Since I began my travels, I’ve gone to a few movies. Now, I know what you’re thinking: you traveled halfway around the world just to go to the movies?? Well:
- Going to the movies is a huge part of my life. Always has been, always will be.
- When you’re walking around all day in the heat, there comes a point — usually around 3:00 or 4:00 — when you just wanna sit down in an air conditioned room for a couple of hours.
- Don’t judge the way I live my life, man.
I noticed that Wish Upon was playing here in Madrid (for the unaware, Wish Upon is a cheesy horror movie that kinda flopped in the States and didn’t even bother to come out in Canada). Being a fan of cheesy horror movies, I got more excited about this than I should probably admit.
The theatre where it was playing turned out to be on the outskirts of Madrid, so getting there was a bit of a challenge — it involved multiple transfers on the subway.
An aside: trying to navigate the Madrid subway system is a baffling ordeal. Being from Toronto (which has, what? Two subway lines? Three?) my brain can hardly even comprehend the Madrid metro’s labyrinthine, multicolored spiderweb of about a dozen overlapping lines. It’s nuts.
So I’m at the movies, the trailers start, and I immediately notice that the English has been dubbed over in Spanish. “Huh,” I think to myself. “That can’t be good.”
And no, it was not good. I just came from Portugal, where almost all English-language films (with the exception of cartoons) are presented in their original language and subtitled in Portuguese. I sort of figured I was in for the same deal here.
It turns out Portugal is the outlier in this situation; apparently the majority of Europe plays dubbed movies. So that’s just delightful, obviously. Thankfully, it is still possible to see undubbed movies — they’re just not as common.