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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1913 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Do you normally watch movies in one sitting? I'm not really into cinema overall, but I watched The Northman the other day and it took me several sittings even though I liked it, especially the last third or so. Today I started watching Princess Mononoke and I decided to do something else half-way through and finish it tomorrow, even though it's not like I ran out of free time or anything like that. Can't imagine paying for watching either movie in a theater only to get robbed of my Rewind and Pause buttons. I think I'm fairly normal psychologically. I guess it's just a zoomer thing

OK, I'm going to be a boomer about this one - needing a break, needing captions, needing to pause and rewind, these are all signs that your attention span is broken. Rather than avoiding the discomfort of having to pay attention for two consecutive hours without getting to roll something back, you should lean into it, embrace the discomfort, and see the ability to just be present as a new power to develop.

What’s wrong with captions?

They take the viewer's eyes off of the actual visual content of a scene and diminish the need to listen closely to dialogue that is intended to be listened to closely. Try it out with a scene where the actors are speaking in hushed tones - if you turn on captions, do you tend to just read them without changing the way you're listening? If you turn off captions, do you tend to tune your listening to the sort of secretive tones that you would in real life? Different types of immersion impact the experience of content in a meaningful way.

I'm not saying everything needs to be engaged with this way. If I'm flying, the audio quality is going to suck anyway, the visual content is on an iPad, and I just want some entertainment to kill a couple hours, so I'm going to turn captions on. Nonetheless, I think it's a bad habit to get into more generally and feeds into the inclination to divert attention to multiple things instead of just paying attention to one thing.

If you turn off captions, do you tend to tune your listening to the sort of secretive tones that you would in real life?

No, I just end up not understanding what they’re saying and missing key plot points, replacing my immersion with confusion.

Sorry, it's not my problem that modern movie-makers increasingly have a skill issue about making their movies intelligible. There's also a problem with viewing foreign media - I mentioned Princess Mononoke and I surely ain't watching that with original voice track alone, and dubs are generally bad idea or simply low quality.

Though I acknowledge the problems you raise and will say: let the movie prove itself that it deserves a second viewing so I could appreciate it from a new angle using my memory instead of subtitles.

Sorry, it's not my problem that modern movie-makers increasingly have a skill issue about making their movies intelligible.

Love this video, thanks for linking it.

I don't think this is inconsistent with what I wrote though - if you're somewhere that the audio is literally unintelligible (for any reason), captions are the obvious solution. Personally, I would rather try it out as intended by the creator rather than immediately going to the written form. Perhaps Nolan's choices are so extreme that this pretty much means you need to be in a top-end theater - sure, fair enough.

Yeah I'm with you on this - I pretty much have to have subtitles these days because my hearing is shot, but I think it's undeniable that I am missing part of the experience. That said, I don't know if it's just growing up watching a lot of stuff with subtitles (when I first moved to Australia as a kid we lived in a semi-rural area and the only channels we could get were the ABC and SBS, and SBS primarily played foreign language content) but they don't take me out of the film or show at all. I know they are intellectually, they must be, but I don't feel any detraction.

Actually, thinking about it, it's probably more accurate to say that they are less detrimental to my experience than the feeling of frustration and confusion I get when I can't hear half the script.

I don't know. I don't feel more immersed in Swedish or English language content that I consume effortlessly without subtitles than content in other languages where I have to use subtitles. Maybe it's just a skill issue on the part of people unused to subtitles? Perhaps it depends on how fast one reads? If you can read a sentence at a glance then you're not really "looking away" for any appreciable amount of time.

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