It seemed as though Ewan McGregor's line was dubbed over with the word "Target" from whatever store the residents of the UK shop in on Sunday. Anyone else notice this?
http://janeaustenfilmclub.blogspot.com
I dearly love a laugh.
I just watch the film and came to IMDB specifically to ask about this! The dubbing really bothered me, so obvious he's saying something different and I assumed it was "Tesco." I'm Canadian and I know there's no Target in the UK, we only got it ourselves this year. Strange that they would think it necessary, in a movie partly set in England featuring a British task, and in light of KST's later line about Tesco.
shareYes - it took me right out of the film when I watched it this morning. I had to replay it on my PVR. There are NO Target stores in the UK. They could have used Safeway, which existed in both countries at one time. However, the reason a large proportion of the US population remains ignorant IS because they get their movies 'dumbed down'. If johnston.scot and others feel it was necessary, because it was the only way that Americans could understand the joke, you've proved my point. Most people, of even a normal intellect, would get the inference to shopping not church by just a little thought. It may have taken a few nanoseconds longer to work it out before they laughed - but they would have made fine use of their brains, and increased their knowledge, to get there!
After all - that's how everybody else in the world learns about the USA, good or bad, right or wrong, by watching movies!
The word "Tesco" means nothing to me. That doesn't make me "ignorant" or "dumb" any more than the fact you've probably never heard of QFC makes you ignorant. It's not "dumbed down:" it's avoiding specific references that are only recognizable to people from a particular geographic locale. I guess I don't quite understand how knowing what Tesco is makes you an intellectual.
I don't think you understand how jokes like the one in the movie work. Like a lot of jokes, it works by way of indirection and surprise: something unexpected and out of place is inserted at the end of "On Sunday we go to _____." What makes it funny is that what goes in the blank is a surprise. If you could figure it out from context, it wouldn't be a surprise, and it wouldn't be funny. I suppose you can figure it out, by the following process: (i) hmm, that line is otherwise so pointless, I guess it's supposed to be funny. (ii) What would make it funny is if "Tesco" is something that's totally different from church. (iii) What's totally different from church, but is a place someone might go regularly on Sunday? Maybe a movie theater? Hmm, no, that's not bland enough. Maybe a grocery store? Yeah, that would be kind of amusing." What's missing, if you do it that way, is ... the laugh.
It's the same as the line I mentioned from "Splash." People in England (at least in the mid-'80s) had no idea what Mrs. Paul's was, so nobody in the theater laughed. If the filmmakers had been more on the ball, they would have replaced it with an appropriate reference that would be recognizable to an English audience. If it was to something that didn't exist in the US, so what?
I suppose I'm just short of normal intellect. Ah, how I wish I could be brilliant, like all the English people!
I completely agree, JS...and I'm English. It's a quick joke that needs to be understood instantly or the rhythm is lost - a perfectly sensible dub for the US version, and worth doing as the market is so big.
You're right about 'Mrs Paul's', too, even today. I am well-travelled and in fact lived in the US, on and off, during the 80s - but until I looked it up just now I had no idea what this meant. Not dubbing Splash with something else for the UK version wasn't (and isn't) a matter of missing a trick, though - let alone a sign of American arrogance, as some have suggested: it's just economics. Recording and inserting something new is expensive, and the UK audience is probably too small to make it worthwhile. It might make sense where there's one product name that would do for most of Europe, say, but that's an unlikely scenario. And besides, I'm struggling to think of a UK brand (apart, perhaps, from Birds Eye) so immediately associated with frozen fish, let alone one with two m-b-p consonants and a syllable between for lip-syncing.