In the Chinese (Cantonese to be precise) edition, there is no mention of "personalities" in the movie at all. in fact, the movie plot made every effort into believing either ghosts really do exist or the detective is totally insane. the viewer has to watch to the end to figure out those werent ghosts.
the english translation immediately gave away in the tagline that those were personalities. >.<
That's too bad. That said, I don't think pointing out that they were multiple personalities at the beginning of the film ruined it for me. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. On the other hand, I'm curious to see how it would have been not knowing.
shareI really enjoyed with the English subtitles. I can't say how I would've reacted without them but it would've been weird! :-)
"Don't over-egg the pudding, Willie"
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Well, you always lose something when you watch translated movies, no matter what language.
hmmz, next time i'll watch it i'll try to replace the word with ghosts (although its a bit too late now :/).
A different translation for "inner personalities" would have helped, since it wasn't clear that these were necessarily negative. That the police chief had no inner personalities to me signified that he was emotionless, where if I'd known the personalities were more like inner demons, I'd have understood he was simply "pure", rather than emotionless.
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I don't think those are inner personalities or ghosts. I think those are thoughts.
On the beginning, there is a girl in the store had been kept telling to steal. I think she was not having another personality, she was just struggling in steal or not steal at that moment.
When Bun shouted at her, the thought of stealing the lipstick was gone. I don't think any one can shout away a person's personality. I think what he was shout away is the thought of stealing things.
I can imagine, if the girl decided to steal the lipstick at the end, then the next time Bun seeing that girl, she may look like the girl in red wig.
Yeah they may be very well the Buddhist notion of thought, unwholsome thinking you should never identify with... Loved the idea that, if lipstick girl had done the deed, she would have appeared as her pink wig thought.
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I felt that there were many ghost movie conventions. My question is about "Mad" being in the title ("wonderful detective" is the translation supplied me by my Chinese-reading cowatcher).
shareAccording to my dictionaries, the ideograms of the title (神探) could be read as something like "soul searcher", but I wouldn't bet my life on this - even though it kind of fits the movie and I kind of like the sound of it
there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above her shoulder
...my cantonese isn't strong, but I agree that "souls" is probably the best translation rather than personalities or ghosts. On the topic of the english translations overall, I found them to be adequate. There was a section of dialogue that would have been translated literally as right and left brains, but obviously, that wouldn't have made much sense.
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