I re-subscribed to MHZ Choice via Amazon Prime earlier this month. For those unfamiliar with the channel, it features international TV programming (though the bulk is European). During my initial go-round, in 2020-21, A French Village—which dramatizes the Nazi occupation of France during World War II—proved compelling, while the Swedish Sandhamn Murders, which mixes light and dark, was entertaining. There were a slew of Nordic noirs that kept me intrigued, too. After four or six months of subtitled fun, however, I hit the wall and let the subscription lapse.
As I said up top, however, I’ve re-subscribed. I’d hoped that more Nordic noirs had joined the lineup, as I enjoy intense mysteries, but they haven’t. Instead, the service has combined with another streamer, Topic, and seemingly upped its quotient from Germany. That’s not a dealbreaker, per se, though the Germanic fare has thus far been fairly mundane. Worse is this: I clicked on one program and watched as the words slipping from the actors’ mouths were in English and, horror of horrors, didn’t match the motion of their lips. At some point in the past few years, MHZ unleashed dubbed versions of various shows.
Dubbed anything is a pet peeve of mine. Subtitles, though not always accurate, enable us to hear the actors’ voices and inflections, which are often more important than the dialogue itself. (To borrow a quote from Alfred Hitchock, “Dialogue should simply be a sound, among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”) So now, with MHZ Choice + Topic, I have to make sure I’m clicking on the right version of a program.
As long as I’m discussing entertainment-related annoyances, here’s another: colorized versions of classic films. Last year, as we always do around Christmas, Diane and I clicked play on It’s a Wonderful Life only to discover that it was a colorized version. I felt like Bill the Cat spitting out, “Ack!” Like many yesteryear films, its black-and-white nature is essentially another character, with the shadows and texture adding to the atmosphere.
There are arguments in favor of both dubbed and colorized fare, of course. For the first, some find flitting their eyes to the bottom of the screen and reading the dialogue a distraction. (It also, of course, alienates the functional illiterates that walk among us.) For the second, some claim that colorizing classic films makes them accessible to audiences not accustomed to black-and-white fare.
In a way, those annoyances lead to another, more major pet peeve of mine: the willing embrace of ignorance. Years ago, I wrote on my About page, “While I subscribe to the George Santayana aphorism that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ I also believe that those who only look in the rearview mirror are sure to drift into the median strip.” If we don’t know where we’ve been, the odds are good that we’ll take a wrong turn and drive down the same pothole-heavy highway that we did long ago. On the flip side, we’ll likely miss out on the present if we focus too much on the past. It’s a balancing act. The older I get, however, the more I realize that many of my brethren reject any- and everything that contradicts their beliefs. They’d rather travel down that pothole-heavy highway again.
The Old Grey Cat 