Marian Schedenig

Come in through the DOOR!

Peter Jackson.

Not necessarily. Modern releases tend to be over-compressed, no doubt. But you *can* get to excessive with dynamic range, and that doesn't sound realistic either.

Normalise it?

For all the scores, period. But later he got Shawn Murphy to record them with such blurry acoustics that the screams cannot be heard on the recording.

I know too little about how this stuff is done in practice, and in the analogue world, to have a serious opinion. I guess it could have been as simple as a misplaced marker on the master for the digital expansion.

I sat at a table next to Ed Harris's in Neusiedl am See in Austria of all things, some ten years ago. Friends then ran into him again on the way to the loo. We weren't convinced it was him and asked the waiter, noticing he had paid by credit card. The waiter didn't know who Ed Harris was, but he fetched the receipt to let us check the signature: Edward Harris.

I guess I don't have to worry about The Cowboys or Small Soldiers selling out before this is revealed.

Yes. Luckily, it's just one moment. I wouldn't mind a couple of clicks on Night Crossing, it's the constancy of them that drives me nuts.

It seems to start abruptly, if that's what you mean?

Well, I stand by what I said. And with the exception of the Hanks example (which I read years ago somewhere online, as mentioned), they're my personal opinions. It's easy to let them be these days, now that home video releases nearly (!) always contain the original language (though German ones often go overboard and replace title cards and even other in-film texts and displays with translated version instead of adding subtitles, even when you're watching in the original language) and because living in Vienna, I have at least two and a half regular English cinema that cover most of the mainstream and not-quite-mainstream English films. Others in more provincial regions of Austria and Germany are less lucky and have to go to greater lengths to avoid dubs. Before the DVD format became standard, it was much more problematic. And of course, most regularly available TV channels here are useless to me. Nevertheless, I find it sad that it's standard practice to dub every mainstream film and for many people to equate the actors' performances to what they see in the dub. Compare a native German film to a dubbed English or French one - the native film sounds authentic and very different from the others, but the way the dubbed English and French films are narrated is virtually indistinguishable - it's not the fact that they're English or French that defines the way they sound (which would be alright) but the fact that they're dubbed. Luckily, dubs don't usually delay theatrical releases anymore like they used to (or at least I assume the dubbing process was a major factor in the delay between international release dates), though we still get at least animated Disney and Pixar films months later. And there are certain dubs that I find morally objectable. Like Die Hard, which makes the terrorists European instead of German with some "clever" dialogue changes, because apparently Germans can't (or couldn't back then) accept being the villains. And Starship Troopers, which (presumably to tone down the fascist component of the film) glosses over several of the harder satirical elements of the original, absurdly with the result of making the film less of a fascist satire and more direct fascist propaganda.

Haven't listened to that one in ages, but I don't recall hearing anything wrong with it.

S1 is very slow (and has bad CGI), but it really starts to soar in S2.

AFO, Leviathan and perhaps The 13th Warrior.

Yes. Of course your in-depth "dubs are great, anyone who doesn't like them is a fraud" argument is much more convincing.