodgy subtitles DVD-by-DVD, and I'm still wetting myself over "Get weapon, bitch!" from Conman in Tokyo (I think). I think I actually remember seeing these subtitles when Cheung Ga-Fai was shouting at Christy Chung ~ was it during the "I don't know what these Japanese are talking about, but their suits make them look like yakuza so I'll beat them" scene (in Louis Koo's humble noodle shop)? When she gives him chopsticks? Can't remember.

Anyway, tonight's title comes from the immortal lines mis-translated all that time ago for Zero Wing. Ah, the days of crappily made Sega Megadrive games… Anyway, enjoy this bloke's site ~ it's a riot (riot! I predict a riot! etc.)!

Do you like the picture for today? Not too shabby, even if I do say so myself.

Tags:
Ewan McGregor
Asian Cinema