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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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
____________________________________

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.

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.