But man do I hate having to "read" the movie. So then you can't take in the visual experience. This phenomenon is driving us crazy.
We rewatched Casablanca with undiminished pleasure the other night and I was struck by the fact that I could understand every word of dialogue. Whereas mumbling, murmuring, ultra-soft dialogue utterances, and nerve-racking very quiet/LOUD BLAST sound mixes seem standard for virtually every contemporary thing we watch now. Like loudness war music, it's insane.
The amazing thing is with music, the average joe actually likes compressed music (at least superficially)...so as much as I dislike it, I get why it's done. But unintelligible dialogue seems to be a near universal complaint - save directors and, perhaps, movie sound mixers.
I mentioned earlier that movies of the era of Casablanca starred many actors with stage experience, where it was necessary to be able to project their unamplified voices. So they made sure they spoke clearly. The blame for the use of the current unintelligible speech, in my opinion, can be laid squarely at the door of Brando. Also, the music used in those days was called "incidental music" as the volume was reduced when the actors were speaking. We've progressed since then through. "background music,"always there, to "foreground music," which can mask the dialogue, constantly in your face and sometimes ramped up as a pathetic attempt to make a pretty lame scene seem more dramatic. It always fails with me.
Sorry, but I don't think it has anything to do with mot learning how to project or...Brando. The current issue is due to conscious mixing decisions, IMO.
I have been using subtitles when viewing at home since 2000 (and I was only 40 then!)— I’ve found it makes it easier to follow many movies instead of rewinding to catch dialogue that is mumbled or drowned out by sound effects or music!
It seems to me that most modern movie soundtrack composers are trying to manipulate our emotions. I am totally not a fan of John Williams for this reason. Most of the contemporary movies I watch are international movies since it is much easier to read subtitles then to try and understand American actors.
I have three sons in their 30's. They laugh at me and my wife using subtitles. I think our trouble hearing dialogue might at least partially be age related.
I think that's akin to how our parents told us they couldn't understand the lyrics to the music we were listening to. I still think contemporary actors mumble and don't project.
You've only a problem if you can't understand the dialogue in a pre-1950 film. I wonder if anyone who actually doesn't know the script (as most people working on a film will) ever watches it before it's released? If you know the script of a film you're watching, you won't have a problem "hearing" the dialogue.
I have dabbled doing location sound dialogue recording for film in the past 20 years (but not very often), so I know the trouble of getting the mic close to the actors, diminishing the background noise, and capturing their speech as clearly as possible. We generally ask them to give us a level, like "check-check-check" and a line of dialogue to set the controls... and then when the scene begins, they inevitably drop their voice to a whisper, mumbling the dialogue "because it sounds more real." Classic stage actors understand the need to project and enunciate their dialogue clearly and naturally, so that everybody could hear all the words... without amplification, without everybody in the audience having to desperately try to hear what's being said. Too often, actors confuse subtlety with believability, and there's a fine line between the two. It's very frustrating for filmmakers and sound crews to convince actors that if they underplay the dialogue too much, nobody can ****ing hear them. It's a little of both. The problem is (as I said earlier in the thread), you have writer/directors like Christopher Nolan who have completely memorized their script, so when they hear the sound in a mixing session, their head fills in the gaps when music and sound effects overwhelm the dialogue. But if you brought in somebody who had never read the script and had no idea what it was about, they'd be complaining, "hey! I can't understand the actors!" But the director arrogantly assumes that everybody hears the film the same way he or she does, and so they override the sound mixers' suggestion, and the film gets sent out with bad dialogue levels. Number one, the technique of "Mickey-Mousing music" that manipulates us literally goes back t the 1930s (really the late 1920s, the beginning of sound motion pictures). Every single action on screen in a cartoon is accompanied by a slide trombone, or a whistle, or a cymbal crash, to accentuate what you see. So it's a technique that's almost 100 years old -- it's not "modern" at all. Number two, the composer works for the director, so it's the director's decision to jam in too much music, not enough music, or just the right amount of music. There's a stage during editing where the composer and the director sit down and do a "music spotting" session where they go through the entire film from start to finish, and the director might say, "right here, I think we need a big brass fanfare," and later on in a scary scene, the director might say, "I think we go for some really scary string arrangement here." So it's the director making the decision, not the composer. Sometimes there are clashes between the two -- for example, very famously between Hitchcock and the great Bernard Herrmann on Torn Curtain -- and they never worked together again. The technical balancing of all the levels between dialogue, music, and sound effects is controlled by a team of Re-Recording Mixers (traditionally 3 people working in tandem, but more frequently nowadays just by 2 people and sometimes only one), but they always make sure that Dialogue Is King. The problem is, between directors making bad decisions and actors performing badly on set, things can and do go horribly wrong. It's often not a technical problem -- it's bad choices being made. BTW, I saw the (very loud) action picture John Wick 4 about a week ago, and we had zero problems understanding even a single word in the entire film. It all made sense, it wasn't overpowering, the actors were fine, and it totally worked. So it can be done if they work at it.
I have an example where I can prove - at least to myself - that it's definitely not my own equipment or my hearing that's the problem understanding the dialog. I have a Sony television and Sony receiver, a couple of Bose bookshelf speakers for left/right/stereo and a Sony center channel speaker for the centered dialog. I only use basically a 3.0 setup as I've gotten past the thrill of 5.1 or 7.1 or 19.2 channels of sound. Just give me the basics and I'm happy. Most movies and shows give me generally any music in stereo in the two Bose speakers with dialog and main action in the center Sony speaker. And it all sounds really good and crisp and clear with any old classic movie or TV show. So, I put on a modern movie, like the above-mentioned Christopher Nolan films and I have to rely on closed captions to understand what's going on. And it's not just him. I can tune in to a CBS broadcast of an FBI show and sometimes it's all OK. It gets a little dicey with the International version getting acclimated to the accents of the non-American actors, so closed captioning helps there, but I can understand all if the main actors just fine. Now, I turn to Paramount+ and put on an old STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - no problem understanding or hearing any dialog - at all sounds fine. BUT - same Roku device, same streaming service, same A/V receiver with the same settings and I'll watch a STAR TRE: PICARD - and half the time I'll need closed captioning to understand the dialog. These are largely the same actors, the same studio, the same streaming service through the same equipment. It HAS TO BE something the modern show is doing wrong that the old show got right.
Mixing does have a huge effect but so does the concept of projecting. There are countless scenes where the actors are 3-6 feet apart and they are basically whispering to each other. AND YET no one ever says "What's that, I couldn't hear you". I mean that's just not how that works in real life, at least in my life
I think that late 80s to mid 2000s (and maybe a bit later than that) were best for audio mixing. Before that films (mostly) utilised the optical sound (and that one sounds like crap), and after they've started to mess up the dynamics
Meanwhile, Amazon just made this surprising announcement today... Amazon’s New Dialogue Boost Feature Adjusts Sound in Movies and Shows | IndieWire No word from Christopher Nolan as to what he thinks about that.
I have a good answer as to why but my reply wouldnt be liked by many of you So ill keep quiet on this 1
