American Hustle, one of the biggest films of the year, has been entertaining UK audiences for weeks now. With an impressive ten nominations it’s currently leading the Oscar race alongside Gravity and one nomination ahead of 12 Years A Slave. Thanks to its amazing all star cast, incredible Seventies style and Christian Bale’s truly awful comb over, the film has been described as one of the most entertaining and hilarious films of the year.
But hearing impaired Brits certainly aren’t laughing. In fact, due to the fact that no subtitled version of the film has been distributed, many people with hearing loss feel that they’ve been conned out of a valuable movie going experience.
Your Local Cinema, a website dedicated to showing where in the UK you can go to see the latest subtitled films, has brought to our attention the fact that one of the films with the highest demand is currently inaccessible for people with hearing impairments. They contact us to let us know that although “in the USA, people with hearing loss are currently enjoying the film ‘American Hustle’. The film contains a subtitle track and is currently showing with subtitles in hundreds of US cinemas. The UK version does NOT include a subtitle track. UK cinemas cannot show it with subtitles.”
It seems like an extraordinary oversight not to be providing a subtitled version of such a major release. It is generally the norm for most big box office movies to receive at least a small number of screenings with a subtitle track. Current releases like 12 Years A Slave, Inside Llewyn Davis and The Wolf Of Wall Street all have subtitled versions, yet American Hustle does not.
The fact that an American subtitle track exists makes things even more peculiar. One would assume that simply using this would suffice for UK audiences. Surely hearing impaired viewers would be able to put up with the tiny differences in the English and American languages in order to see the film. Wouldn’t the occasional ‘Zee’ where we would put an S or the lack of a U in words like colour (let’s call them what they are – spelling mistakes) be worth enduring in order to see Jennifer Lawrence aggressively dancing around the house in a pair of marigolds? There seems to be a simple solution here but, as far as we’re aware, there still aren’t any subtitled showings to speak of.
Your Local Cinema have started a campaign to try and persuade the American Hustle distributors to sort this problem out. They’re collecting comments from anyone who thinks that a subtitled version needs to be made available and then sending them on to the distributors. If you want to submit a comment then head to their website and do so. Then hopefully everyone will be able to see the film.
As we said, this is a really popular film which has been nominated for an incredible 10 Oscars, including best actor/supporting actor nominations Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Our personal feeling, having seen it, is that although the performances are fantastic, it’s not quite as good as all that (a lot of people have been agreeing – saying it’s good but not a ‘ten Oscar film’, whatever that means). However, despite finding that it doesn’t live up to the hype, we strongly believe everyone should be able to find that out for themselves. We believe that every film should be accessible for everybody, so we’re urging as many people as possible to contact Your Local Cinema!