In which I offer a rebuttal to my esteemed colleague’s previous panning of “Dude, Where’s My Car?”
This week was a crusher. The situation at work, which I go out of my way not to talk about too much, has managed to offer pretty much every possible vexation as well as some new variations on old themes. It just has. Adam-wise this has been a mild week, but with work wearing me down, even the most ordinary chores at home or outside it could try my patience, and so it has been. I just barely made it through the work week without choking any of my colleagues or students. Just. By the time Friday was over, I wanted no more from its evening than Homer Simpson might.
So I was the ideal audience for “Stari, kje je moj avto?” last night. I had had no intention of watching it, but my adorable wife, who loves a good brain-out on a Friday night, insisted. But she’s too smart to enjoy anything SO stupid, and within minutes of the film’s opening gambit (two stoners waking up with a hangover) she was on the email.
Meanwhile, I watched the opening under duress; a good friend, whose taste and advice I honor, had told me in no uncertain terms that “Dude, Where’s My Car?” was not to be watched under any circumstances, not even the most ironic. That madness that way lay, that no one could ever recover for me an evening so lost. Gone and gone. Don’t do it.
Well, I did do it, and I have to say that Aston Kucher and Seann William Scott can enter the pantheon of great comic pairs populated by Abbott & Costello, Belushi & Akroyd, Sacco & Vanzetti, et alia. In trying to reconcile the vast divergence of taste between myself and Julie on this particular topic, I have come to some conclusions.
First of all, any film entitled “Stari, kje je moj avto?” is always going to be several times funnier than anything called “Dude, Where’s My Car?” There is a Bergmannesque je ne sais quois given to a film so entitled (and subtitled!) that is simply lacking in the original. The very fact of being translated into a language spoken by fewer than two million souls lends a gravity to the film that was, perhaps, heretofore lacking.
And what subtitling it was! The most arcane subtleties are delicately teased out in the subtitles. For example, the seminal scene in which Jesse (Kucher) and Chester (Scott) realize that both have had their backs unwittingly tattooed while wasted bristles with delicious tension as rendered in Slovene, whereas the orginal lackluster English left something to be desired. Both characters remove their shirts simultaneously, revealing tattoos that read, respectively, “DUDE” and “SWEET”. Their feckless failure to cause comprehension to occur in the ensuing scene is reminiscent of “Who’s On First?”. In the Slovene version, the comedy is further concentrated by the precision of the translation: the tattoos are translated as reading “STARI” and “FINO”. I nearly laughed my liver out.
But didn’t.
