Scenes where someone turns out to speak a particular language?
 

Looking for scenes where someone (I guess often the main character) (surprisingly) turns out to speak a particular language, and it is relevant to the plot.

Recently I watched this in a show (39:30):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuG6Rzgvcac&t=39m30s

In this scene, it's English with the surprise being Spanish.

Vaguely I remember more of those moments from movies (or shows), but they don't come to mind and I wasn't smart enough to find anything with the help of search engines.

Re: Scenes where someone turns out to speak a particular language?
 

Towards the beginning of John Wick, the mobster's son wants to buy his car. Wick replies in English that it's not for sale. The son then says in Russian, "Everything's got a price, bitch", not knowing that Wick understands the language. Wick replies, "Not this bitch."

The son's pride is hurt, and he decides to attack the owner and steal his car. The rest flows from there.

Re: Scenes where someone turns out to speak a particular language?
 

Re: Scenes where someone turns out to speak a particular language?
 

Two that come to mind is in the recent Magnificent 7 movie with Denzel Washington.
Red Harvest suddenly speaks English about 2/3 of the way through the movie.


And in Kung Fu Hustle... the whole movie is in Chinese with sub-titles... but when Donut is dying he says "What are you prepared to do?" in English, with no sub-titles and the other characters look confused and say "Donut, we don't understand you"

Re: Scenes where someone turns out to speak a particular language?
 

Theres a scene in The A Team where B.A and Murdoch are trying to get through airport security and Murdoch suddenly starts speaking the language of the passport officer. Another scene in Pacific Rim when Mako first meets Raleigh. I think the movie Rush Hour has a scene like that as well where Jackie Chan pretends to not speak English.

Very cool. It helps a lot to learn a living, real language. I recently found my best tutor. Before that, I tried many online services and offline courses and found that learning online is the best option for me. In fact, it is not so important for the average person to go deeper and learn the dialect of the language. But, of course, you need to learn languages. No matter how hard you try, training is the basis of everything.

Re: Scenes where someone turns out to speak a particular language?
 

Thanks, guys. I'll check out some of them.
Cratters, you polyglot, you.

Re: Scenes where someone turns out to speak a particular language?
 

The 13th Warrior. More of a cool beat/moment than really integral to the plot, but it's definitely part of it. Super good, super underrated film, too.

That sequence, where through a montage he learns their language, is one of my favorite examples of "show don't tell". And it also resolves the issue of two languages in a film and how to make the majority of the dialogue be English.

Great points, it's just good filmmaking/storytelling, and even has that sort of meta explanation for the language switch. So weird to watch that, love it, and then learn later it's thought of as one of the biggest mainstream flops of the last few decades. Go figure.

Well, it's budget was $160 million and it made $61 million worldwide, so it earned back less than half of its budget. It is, financially speaking, a total flop.

I have to say, I was a teenager when the film was released and I think that the marketing is a lot to blame. The trailers were confusing to me. Was this an action film? A dark historical piece? It was an age where I wanted to see everything, but this one didn't interest me.

Years later, when I did watch it, I was surprised by how smart it is. And at that point I had read Beowulf and could appreciate the references and the adaptation of the story.

I think that it had a "stupid-smart" problem. The film looked too mannered to appeal to the dumb fun crowd, and it looked too actiony to appeal to a more brainy crowd. Aside from Banderas, it didn't have much "star power" appeal. I rented it (for free from the video store where I worked) expecting to laugh at it, and was shocked to really like it.