*

In the three years I have been living in Japan thus far, I have made solid progress learning the language.  I can with some confidence sit through a japanese feature film without my eyes glazing over, confident I have at least caught the gross outlines of a plot.

But subtitles are still preferable, and I usually just wait for a DVD release.

Conversely, for the japanese person sitting next to me watching a DVD, it is no great excitement to watch a brand new hollywood movie, because there is anywhere from a 3 month to two year gap between when most movies are released in the US and when they hit Japanese theatrical, let alone DVD release.

This means I usually end up seeing things very late, or I scour the internet looking for fan-generated subtitles (either english ones for new japanese releases, or japanese ones for new english-language releases).

Either way, the DVD format is lacking, and sure enough I can’t even contemplate watching say, a spanish language release with a japanese friend.

That was mildly unpleasant, making me watch Motorcycle Diaries twice, and so on.

But Babel, sigh.

I really really wanted to see Babel in a proper theatre, and here is a film that is reportedly in six languages.  I don’t know if that is accurate, but there was no way I could just watch it in a japanese cinema.  I couldn’t just watch it on DVD either, because I wanted to enjoy not alone, but together.

I love the irony of a film titled “Babel” being unviewable together by two people with different native tongues.

So I redoubled my efforts to find a way to watch a film with both Japanese and English subtitles at the same time.
I located a fan-generated Japanese subtitle stream.

I got ahold of the US release, which has english subtitles.

I found not a single program for the Mac that supports this concept.

However, to my surprise, in Bootcamp under windows XP, The KMPlayer, a free video player, not only functions perfectly fine (even running IN PARALLELS!) but it allows the playback of multiple subtitle streams, regardless of whether those streams are part of the original feature or are sourced from a separate subtitle file.

We sat through the film together, and while I won’t make any plot spoilers, it was well worth sharing the experience for once.