DVDs

Watching movies and TV here are a challenge, since they are always overdubbed and never have subtitles. News is the hardest since the broadcasters speak so rapidly. Sports are good since a lot of the vocabulary is repeated. There are a couple of comedy shows with a lot of physical humor which makes them easy to understand. People always recommend cartoons, but the problem with cartoons is that they either have no dialog or have really wacky voices which are hard to decipher.

So I decided to pick up some dvds in Russian with Russian subtitles to watch when I'm just hanging out and when weather is crappy (which I have a feeling will be a lot soon).

I started asking people about Russian horror movies - they are usually really predictable and don't have a lot of complex dialog. The first one recommended to me was Yulenka (Tagline: "She doesn't play with dolls. She plays with people."), a movie about a male teacher at an all girl's school. The package said it had both Russian subtitles and an English audio track. I popped the movie in the DVD player at home and it had neither. The DVD menu looked really cheap so I'm led to believe that it was actually a pirated copy, despite the fact that the packaging looked immaculate and I purchased it in a real store (not at the market or on the street).

Since I still had the receipt I took it back and explained that it didn't have any subtitles and that I'm a foolish foreigner and can't watch Russian movies without them. Then I asked for recommendations for other Russian horror/thriller movies. The two guys working in the store would recommend a movie, then, with most of the disks, they would open the plastic wrapper, pop it in a computer to check if it had subtitles or not.

With some of the picks they said checking for subtitles wasn't necessary - that they were 100% sure that the back of the packaging was right. Those ones were always in normal looking plastic cases; the others requiring verification were always in the cardboard style cases. Which again makes me think some of their movies are pirated and others are legit.

I ran into the same issue in Russia before and in Thailand. Back in 2005 I bought a Brazilian Girls cd from a legit looking music store, which turned out to have typos on the back liner notes. And in Thailand you can buy legit looking DVDs which, when you get home and read the case, you discover have really hilarious typos, completely mangled English.

Alls well that ends well. Picked up two of the legit looking DVDs, "Zhest" and "Mechenosets." I'll report back after I get a chance to watch.