What’s up with the people at Miramax? Like it’s not enough that they buy up rights to good films and then sit on them for years but when they finally do give something a release they have to royally screw it over, even if it’s just on DVD …
Case in point: Miramax finally put out a Region 1 DVD of Avalon back in December. Now, I’ve had a copy of Avalon for ages, but it was a Hong Kong bootleg and seeing as the Brothers Weinstein actually decided to (gasp!) release the film in it’s original aspect ratio and with the original languages intact (the audio even defaults to the original Polish) I figured I’d be a good boy and buy an official copy. I mean, if I want them to actually do something with the other properties they’re holding I should support the ones they do actually package up right, yes? Well, I go looking around today and come across a little article that point out that not only did the Weinsteins bring in a writer to ‘plump up’ the script a bit and flesh it out for American audiences in the English dubbed version – the writer was Neil Gaiman and I was already aware of this part – but it turns out that when they did the subtitling they based the subs NOT on the original film but on their own rewrite of it. Thus, you get subtitles popping up when nobody’s actually speaking and you have Gaiman explaining – or just making up explanations, really, cause how would he know – things that the film’s director intentionally left vague. So sure, there’s an untouched version of the film on there, but unless you speak Polish you’ll never know what the original dialog actually said. This sucks. I’m gonna go buy another bootleg.
Addendum: My spellchecker suggests ‘weeniest’ in place of Weinstein. This strikes me as being entirely appropriate.
