Emboldened by this thread and doing OK on the mock JLPT listening portions, I decided to turn off English subtitles for Tetsuo: the Iron Man the other night. This turned out to be the right call, as it turns out that movie has almost zero important dialogue, so I just got to feel a little closer to it with little effort. (and 鉄男 is a less redundant title anyway…)
鉄男 thoughts
I loved the effects, the vibe, the soundtrack, and the beginning and end… didn’t love as much the drill penis. A weirdo underground body horror cult movie isn’t going to be to everyone’s tastes, but it’s definitely an experience, and the human body mashed together with globs of oozing machinery in a blast of black-and-white effects is something to behold all right. Curious to see other 塚本晋也 now that I’ve seen the most famous one.
There was so little dialogue (but still just enough for me to ocasionally rewind and turn on subtitles and try and fail to figure out exactly what he said - I should have just rolled with it) that I was still hungry to try to gauge my comprehension in that setting, so I tried a movie I’ve seen recently: リング and watched maybe the first third of that with subtitles turned off, figuring that the opening scene and slow investigation would be especially good for listening practice.
It was fun, but it turns out it’s pretty hard to tell if I’m keeping up with the movie because I can tell what people are saying, or because I’ve seen it before! And they certainly do talk fast at times…
So anyway, since watching movies is my most established “I’m going to do nothing but sit and pay attention to this” time, I might try to make an effort to avoid English subtitles with them, and see how that goes.
P.S.
I put スウィートホーム in the recommendation column of the wiki page, since I saw it recently and enjoyed it a lot. It was co-produced with a tie-in Famicom RPG that went on to directly inspire the Resident Evil games, which is a weird enough history that I had to watch it, plus it’s directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who directed Cure and Pulse which I’ve seen before and enjoyed. Turns out it’s a fun haunted house movie that isn’t really anything like either of those movies or Resident Evil!
I’m not as much of a horror person as talking about this might make me sound, but I like weird special effects and concepts in movies, and horror is a reliable source of that. If a movie can show me either a person turning into a skeleton turning into goo, or goo turning into a skeleton turning into a person, then I’m pretty much on board, and well – スウィートホーム has some effects I wish I could watch in more fidelity (as far as I can tell there was never a DVD or blu-ray release but you can find it in VHS quality)