Yes, it is hard to understand what they are saying on TV sometimes. Actors not speaking clearly, too loud background music and I am Old.
My hearing aids don’t help either.
Nolan does have this problem he has to make things as chaotic as real world conditions
On tenet the subtitles help
Of course life doesnt have a ponderous side track
Meh. I long ago realized I should have a sound system that is at least decent to go with my TV — so I’ve had a full 7.2 sound system for over a decade — with only four main speakers, mind you, as I haven’t run wires to the middle or rear, so I have a woofer, a center channel, and a left and right channel… but it gets processed through a decent audio system, at least.
And when you’re using your phone, you should be using some kind of headphone… And probably you need something to override the inherent “ear protection” that phone systems apply towards headphone output.
Yes, headphone software on phones lower the max possible volume to the point of inaudibility. You should look into a “stereo boost app” that fixes this problem, or your headphones will get swamped out by the ambient sound level… in a public library. :-/
😉
Mind you, I’m not talking about blowing your ears out — but the sound limits ignore the fact that ambient sound levels can, very reasonably, be high enough that the audio is… inaudible.
This might be a myth, but they say, in the 1950s era, Marlon Brando got a role in a film version of, (Shakespeare’s) Julius Caesar.
And when Marlon said his lines, he sounded something like this:
Marlon’s speech didn’t sound like that, because of flaws in [technology]…that was just his acting + entertainment voice! 🙂
A very nice description of the problem.
The two biggest problems of the ones described are:
1) Most films get watched at home these days. Nobody wants the audio dynamic range, and loudness, of a first run movie theater at home. They want a competently managed reduced dynamic range. Unless you have an actual movie theater room in your home. I had that experience once as a guest.
2) Screenwriters never have and probably never will be as valued as other members of the filmmaking team. But I suspect directors in past more consistently valued the intelligibility of the dialog. If I were a director, I would never wrap shooting a scene until the actors spoke intelligibly.
Directors like Billy Wilder, Joel Coen, and Tarantino were members of a screenwriting team. Wilder and Tarantino started as writers. So they care deeply about the dialog.
Plus, some actors care and work diligently on their voices and voice style. I used to watch a lot of documentary TV and paid some attention to the narrators. Edward Herrmann had a clear and wonderful voice. Once Tom Berenger narrated one and it was quite substandard. I like his acting too. But remove the visuals and his voice isn’t that great.
Amazon Prime videos tend to have a low-volume problem. I’ve Googled the heck on this subject and haven’t found a solution. Sometimes the movies I’m streaming are only marginally audible.
IrishOtter49,
I’ve noticed the same with Disney+. When playing through the TV’s speakers I have to crank the volume up. However, when going through my audio system (Bose soundbar, sub, and surround) they work fine. I think Amazon and Disney are streaming in true HD5.1 as opposed to Netflix etc, so more noticeable with just TV speakers. A hypothesis anyway….
Richard Burton had a marvelous — and audible, comprehensible — speaking voice. In all of his movies he spoke so clearly, enunciated with such precision, you never had any doubt as to what he was saying. And the tone and timbre of his voice was mesmerizing.
physicsguy,
The problem is most acute when streaming on my PC. And my computer’s sound isn’t the culprit.
The section of the video that explained the segregating of the frequency space between music and dialog was very interesting. I’d not heard that before.
In the documentary “DePalma,” Brian De Palma discusses working with great composers such as Bernard Herrmann and Pino Donaggio. He said that you have to give the composer some room to move. They need stretches without dialog, especially if the film needs strong emotional content in a given scene. Don’t sprinkle dialog sporadically throughout a scene that needs a great bit of scoring.
Now they probably just smoosh it all together with digital editing. A step backwards.
There are all those different playback hardware options and codecs.
I spent some money on a nice music Hi-Fi system and was not inclined add a fancy movie audio system to the mix. So I don’t have familiarity with that. I’m relatively sure that the fancy audio receivers and probably some nice soundbars have dynamic range compressors as an option.
Once, and only once, I really wanted to analyze and dissect a film. I watched it several times on a cheap DVD player played through my Hi-Fi system, and later switched to playing it on desktop PC. I was surprised to hear faint sounds on the PC that I’d not heard from the DVD player. I went back to the DVD player and cranked the volume way up, and the sounds simply weren’t there.
This was an older movie from around the year 2000. I think it’s the difference between the basic MPEG, AC3 audio track with substantial digital compression and the enhanced DTS audio tracks also included on the disk.
Yeah, annoying issue. Nolan is one of my favorite directors, but he needs to come off his high horse on this one.
Also, Dolby Atmos doesn’t have 128 discrete channels, but it’s “object-based” in that sounds can be placed on 128 points within a 3D sphere (if a 7.2.4 system is used, I believe).
Most soundtracks with Atmos sound great on my moderate 5.1.2 system, but I still use subtitles watching most movies.
TR: It is a myth. Brando’s aticulation is flawless in Julius Caesar.
He was for years the punchline to a joke about “mumbling” because he was the breakthrough actor who got movie acting away from the “golden age” style of speaking — an artificial convention which divided audiences back then. Some could no longer accept it; others could accept nothing else.
There are two Julius Caesar movies from just before and just after that transition period, both of them good; the earlier with Brando and the later with Charlton Heston as Mark Antony. (And one has James Mason as Brutus, the other Jason Robards.) There are interesting differences in the two movies, but they’re both worth seeing.
The best Julius Caesar on film, however, is Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) (2012), the only “great” film of the three. Filmed in a high security prison, with a cast of prisoners, whose life stories mingle with the play’s blood and treachery, and with its pathos. There’s only a scant handful of Shakespearean films I’d call great: Cesare deve morire is at the top of the list.
Hello, and thank you.
I come to you from Gerard’s place and I’m very sorry for your loss. I, like most, never really knew him but we chatted sometimes back in the day, and he will be missed. His was a place to go and get away in the mid-day, a place that let me think about other things for 10 minutes (or an hour). His writings and sources pointed me to so many places I’d never known and I’m a better person I think because of that.
His writings can never be replaced but I hope somehow to find that piece I find that I really need. Would you mind if I hang around for a bit.
You know, It almost seems familiar.
Forget subtitles – just turn DOWN the noise!
They can very well blame tech; but, it is the director or whoever deciding that the soundtrack needs to be louder than the voicetrack.
I really don’t need to hear a piece of paper being crumpled up, blasting my ears doing so, to see that it is being crumpled up while I can barely hear what the actors are saying.
It is this blasting my ears with loud noise while barely hearing the dialog that is one reason why I haven’t been to the movies in years – and I mean years before the pandemic.
Whenever I’m watching a British movie or tv show, I have to use headphones (over the ear). The British accents and vernacular are just become gibberish without them.
I’ve abandoned my “home theater” for a simple 2.1 system using a compact class D amplifier.
I like surround sound, but my room doesn’t lend itself to it. In 1974, soon after college I bought a 4 channel Marantz system with large Advents. Needless to say there was never much 4 channel material to play through it. I would have better off spending the money on a pair of Magnaplars.
Often when I rewind to read the dialog I couldn’t decipher, neither could the closed captioning.
There are subtitles that are just plain unreadable…white lettering against a snow background, for instance.
TR @ 11AM,
On the set of “Guys and Dolls” Francis Albert Sinatra referred to Brando as “Mumbles” and was not happy when he was forced to help Brando with his singing so he could be understood on “Luck be a Lady,” especially because Sinatra had wanted the part of Masterson, rather than Detroit.
well he played a mobster in that, he played an ambassador, name escapes me in the ugly american, who was the very epitome of a brahmin
Heh, heh, heh!
No offense meant, Baseceras.
Me, personally, I think- Brando didn’t care if audiences liked his voice-delivery, or not.
I think Brando had a sense of humor, about his job, + about other actors.
He’d say things like:
“An actor’s a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening”,
and,
“I don’t care if I’m fat. I get paid the same.”.
Now if you [really] want to see someone who lets his diction slide around in his films, check out- Sean, [excuse me…Sirrrr] Sean Connery:
[Sir Sean Connery, in an Indiana Jones film, speaking to some Nazi-collaborating archaeologist]: “I didn’t think you’d join up with, the SCHHHHLIMMME of humanity!”
[Cue up the die-hard, Connery fans.] XD
IP:
Hi – all are welcome.
Hi Rufus T. Firefly,
Oof! Yeah. If Frank Sinatra [desperately] wanted be Sky Masterson, it must of been rough for him, to be told by the directors, some message like:
Yeah, we don’t think you’re right for the part…we’re going to use BRANDO, instead.
Oh by the way, since you sing MUCH, much better than him, can you now help him do his singing parts???
[Ow. Hee, hee, hee!]
LSA90:
Welcome! Someone told me that Derbyshire had mentioned me, but do you have a link to it? Thanks.
Sinatra would not have worked as Sky Masterson, who has to be very handsome and sexually magnetic. Sinatra was many things, but he wasn’t that kind of leading man. Unfortunately, he was also a terrible Nathan Detroit, IMHO. And Brando was kind of a dud as Sky. See this.
To me the problem is that so many directors and producers have leaned toward using noise as a simple shock & attention tool. Geez, try listening to a suspense film sometime. The technique has bled over into every idiom now. Big, loud noises, big crescendo music, slamming doors, explosions, gunshots, all designed like Haydn’s surprise symphony, to shock the viewer into paying attention to an otherwise cut-rate film with boring dialog and shabby production values. Then on top of this, the noise levels are modulated to a much wider range of volumes. We have a decent surround sound system, nothing fancy, a dozen years old, but when the wife watches a show that is geared this way, she’ll have to turn the volume up to hear the dialog, and then the glass in my office door will rattle when the ‘surprises’ hit the story line. It’s awful. Also, I think there may be different sound tracks on versions of the same film, to utilize the full range of well-appointed theaters – and sometimes these play poorly on lesser systems.
There is a solution to all these problems which will not appeal to those here with various sound systems. Don’t stream videos, and don’t watch.
The whole closed caption thing was a godsend in our household. My dad was partially deaf, and I have a bit of hyperacusis. We could never find a happy medium. Until closed captions came along. Now I am married to someone partially deaf. My hyperacusis has become not nearly as problematic — as I have aged, some of my hearing is going. But closed captioning is still a god send. Even when I was living alone, I always had closed captioning on because the tv was usually too painful to hear.
Neo — I agree with you about Sinatra and Brando. Brando was woefully miscast in that movie. Robert Alda was Sky Masterson on Broadway, and I’ll bet he was great.
Sinatra wasn’t really a Nathan Detroit sort of actor, but he wasn’t as painful to watch as Brando was. Sam Levene played Nathan Detroit on Broadway. While I know I have seen him in films, I can’t picture him well enough to imagine him in the role.
File under The Slippery Slope of Gay Marriage and The Destruction of Traditional Culture.
A child had been enrolled in the Christian school by her mother.
“Williams (her father) said he and Ortega went to Heart Cry in late January to introduce themselves and learn more about the school since they weren't involved in the enrollment process. That's when they learned that "homosexuality is not welcomed and not allowed" in the school, Williams said.
Pastor Billy VanCamp took them to a conference room "away from all the children" and started questioning the relationship between Williams and Ortega, Ortega said. The pastor told Ortega he wasn't allowed on campus because he is a gay man without any blood relation to Williams' daughter, he said.
"I said, 'I'm still her stepdad, and as long as she is in my life and as long as she is attending the school, I'm going to be a part of it,'" Ortega said. "And he said, 'Well, you are not welcome here.' So, I was like, 'Are you threatening me?' And he said, 'Try me.' Clearly, he is threatening me, and, at that point, I felt very unsafe."
The story makes a centerpiece of Arizona’s school voucher program, then includes this: “It’s unclear whether Williams’ daughter uses a voucher to pay tuition at Heart Cry…”
correction donovan played by the great british actor, julian glover, plays all too recognizable industrialist type, that toadied to the nazis like teagle of standard oil, or sosthenes behn of itt,
… but when the wife watches a show that is geared this way, she’ll have to turn the volume up to hear the dialog, and then the glass in my office door will rattle when the ‘surprises’ hit the story line. It’s awful. — Aggie
So true. It’s not just the big dynamic range, but also this startle factor nonsense. Why is the dialog or soundtrack so quiet at this point in the film I’m watching? Oh, because they are going to startle me with some incredibly loud sound in a minute.
_______
Sinatra would not have worked as Sky Masterson, who has to be very handsome and sexually magnetic. Sinatra was many things, but he wasn’t that kind of leading man.
It’s not at all a romantic lead role, but Sinatra and Janet Leigh’s romantic scenes in The Manchurian Candidate are really different and interesting to me. Sinatra as Major Marco is of course very strained and strung-out. But Leigh’s character Eugenie is quite unusual too, maybe as a believable complement to Major Marco. All the major roles are well cast and acted in that film.
The YouTube reminded me of a problem I find with current video — too dark. So dark, at times the action is near-unintelligible.
IMO it’s a result of current tech. With digital they can film in dim light without lighting, so they do. It’s cheaper and can be called “edgy,” so they do.
My language learning quest led me to Steve Kaufmann, a polyglot who has been studying languages for fifty years, learned 20 languages with varying degrees of fluency, and has started Linq, an online language learning site based on his personal techniques.
____________________________________
The best way to learn a language is to massively ingest it, by listening and reading. Listening and reading are so powerful. If you can read the books, you know the language. To get to know a language takes a lot of time and a lot of interacting with it – and a lot of that time has to be on your own. I think it’s better to work on comprehension and vocabulary without pressure to reproduce the language (by speaking).
Obviously Kaufmann is right up my alley. I wouldn’t claim his approach is the best, but it has worked for him. Since my focus too is on listening and reading without sweating the grammar, I’ll take his work as validation of what I’m doing.
Plus the overarching principle Kaufmann advocates is to do what you enjoy doing as you learn a language.
That has always been obvious to me. Once I got past readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic in school, I mostly learned by getting super-motivated then massively immersing myself in a subject without waiting for a teacher or textbook to chop it up into bite-size chunks and serve it up in some particular order.
Or, 4, don’t spend a dime on the crappy movies. I hated Dunkirk, and I’m its natural audience.
Lee Also:
If you followed the link I gave in this comment of mine, you’d see my discussion of Sinatra and Levene doing the song “Sue Me,” with illustrative videos. Here’s the link again. Levene was great.
Has Google Translate developed an application to understand what Pete Davidson is saying?
IrishOtter: Richard Burton had a marvelous — and audible, comprehensible — speaking voice. In all of his movies he spoke so clearly, enunciated with such precision, you never had any doubt as to what he was saying. And the tone and timbre of his voice was mesmerizing.
Well, that’s not really fair. Burton is certainly the best actor of his time period (50s-70s) and one of the best actors ever, beyond a doubt.
He and Taylor are fantastic in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” — mind you, it’s a very very mean-spirited and unpleasant movie, but it is worth seeing just for the performance. You may never ever want to watch it again, but you should see it just for that.
One of his other tour-de-forces is “Equus”. The pain in his voice as he talks of his envy of the problem child is amazing.
The only other two people who come to mind as a possible equal are Dustin Hoffman and Gary Oldman. And Oldman is the only one who might be better (hard to tell, Oldman might be “better” due to the better writing and film techniques during his career)
}}} Has Google Translate developed an application to understand what Pete Davidson is saying?
I’m waiting for Google Translate to come up with an app that can actually translate what woke idiots are thinking they are saying, as opposed to what they are saying.
P.S., Think what you might about Paul Joseph Watson, but this piece about ChatGPT is spot on about a future issue with “AI” (which translation is a partial function of):
See if you can find a copy of the film/video made of Burton’s stage performance of Hamlet. Incredible.
I thought Dunkirk was great. Very moving, inspirational — and innovative.
huxley on February 6, 2023 at 8:27 pm said:
“The YouTube reminded me of a problem I find with current video — too dark. So dark, at times the action is near-unintelligible.”
Ira on February 6, 2023 at 3:16 pm said:
“Often when I rewind to read the dialog I couldn’t decipher, neither could the closed captioning.”
David Foster on February 6, 2023 at 3:37 pm said:
“There are subtitles that are just plain unreadable…white lettering against a snow background, for instance.”
So what happens when you can’t hear the actors, AND can’t see the actors, AND the subtitles are also unintelligible?
Which has been known to happen, I assure you.
Kate on February 6, 2023 at 5:29 pm said:
“There is a solution to all these problems which will not appeal to those here with various sound systems. Don’t stream videos, and don’t watch.”
Read a book.
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The Derb brought me here. Like your website. I’ll be back
This is in re: to Mona Charen.
They booed her off the stage at CPAC.
Your pretty out of it when even the conventional conservatives like CPAC can’t stomach you anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2GVQINHfVM
Yes, it is hard to understand what they are saying on TV sometimes. Actors not speaking clearly, too loud background music and I am Old.
My hearing aids don’t help either.
Nolan does have this problem he has to make things as chaotic as real world conditions
On tenet the subtitles help
Of course life doesnt have a ponderous side track
Meh. I long ago realized I should have a sound system that is at least decent to go with my TV — so I’ve had a full 7.2 sound system for over a decade — with only four main speakers, mind you, as I haven’t run wires to the middle or rear, so I have a woofer, a center channel, and a left and right channel… but it gets processed through a decent audio system, at least.
And when you’re using your phone, you should be using some kind of headphone… And probably you need something to override the inherent “ear protection” that phone systems apply towards headphone output.
Yes, headphone software on phones lower the max possible volume to the point of inaudibility. You should look into a “stereo boost app” that fixes this problem, or your headphones will get swamped out by the ambient sound level… in a public library. :-/
😉
Examples:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.soulapps.superloud.volume.booster.sound.speaker&gl=US
(This above is the one I use)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=volume.super.loud.sound.booster&gl=US
Mind you, I’m not talking about blowing your ears out — but the sound limits ignore the fact that ambient sound levels can, very reasonably, be high enough that the audio is… inaudible.
This might be a myth, but they say, in the 1950s era, Marlon Brando got a role in a film version of, (Shakespeare’s) Julius Caesar.
And when Marlon said his lines, he sounded something like this:
“Friends, Romans, Countrymen…Vrkvkkhvkvhmmfffffjmmmmmmmff!”
More info about my above comment:
Marlon’s speech didn’t sound like that, because of flaws in [technology]…that was just his acting + entertainment voice! 🙂
A very nice description of the problem.
The two biggest problems of the ones described are:
1) Most films get watched at home these days. Nobody wants the audio dynamic range, and loudness, of a first run movie theater at home. They want a competently managed reduced dynamic range. Unless you have an actual movie theater room in your home. I had that experience once as a guest.
2) Screenwriters never have and probably never will be as valued as other members of the filmmaking team. But I suspect directors in past more consistently valued the intelligibility of the dialog. If I were a director, I would never wrap shooting a scene until the actors spoke intelligibly.
Directors like Billy Wilder, Joel Coen, and Tarantino were members of a screenwriting team. Wilder and Tarantino started as writers. So they care deeply about the dialog.
Plus, some actors care and work diligently on their voices and voice style. I used to watch a lot of documentary TV and paid some attention to the narrators. Edward Herrmann had a clear and wonderful voice. Once Tom Berenger narrated one and it was quite substandard. I like his acting too. But remove the visuals and his voice isn’t that great.
Amazon Prime videos tend to have a low-volume problem. I’ve Googled the heck on this subject and haven’t found a solution. Sometimes the movies I’m streaming are only marginally audible.
IrishOtter49,
I’ve noticed the same with Disney+. When playing through the TV’s speakers I have to crank the volume up. However, when going through my audio system (Bose soundbar, sub, and surround) they work fine. I think Amazon and Disney are streaming in true HD5.1 as opposed to Netflix etc, so more noticeable with just TV speakers. A hypothesis anyway….
Richard Burton had a marvelous — and audible, comprehensible — speaking voice. In all of his movies he spoke so clearly, enunciated with such precision, you never had any doubt as to what he was saying. And the tone and timbre of his voice was mesmerizing.
physicsguy,
The problem is most acute when streaming on my PC. And my computer’s sound isn’t the culprit.
The section of the video that explained the segregating of the frequency space between music and dialog was very interesting. I’d not heard that before.
In the documentary “DePalma,” Brian De Palma discusses working with great composers such as Bernard Herrmann and Pino Donaggio. He said that you have to give the composer some room to move. They need stretches without dialog, especially if the film needs strong emotional content in a given scene. Don’t sprinkle dialog sporadically throughout a scene that needs a great bit of scoring.
Now they probably just smoosh it all together with digital editing. A step backwards.
There are all those different playback hardware options and codecs.
I spent some money on a nice music Hi-Fi system and was not inclined add a fancy movie audio system to the mix. So I don’t have familiarity with that. I’m relatively sure that the fancy audio receivers and probably some nice soundbars have dynamic range compressors as an option.
Once, and only once, I really wanted to analyze and dissect a film. I watched it several times on a cheap DVD player played through my Hi-Fi system, and later switched to playing it on desktop PC. I was surprised to hear faint sounds on the PC that I’d not heard from the DVD player. I went back to the DVD player and cranked the volume way up, and the sounds simply weren’t there.
This was an older movie from around the year 2000. I think it’s the difference between the basic MPEG, AC3 audio track with substantial digital compression and the enhanced DTS audio tracks also included on the disk.
Yeah, annoying issue. Nolan is one of my favorite directors, but he needs to come off his high horse on this one.
Also, Dolby Atmos doesn’t have 128 discrete channels, but it’s “object-based” in that sounds can be placed on 128 points within a 3D sphere (if a 7.2.4 system is used, I believe).
Most soundtracks with Atmos sound great on my moderate 5.1.2 system, but I still use subtitles watching most movies.
TR: It is a myth. Brando’s aticulation is flawless in Julius Caesar.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=101sKhH-lMQ
He was for years the punchline to a joke about “mumbling” because he was the breakthrough actor who got movie acting away from the “golden age” style of speaking — an artificial convention which divided audiences back then. Some could no longer accept it; others could accept nothing else.
There are two Julius Caesar movies from just before and just after that transition period, both of them good; the earlier with Brando and the later with Charlton Heston as Mark Antony. (And one has James Mason as Brutus, the other Jason Robards.) There are interesting differences in the two movies, but they’re both worth seeing.
The best Julius Caesar on film, however, is Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) (2012), the only “great” film of the three. Filmed in a high security prison, with a cast of prisoners, whose life stories mingle with the play’s blood and treachery, and with its pathos. There’s only a scant handful of Shakespearean films I’d call great: Cesare deve morire is at the top of the list.
Hello, and thank you.
I come to you from Gerard’s place and I’m very sorry for your loss. I, like most, never really knew him but we chatted sometimes back in the day, and he will be missed. His was a place to go and get away in the mid-day, a place that let me think about other things for 10 minutes (or an hour). His writings and sources pointed me to so many places I’d never known and I’m a better person I think because of that.
His writings can never be replaced but I hope somehow to find that piece I find that I really need. Would you mind if I hang around for a bit.
You know, It almost seems familiar.
Forget subtitles – just turn DOWN the noise!
They can very well blame tech; but, it is the director or whoever deciding that the soundtrack needs to be louder than the voicetrack.
I really don’t need to hear a piece of paper being crumpled up, blasting my ears doing so, to see that it is being crumpled up while I can barely hear what the actors are saying.
It is this blasting my ears with loud noise while barely hearing the dialog that is one reason why I haven’t been to the movies in years – and I mean years before the pandemic.
Whenever I’m watching a British movie or tv show, I have to use headphones (over the ear). The British accents and vernacular are just become gibberish without them.
I’ve abandoned my “home theater” for a simple 2.1 system using a compact class D amplifier.
I like surround sound, but my room doesn’t lend itself to it. In 1974, soon after college I bought a 4 channel Marantz system with large Advents. Needless to say there was never much 4 channel material to play through it. I would have better off spending the money on a pair of Magnaplars.
Often when I rewind to read the dialog I couldn’t decipher, neither could the closed captioning.
There are subtitles that are just plain unreadable…white lettering against a snow background, for instance.
TR @ 11AM,
On the set of “Guys and Dolls” Francis Albert Sinatra referred to Brando as “Mumbles” and was not happy when he was forced to help Brando with his singing so he could be understood on “Luck be a Lady,” especially because Sinatra had wanted the part of Masterson, rather than Detroit.
well he played a mobster in that, he played an ambassador, name escapes me in the ugly american, who was the very epitome of a brahmin
Heh, heh, heh!
No offense meant, Baseceras.
Me, personally, I think- Brando didn’t care if audiences liked his voice-delivery, or not.
I think Brando had a sense of humor, about his job, + about other actors.
He’d say things like:
“An actor’s a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening”,
and,
“I don’t care if I’m fat. I get paid the same.”.
Now if you [really] want to see someone who lets his diction slide around in his films, check out- Sean, [excuse me…Sirrrr] Sean Connery:
[Sir Sean Connery, in an Indiana Jones film, speaking to some Nazi-collaborating archaeologist]: “I didn’t think you’d join up with, the SCHHHHLIMMME of humanity!”
[Cue up the die-hard, Connery fans.] XD
IP:
Hi – all are welcome.
Hi Rufus T. Firefly,
Oof! Yeah. If Frank Sinatra [desperately] wanted be Sky Masterson, it must of been rough for him, to be told by the directors, some message like:
Yeah, we don’t think you’re right for the part…we’re going to use BRANDO, instead.
Oh by the way, since you sing MUCH, much better than him, can you now help him do his singing parts???
[Ow. Hee, hee, hee!]
LSA90:
Welcome! Someone told me that Derbyshire had mentioned me, but do you have a link to it? Thanks.
Sinatra would not have worked as Sky Masterson, who has to be very handsome and sexually magnetic. Sinatra was many things, but he wasn’t that kind of leading man. Unfortunately, he was also a terrible Nathan Detroit, IMHO. And Brando was kind of a dud as Sky. See this.
To me the problem is that so many directors and producers have leaned toward using noise as a simple shock & attention tool. Geez, try listening to a suspense film sometime. The technique has bled over into every idiom now. Big, loud noises, big crescendo music, slamming doors, explosions, gunshots, all designed like Haydn’s surprise symphony, to shock the viewer into paying attention to an otherwise cut-rate film with boring dialog and shabby production values. Then on top of this, the noise levels are modulated to a much wider range of volumes. We have a decent surround sound system, nothing fancy, a dozen years old, but when the wife watches a show that is geared this way, she’ll have to turn the volume up to hear the dialog, and then the glass in my office door will rattle when the ‘surprises’ hit the story line. It’s awful. Also, I think there may be different sound tracks on versions of the same film, to utilize the full range of well-appointed theaters – and sometimes these play poorly on lesser systems.
There is a solution to all these problems which will not appeal to those here with various sound systems. Don’t stream videos, and don’t watch.
The whole closed caption thing was a godsend in our household. My dad was partially deaf, and I have a bit of hyperacusis. We could never find a happy medium. Until closed captions came along. Now I am married to someone partially deaf. My hyperacusis has become not nearly as problematic — as I have aged, some of my hearing is going. But closed captioning is still a god send. Even when I was living alone, I always had closed captioning on because the tv was usually too painful to hear.
Neo — I agree with you about Sinatra and Brando. Brando was woefully miscast in that movie. Robert Alda was Sky Masterson on Broadway, and I’ll bet he was great.
Sinatra wasn’t really a Nathan Detroit sort of actor, but he wasn’t as painful to watch as Brando was. Sam Levene played Nathan Detroit on Broadway. While I know I have seen him in films, I can’t picture him well enough to imagine him in the role.
File under The Slippery Slope of Gay Marriage and The Destruction of Traditional Culture.
A child had been enrolled in the Christian school by her mother.
“Williams (her father) said he and Ortega went to Heart Cry in late January to introduce themselves and learn more about the school since they weren't involved in the enrollment process. That's when they learned that "homosexuality is not welcomed and not allowed" in the school, Williams said.
Pastor Billy VanCamp took them to a conference room "away from all the children" and started questioning the relationship between Williams and Ortega, Ortega said. The pastor told Ortega he wasn't allowed on campus because he is a gay man without any blood relation to Williams' daughter, he said.
"I said, 'I'm still her stepdad, and as long as she is in my life and as long as she is attending the school, I'm going to be a part of it,'" Ortega said. "And he said, 'Well, you are not welcome here.' So, I was like, 'Are you threatening me?' And he said, 'Try me.' Clearly, he is threatening me, and, at that point, I felt very unsafe."
The story makes a centerpiece of Arizona’s school voucher program, then includes this: “It’s unclear whether Williams’ daughter uses a voucher to pay tuition at Heart Cry…”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/02/06/gay-fathers-confronted-at-arizona-religious-school/11198267002/
correction donovan played by the great british actor, julian glover, plays all too recognizable industrialist type, that toadied to the nazis like teagle of standard oil, or sosthenes behn of itt,
… but when the wife watches a show that is geared this way, she’ll have to turn the volume up to hear the dialog, and then the glass in my office door will rattle when the ‘surprises’ hit the story line. It’s awful. — Aggie
So true. It’s not just the big dynamic range, but also this startle factor nonsense. Why is the dialog or soundtrack so quiet at this point in the film I’m watching? Oh, because they are going to startle me with some incredibly loud sound in a minute.
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Sinatra would not have worked as Sky Masterson, who has to be very handsome and sexually magnetic. Sinatra was many things, but he wasn’t that kind of leading man.
It’s not at all a romantic lead role, but Sinatra and Janet Leigh’s romantic scenes in The Manchurian Candidate are really different and interesting to me. Sinatra as Major Marco is of course very strained and strung-out. But Leigh’s character Eugenie is quite unusual too, maybe as a believable complement to Major Marco. All the major roles are well cast and acted in that film.
https://m.imdb.com/video/vi1402799641/?ref_=tt_vi_i_1
The YouTube reminded me of a problem I find with current video — too dark. So dark, at times the action is near-unintelligible.
IMO it’s a result of current tech. With digital they can film in dim light without lighting, so they do. It’s cheaper and can be called “edgy,” so they do.
My language learning quest led me to Steve Kaufmann, a polyglot who has been studying languages for fifty years, learned 20 languages with varying degrees of fluency, and has started Linq, an online language learning site based on his personal techniques.
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The best way to learn a language is to massively ingest it, by listening and reading. Listening and reading are so powerful. If you can read the books, you know the language. To get to know a language takes a lot of time and a lot of interacting with it – and a lot of that time has to be on your own. I think it’s better to work on comprehension and vocabulary without pressure to reproduce the language (by speaking).
—Steve Kaufmann
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Kaufmann%5D
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Obviously Kaufmann is right up my alley. I wouldn’t claim his approach is the best, but it has worked for him. Since my focus too is on listening and reading without sweating the grammar, I’ll take his work as validation of what I’m doing.
Plus the overarching principle Kaufmann advocates is to do what you enjoy doing as you learn a language.
That has always been obvious to me. Once I got past readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic in school, I mostly learned by getting super-motivated then massively immersing myself in a subject without waiting for a teacher or textbook to chop it up into bite-size chunks and serve it up in some particular order.
Or, 4, don’t spend a dime on the crappy movies. I hated Dunkirk, and I’m its natural audience.
Lee Also:
If you followed the link I gave in this comment of mine, you’d see my discussion of Sinatra and Levene doing the song “Sue Me,” with illustrative videos. Here’s the link again. Levene was great.
On a sad note, internationally renowned virologist, Dr Oveta Fuller, RIP.
Has Google Translate developed an application to understand what Pete Davidson is saying?
IrishOtter: Richard Burton had a marvelous — and audible, comprehensible — speaking voice. In all of his movies he spoke so clearly, enunciated with such precision, you never had any doubt as to what he was saying. And the tone and timbre of his voice was mesmerizing.
Well, that’s not really fair. Burton is certainly the best actor of his time period (50s-70s) and one of the best actors ever, beyond a doubt.
He and Taylor are fantastic in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” — mind you, it’s a very very mean-spirited and unpleasant movie, but it is worth seeing just for the performance. You may never ever want to watch it again, but you should see it just for that.
One of his other tour-de-forces is “Equus”. The pain in his voice as he talks of his envy of the problem child is amazing.
The only other two people who come to mind as a possible equal are Dustin Hoffman and Gary Oldman. And Oldman is the only one who might be better (hard to tell, Oldman might be “better” due to the better writing and film techniques during his career)
}}} Has Google Translate developed an application to understand what Pete Davidson is saying?
I’m waiting for Google Translate to come up with an app that can actually translate what woke idiots are thinking they are saying, as opposed to what they are saying.
P.S., Think what you might about Paul Joseph Watson, but this piece about ChatGPT is spot on about a future issue with “AI” (which translation is a partial function of):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWzprRWPI68
OBloodyHell,
Not a fan of Hoffman. But Oldham: yes indeed.
See if you can find a copy of the film/video made of Burton’s stage performance of Hamlet. Incredible.
I thought Dunkirk was great. Very moving, inspirational — and innovative.
huxley on February 6, 2023 at 8:27 pm said:
“The YouTube reminded me of a problem I find with current video — too dark. So dark, at times the action is near-unintelligible.”
Ira on February 6, 2023 at 3:16 pm said:
“Often when I rewind to read the dialog I couldn’t decipher, neither could the closed captioning.”
David Foster on February 6, 2023 at 3:37 pm said:
“There are subtitles that are just plain unreadable…white lettering against a snow background, for instance.”
So what happens when you can’t hear the actors, AND can’t see the actors, AND the subtitles are also unintelligible?
Which has been known to happen, I assure you.
Kate on February 6, 2023 at 5:29 pm said:
“There is a solution to all these problems which will not appeal to those here with various sound systems. Don’t stream videos, and don’t watch.”
Read a book.