Screwball | Relaxer | Rafiki

A trio of quality goods:

Like if latter-day Adam McKay helmed a Pain & Gain-esque documentary.

Sam Shepard, Sam Beckett, Will Eno and David Cronenberg walk into an acid bar; they trip out together — pun intended — with Relaxer.

Whenever a movie like Rafiki uses subtitles for English dialects deemed too difficult for American audiences to fully understand every word — a suspect decision when anyone but the director is doing the deeming — I realize anew how much is lost in translation between ALL subtitles. The how is often more crucial than the what, in stories/art/life; how we communicate in language, the EXACT words and sentence structures we choose, communicate just as much as what the words are trying to explicitly communicate. A cross-language perfect match is probably impossible — linguistics! — but English-to-English subtitles showcase the difference between character-laden human speech and the depersonalized mutations that end up on screen. It’s high time for technology to catch up with Douglas Adams’ brain.

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