(Phil Lord on) Why the Spanish dialogue in 'Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse' isn't subtitled. *Spoilers*
- Thread starter Slayven
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Shameik Moore is not hispanic.
Audiences can read the room without words being spoken. The language barrier has never stopped people from listening to music from other countries.
well, you also have the opposite extreme where you have people saying they only understand and empathize better with these the characters because they spoke in a spanish without a subtitle.
They might not know what exactly is being said, but it's not hard to suss out what they're talking about based on context.
I mean shit, I do this daily at work. i have co-workers that say shit in absolute Spanish all the time and I can figure out what they're talking about and interject in English based on what marginally insignificant Spanish I do know.
No one needs to know his mom said "I want you to wash the dishes right this instant instead of cleaning your room" when we can figure out what she's saying based on what's going on in the scene and how everyone else is reacting in manners we can understand.
When you're marginalized or treated as invisible, the little shining moments that actually highlight your experience actually matter.
And I'm not talking about marginalized as in being oppressed, I'm using marginalized as in "your experience is largely the same as the collective and isn't influenced by anything that makes you the minority of the collective in the first place." Marginalized as in downplaying in order to express homogeny.
all of this is a worthless gesture then. why is it that latinos are so easily brushed aside in Hollywood and there's never ANY pushback when someone of a different ethnicity gets cast in our roles? It's goddamn bullshit.
Miles is half black so I don't see reason to call his casting into question.
I find when there are no subtitles for a character and I can't understand them then they get relegated to be inconsequential characters. It's a part of the same thing that happens when I hear people in public speaking in a foreign language, I just filter it out.
its in the OP
half of the equation isnt good enough, especially with hispanics being as underrepresented as they are, even less so with afro-hispanics.
Would casting a brown or white hispanic be okay with you since by your own logic only half is good enough?
this is literally for every ethnic role in hollywood. It ai'nt a latino thing.
lol so tell me when do we get to call dibs on our characters? Apparently I'm wrong when I want actors for characters like Bane and Miles to actually reflect their cultural background.
The hard thing is that Miles isn't just yours. He's mine, too.
While an afro-latino person would've been preferable for sure, personally, brown or black are suitable in the interm just as long as the experience is properly captured and represented, which it seems to be.
you can call dibs whenever you want to? I mean, you have Scarlett and Emma playing asian people. I dont see how it can get worse than that.
Also, ain't Miles half black?
I understand what you're saying, years of film study would be useless if I didn't, but I still don't agree that the comparison here is apt. In Prayer Before Dawn the experience of the protagonist is meant to be the same as the experience the film wants the audience to have, and that isn't changed by the removal of subtitles. In Spider-Man the experiences of Miles are likely what the film intends the audience to empathise with as well; yet despite this it has chosen to give some viewers an experience objectively less 'complete' than Miles' due to the language they speak. Of course that will inevitably be at least somewhat true as there will always be some disconnect but it will be even more true here even if the audience gets the general 'gist' of what's going on.
Personally I couldn't care less and knowing this won't harm my enjoyment of the film when I watch it on Friday, I just don't feel that what Lord said about the decision is a good enough justification for intentionally harming the film by removing these subtitles.
Audience members can empathize just fine with a tree man who repeats the same phrase over and over again with no subtitles to give you an accurate idea of what he's actually saying. I think they can manage a few words of Spanish here or there.
When it comes to voice acting, why does the skin color take precedence over y'know, actually being a hispanic bilingual english/spanish speaker? Genuine accents would seem to me to be more important in capturing the experience. I haven't seen the movie since it hasn't come out in my country yet, but if his spanish sucks thats an automatic failure in capturing the experience.
Live action is another topic, of course, as his skin would obviously be more important.
have you been missing the part where I'm asking for an AFRO-hispanic? Shouldn't be hard to find one, considering in Puerto Rico everyone speaks both languages.
If its brief throw away dialogue then it shouldn't matter. If we are supposed to be investing in a character and their story then we absolutely need to understand what they're saying. It doesnt seem that this is the case though.
You don't need subs on anything that is needed to understand. They clearly only subbed what was needed.
Skin color should take precedence since minority roles are harder to come by in general, so if they can get a minority to fill the role, good.
Being bilingual would be a great thing for sure, but isn't absolutely necessary if the person reading the lines can muster up proper pronunciation, and I say that because not everyone who speaks Spanish has an accent. I have a friend from Colombia who doesn't even speak fluent Spanish, I have a friend born and raised primarily from Mexico who doesn't even have an accent speaking English or Spanish, and i have another from Guatemala who only has an accent speaking Spanish. And me, everyone I seem to encounter is surprised by my ability to properly say words in Spanish in spite of me only being able to pick up on words and phrases occasionally. And on the flip side, I have a friend who's also black who can't say Spanish words for shit and is one of those people who say tor-tilla.
Not everyone has an accent when speaking Spanish, so looking for Miles with an accent when speaking it doesn't seem important. What is important to me is finding someone who's some sort of facsimile to what Miles actually is (a black/brown person) interacting with the aspects of his culture in a manner that makes sense; jumping between English and Spanish.
do...do you think hispanics are a majority or something? we're probably the most underrepresented culture in Hollywood.
You're coming across as a privileged American tbh, for natural spanish speakers like me him having a proper spanish pronunciation/accent is very important. And I wasn't talking about him having an accent when speaking english, I don't have an accent when I speak english either. I'm talking about when he speaks spanish. One shitty sounding word and the illusion goes KAPUT.
Are we not allowed to voice our concerns much like everyone else when any other character is white washed? There was a whole shitstorm over Iron Fist and he wasn't even fucking Asian to begin with.
And you're seriously asking this in a thread related to Miles' ethnicity? lol
1. I'm well aware.
2. How am I coming off as privileged? Because I recognize that there's plenty of Latinx people in the United States who speak fluent Spanish without an accent, even when growing up in households where people speak Spanish? Miles lives in a house where he juggles between languages and lives in a society where he predominately juggles between languages. Why would he have an accent? Proper pronunciation is not an accent, and as long as the actor isn't butchering pronunciation, then things are fine. Miles is a black and Puerto Rican kid from Brooklyn; English or Spanish, he's going to sound like he's from Brooklyn.
Nowhere did I imply that audiences won't be able to empathise with Miles at all, or even that this will severely impact things, I said that audiences won't be able to empathise fully with his experience. I admitted that such a phenomena is for the most part impossible but since the lack of subtitles is not an inevitable factor the choice to harm that connection should be brought into question.
As for Groot, that comparison is incredibly flawed. Groot only being able to say "I Am Groot" is an inherent part of his experience and the experiences of everyone in the film; there is no disconnect between audience and character there and the film knows this. A better comparison would be Chewbacca or R2-D2 from Star Wars who are both characters that are understood in-universe but aren't outside of it. However that is still not the same thing as those characters were built around the knowledge that this disconnect exists whereas this isn't the case for the Spanish-speaking characters in Spider-Man.
No he's not... He's a Peter Parker clone.
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Yeah sorry mate if you think "as long as he isn't butchering it" is good enough or that a spanish accent when speaking spanish isn't a thing then yes, you're coming across as privileged since your ear isn't as trained as mine when it comes to spanish, and I'm going to have a much bigger issue than you when actually listening to it.
Anyways have at it, I'm done discussing this topic. It's sad how a supposedly progressive forum like this one pushes back constantly on Latinos getting Latino roles. See: Dave Bautista as Bane fanwank.
Reads like it's because he speaks two languages. IE, he doesn't care if others don't.
I think you read a bit too much into what I was saying. If people can follow along with such alien characters who are speaking in a manner that is not directly understandable that they can far more easily follow along with a few Spanish words peppered in.
I thought this was cool. I don't understand a lick of Spanish but it didn't feel weird or annoying to me because you can totally understand what is going on without having to understand the exact dialogue. It feels much more natural. It's the same reason why I really enjoy watching Wong Kar Wai movies where he seamlessly lets his cast speak in the languages which make sense for them. A scene could be in Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, Japanese, Filipino, etc depending on the film setting, the character, etc. For English speakers since foreign film are subtitled regardless, this naturalism can be sort of lost, but watching WKW films without subtitles is a fantastic experience that really immerses you in the setting and how it would be like to see people with such backgrounds and in diversified settings just switch between languages and for it not to be "othered" in a sense. Of course it also helps that these films don't rely on the dialogue to drive any sort of story, and are instead mood pieces and character/period/setting studies which invoke emotions rather than narrative. But yeah, it's a cool thing and more directors should try it when the opportunities are right for it. Not everything needs to be subtitled or specifically understood by everyone. Sometimes showing things as it is, is just as if not more important.
I don't see how; you said people can empathise just fine with Miles and I said that was a misrepresentation of my argument, the same goes with your second reply as none of my points have been about how people won't be able to "follow along."
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They probbably have a special version of the film for theaters equipped for that
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I think it is a amazing choice. Miles is a biracial kid that goes to a majority white school, so he is probably force to code switch like a mother fucker. Showing they speak spanish in his home shows it is one of the places he can relax and be himself. POC's are force to immerse themselves in American culture which isn't always their culture, to adapt and survive. Exposing the majority to that isn't a bad thing and might breed a little empathy even if ti is in a movie with a talking pig that mutated from a spider
Please point to me to where I said such a thing. Saying that not all Spanish speakers speak Spanish with an accent isn't being dismissive of Latinos, it's something that's true. Sure, I'm not a Spanish speaker, but I live in Las Vegas, a city where the second largest demographic is people who speak Spanish. I hear people speak Spanish daily, either to me or around me. Sure, I may not have an "ear" like you do, but that doesn't discredit the fact that there's people who don't speak with accents.
Maybe it's a lot less people, but they still exist.
And I'm not pushing back on Latinos getting latino roles any more than you are pushing back against a black person getting a black role, especially as socially, given that this is Miles Morales, a fictional citizen of New York City in the Unite States of America, is generally seen as black first. Most mixed black people in the US in general are seen as black first.
There's 2 different Scorpions in the Ultimate universe. Miles fought a Mexican crime boss who was also called Scorpion.
Lol you're funny, we have 15 one-off Batman Villains (in this case, literally just Evil Batman™ ) to give books too before we get to a brown person.
I don't agree that it's lost on 99% of the audience. If you can understand the English that Pops is saying in the same scene where Mom is saying mostly the same stuff, you can pick up the context of what is being said. Miles also has a few lines in Spanish but again, it's surrounded by English that means the exact same thing.
I'd be very surprised if the assisted listening/CaptiView enabled theaters were incapable of rendering any of those scenes comprehensible to people who need that kind of assistance. In any case the charge of xenophobia seems grossly misaimed here.
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The Signal...........
After Batwing and Orpheus I believe being black in the batfamily is a curse
I mean most other nations teach their kids to be at least conversational in secondary languages. Shame the US doesn't really emphasize that but there's no reason to subtitle it when the point is the exchange not being made to feel foreign because it's not. To the characters it's a natural interaction they have every day with one another. Subtitles draw attention to the "otherness" of it to many people when that's not the thematic intent being pushed by the scene. As duckroll pointed out, this is something Wong Kar Wai does in almost all of his films. A movie making decision is meant to convey that feeling of that decision to the audience thematically.
Man they pushed Batwing soooooo hard too.
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So what you saying is Andrew Blake deserved all those awards?
If you are old enough to get that without gooingly, damn. Don't google that at work
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