Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

A while ago I went to a rather fancy movie theater in New York to see The White Countess. I’m pretty sure it was during the previews for that film that I saw one for Joyeux Noël, a French film about the Christmas Truce of the first year of World War I. It seemed interesting and like something I would naturally enjoy, so I waited and kept an eye out for the release date. I was never able to find a theater playing it, though, and several months later, I couldn’t find a copy of it or DVD release dates anywhere. While it seems somewhat okay to download anime, it feels a bit more illegal to download other films, but since I couldn’t find it I decided to try downloading. I finally found one online, and after hours and hours spent in downloading I realized that there were no subtitles. Now the people in the movie understand English, French, and German, but I would find it pretty impressive if someone could understand all three languages well enough to be able to watch the whole film (it was about equally split between the three languages). Needless to say, I could have watched the movie, but I wouldn’t know what was going on for two thirds of the time.

So I tried to download another file, and that took over a day, but this one came with subtitles. Yay! Except the time at the bottom of the player said it was only 56 minutes long, and IMDB marks its runtime at 116 minutes. I was disappointed that I would have to see the “abridged” version, but it was still better than nothing. Yet, the film was not even halfway over and I had thought I’d been watching it for at least half an hour. I didn’t really pay this any mind at the time, but when I returned to it later I thought that the seconds were ticking slowly. I investigated and discovered that for every 10 minutes that passed on my watch, the film’s clock only noted the passage of six minutes. The title of the post is a line in the film; it seems they were trying to make the viewers understand the meaning. The problem is, though, that there is still a discrepancy between the real movie time and the IMDB data.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 9:18pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.