Got the above film on DVD on Thursday. ‘Tis rather good. But there seems to be a strange fault with the subtitles.
The flm comes on 2 DVDs. Disc 1 has the film, both dubbed into English and in the original Russian (although the voice-over in the beginning is still in English either way), and with commentaries from the director and writer. There are four subtitle streams: English for the Hearing Impaired, English Text, and one for each commentary. Which is great, except that the second stream is blank. So that if you want to watch the film in the original Russian, you have either no subtitles or subtitles that include descriptions of all the sound effects as well as the dialogue; a tiresome and irritating distraction.
Fortunately, Disc 2 contans the ‘Theatrical Version’, in which the subtitles are incorporated into the picture. This is good not only because it provides a set of dialogue-only subtitles for the Russian soundtrack, but because some thought has obviously gone into where the subtitles are placed and what they look like.
All the same, the missing subtitles on disc 1 are a rather odd fault. Having tried more than one copy, and on more than one player, it’s clearly not a fault with my DVD drive, or with the one particular disc. Very strange.
But the film is good, anyway.