Wholphin

Most recent Netflix rental: Wholphin, Iss. 4. What is Wholphin, you say?

"Wholphin is a new quarterly DVD magazine from McSweeney’s, lovingly encoded with unique and ponderable films designed to make you feel the way we felt when we learned that dolphins and whales sometimes, you know, do it."

I particularly liked "Heavy Metal, Jr.," a documentary about a Scottish metal band called Hatred, whose members are all 10 years old, and a Russian imitation of Married with Children, translated by several different people to varying degrees of accuracy.

The best moments of "Heavy Metal, Jr." come when the one kid's mom prints back patches for their denim jackets, but accidentally misspells the band's name as "Hatrid," and when they know they want a song to have Satan in the title, but can't decide what comes next, then an epiphany: Satan Rock. Or should it be Satan Rocks? If you want to know more, you'll have to watch the film.

The Russian sitcom, translated as "Happy Together," is pretty ridiculous, but the translations get progressively funnier. In a particularly good translation, the husband and wife are both revolutionaries, but he's a pacifist and she's for armed revolt. Hilarity ensues. In an even better translation, the translator begins with some amazing innuendo, makes up hilarious new lyrics to the theme song (which I can't remember, but really, they're very funny), then gives up entirely and starts free-associating for the rest of the episode. She tells an anecdote about her father taking a mime class and being "invisible-lassoed" into going with him, and that was a funny joke. Then she talks a lot about people she knows having kids, which leads to the best line in any of the translations: "If I ever catch pregnant..." Yup.