Emlékmás

Hello, I'm not Ben, I'm Michael. I'm Ben's guest poster this week, while he's off somewhere. I'm not sure where, apparently I didn't care enough to ask or possibly remember; I don't recall. Speaking of which...

...I was watching Total Recall last week (or possibly the week before, or before that). Anyway, it seems to be on TV most days so it's not important. It always reminds me of a time when screens the size of a wall were just a dream and it was perfectly acceptable for the hero of the movie to use an innocent bystander as a human shield before throwing him down an escalator at his pursuers. Ah...better times.

I was enjoying it so much that I googled it – that’s a sure sign you like something. There were all the usual facts; It had the biggest budget ever at the time, Arnie was unable to appear for contractual reasons and is a stop-motion puppet throughout the film. All the usual stuff.

There was also, on Wikipedia, a list of the international names for the film. And in Hungarian it’s called Emlékmás -  which, brilliantly, translates as A Counterpart to Remembrance. Now I can’t get this name out of my head, because:

1. It’s a much better name than Total Recall. It’s so good that I think we should steal the word Emlékmás from the Hungarian language and Anglicise it. It could mean “That feeling you get at the end of a film where you have no idea if what you saw just happened or not”. i.e.”The ending of Donnie Darko was very Emlékmás”, or David Lynch eats Emlékmás for breakfast.
2. It makes me want to live in an alternate universe where the Hungarian government, in order to protect their cultural heritage, passed a law banning the dubbing or subtitling of American movies. In order to keep Hungarian values alive any popular American film would have to be remade, shot for shot, by Hungarian actors/directors etc. on a much lower budget.

Total_recall

Maybe it could star this guy. He’s made a wearable piece of art made from phone parts in order to celebrate the film. Imagine a scratchy black and white film starring him made in Hungarian following the exact plot of Total Recall. I want to see that film, it’d be totally Emlékmás.