Talk:The Debt (2007 film)

Separating cast into two columns

{{helpme}} I am trying to separate the cast list in this article into two columns but (as you can see in the article) the columns will not begin until below the infobox, which is creating a large blank space in the article (defeating the purpose of two columns, which was to condense the article). Is there a way of reformatting the columns so that the blank space does not appear, and the info is "lifted" to the line below the sub-section heading? NearTheZoo (talk) 17:55, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Hello, I fixed the issue. :) I used Template:Div col. --Obsidi♠n^Soul 18:50, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Great! And now I've learned from the way you fixed it. Thanks very much. NearTheZoo (talk) 18:53, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Synopsis removed

   I have removed entirely the following:

==Synopsis== Three former Mossad agents are famous for the 1965 death of Nazi war criminal Max Rainer, "The Surgeon of Birkenau," who (according to the official story) committed suicide after being captured by them. However, 35 years later, a local paper in a small European town publishes an article that the criminal is alive, willing to admit his crimes.

When the agents, now in their late 60s, learn this news, they realize it is possible that it is true, because only they remember how their prisoner managed to escape, and how they invented the story of his death. With their reputation on the line, they decide to complete their old assignment, this time by finally killing Rainer. Rachel Brener (played by Gila Almagor, and Neta Garty in flashbacks), now a beloved Israeli writer who became famous for her book on the supposed 1965 capture and death of Rainer, is chosen to carry out the assassination if the story that Rainer is alive turns out to be true. The question is whether that story is true, and if so, will the mission succeed this second time around?<ref name="plot">IMDB Plot Summary, accessed February 19, 2011.</ref>

1. The passage's only ref is a single-contributor synopsis at IMDb, asserting as the main char's name "Brener" (in contrast to the twice repeated "Berner" in the presumably more reliable main IMDb entry for the film), stating no source for its information, and clearly written by someone lacking the facility in English to express factual information except with so much ambiguity that the facts in question cannot be extracted. For example, we are told

   ... Rachel is the one to carry out the mission. Rachel today is a well-known beloved writer publishing her new book. She owes that job to her country, friends but especially herself.

   For native speakers, "She owes that job to" describes the circumstances that led to her holding a steady salaried or hourly position, but not a career as an author -- and in any event, if her opportunity to write her new book is the result of her country and friends, in what sense is it especially something she accomplished for herself? Or does our colleague mean that she has an obligation to perform the 2nd assassination mission, and if so, how could that be especially as an obligation to herself?

2. One clearly expressed fact in the removed passage is the scene of the war crimes, "Birkenau", reflecting what is now a week-old correction from the 6-month-old spelling "Berkenau" left by the originating editor. That spelling reflected the same editor's change of heart, 8 hours along (when no one else had contributed more than formatting changes). It was summarized "(→Synopsis: small correction and wikilink)", even tho it changed "Treblinca" to "[[Auschwitz concentration camp|Berkenau]]" -- respectively, a historical camp NE of Warsaw, near the present Lithuanian and Belarus borders, and a historical camp SW of Warsaw, near the Czech and Slovakian borders: a difference of about 250 miles. This edit also had the effect of impeaching the IMDb synopsis, which they continued to vouch for, in what is still the only ref in the entire section. (One speculates that actually the '07 and '11 films, targeted at different audiences, are premised on two different camps, as is not uncommon for remakes -- even when the plot is based on a quite specific historical event, which does not seem to be the case here -- and that our editor simply mistook at least one fictional account, mentioning a historical location, for fact and construed the accurate reports of two settings as one movie's accurate report of a historical fact and one mistaken report of what the other movie stated.)

   A verifiably accurate synopsis (for each film) would be desirable, but guesses like what i've removed are far worse than nothing.
--Jerzy•t 09:06, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

   I now (see #Mining an English-subtitled video of the 2007 film section below) endorse the spelling "Brener" as at least the subtitled version's spelling for her surname, having seen that it is in at least its English version of the opening titles.
   In case there's more to relate than that, i'll have that on my checklist for my next viewing. I wouldn't rule out "Brenner" or "Berner" in a German subtitled version, and the family of the imagined character (or a real Israeli Brener known to the playwright) may have spelled it one of those two ways in Weimar Germany, or in German- or Yiddish-speaking communities elsewhere in pre-war central Europe. And i admit that Rachel probably thot of it as spelled in Hebrew, where (i believe) a sparser (typically Semitic) repertory of vowels would probably make doubling of consonants a waste of effort, in contrast to the Germanic languages of English, German, and i assume Yiddish. (Banner/ vs.bane, or matte/matter and vs. mate/mater are typical of the dominant English orthographic pattern.)
--Jerzy•t 02:10 & 02:28, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

New synopsis

   A colleague has pretty well met my objections above, tho i've done a lot of rewriting -- including paraphrasing in place of direct quotes, as must be done wherever a paraphrase can (at least equally well) suit our purposes.
--Jerzy•t 03:53, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

   I'm still concerned about the name of the camp, and want to compare these and other sources.
   There's no problem with him being the surgeon of Birkenau in one film, and of Treblinka in the other; this is fiction, and one is for an Israeli audience and one American (or international), and someone might think that a different one would be optimum for recognition, associations, "mouth feel" to a Hebrew-, Yiddish-, or English-speaking viewer, etc.
   Given that, any discrepancy is likely to reflect accurate '07 reports of the Israeli film's premise, and some later mistaken impressions that the remake would stick (far more rigidly than is likely to matter) to the same scene of the (war-)crime. But on the other hand, who knows; it's not implausible that the first draft was written with an American audience in mind, and that the Hebrew script represents a side project that followed it, in response to advice that it would be easier to sell in Hollywood once the inevitable kinks had been worked out, and the appeal of the work to intellectuals demonstrated, with an Israeli version whose small-market promotional costs are probably negligible compared to a North American rollout. In that case the earliest camp name could have been the American one, and the camp in the Israeli version could be mistakenly stated as what was the original one intended for the American version, instead of the 2010 version's camp name being mistakenly attached to the Israeli version.
   Bottom line: It's not unlikely that we have too little info to figure out which account is accurate (and that we'll have to say "an extermination camp" in both articles' plot summaries). But it sure looks like there's non-trivial confusion, and we need to clearly ID as much evidence as we can find for 2007 and for 2010, in light of the confusion we've already seen.
   Of course, some of us will have seen the 2010 one by week's end, and gone into the theater listening and watching for both camp names, and unless there's a continuity error or he worked at both camps, we'll know about the actual American release. But maybe we can be sure we don't know before too many people rush to the article between then and now.
--Jerzy•t 03:53, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

   The onerous task of examining multiple sources on two confusable films has pushed me toward the belief that both villains were associated with Birkenau: the embassy's PR about the '07 film, though including "Treblinka", accompanies it with a YouTube film clip whose German dialogue around seconds 25-35 mentions Birkenau twice. (I think she says something that would translate close to "Were you ever in Birkenau, Doctor?" as she attacks him.) But i'm also discouraged about getting adequate verification, and i note that establishing the context of his crimes is valuable to more of our readers than is mentioning the exact sardonic title they identify him by.
--Jerzy•t 08:07, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

   Definitely Birkenau -- and the association between it and Auschwitz, much better understood to an Israeli (and perhaps Jewish-American) audience could have been a reason to change "Treblinka" to "Birkenau" in anticipation of the first version being Israeli.
   But my attempt to translate that incomplete sentence from the trailer was misleading. Having read (tho now forgotten) the English subtitle, what i now here hear is him saying that he will attend to her comfort during the procedure, as he does with all his patients, and her sarcastically (sardonically?) asking, as she launches her attack, if that will be as he did with his patients at Birkenau.
--Jerzy•t 02:10 & 02:28, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

Mining an English-subtitled video of the 2007 film

   I had the great pleasure this evening of watching that version of the film on the Sundance Channel, where it is currently offered free. If there is no one interested who has more suitable language skills than i (the ideal would be English, German, Hebrew, and something that is at least very close to Russian -- my vocabulary is small enuf that Ukrainian might include all the Russian words i thot i recognized in the scenes set in Ukraine), i will probably try to put together a synopsis that at least mentions every change of place or decade, based on the English subtitles and maybe my German translation where the subtitles miss a subtlety that i somehow fail to miss in German.
--Jerzy•t 01:12, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

What constitutes a reliable source about the content of a screen work?

   I note that the Dab Blowing Rock no longer asserts that the phrase can refer to fellatio (verified by the claim that some, but not all, versions of Airplane! (a) make it clear that the "autopilot" is nicknamed "Rock" and (b) have "blowing Rock" appearing in the dialogue for that scene. (Perhaps that claim is hidden in a deletion discussion.) So how many concurring accounts are needed before an editor's personal synopsis can be accepted, and how many disagreeing ones to reject it? I'm going see what WP:V currently has to say, and perhaps check if WikiSource or Wikimedia Commons would value such a synopsis.
--Jerzy•t 01:12, 4 September 2011 (UTC)