Narrow-Bandwidth Television Association

Whew! The movie seems to polarise people into either loving it or hating it. I thought members of this forum would lean towards liking the movie but I suppose I would have looked pretty silly if no one agreed with me that it was a good movie. You have saved me from that ignominy.

gary wrote:).

A surprising (to me) exception to this is a movie I accidentally stumbled over recently called "Primer" (2004) - a very low budget film but one well worth searching out and watching if you fall into a similar category to me.

It is a movie about garage (or "kitchen table") type engineering and time travel.

If you do decide to watch it I would strongly suggest you do not read any "spoilers" (like wikipaedia) before hand as part of the interest in the plot is to see if you understand it on the first iteration - it is quite challenging.

If anyone has already seen this movie I would be interested in reading about what you thought of it.

I saw it today.
Interesting but I kinda lost the plot near the end.
The speech was too rapid and at times was laid over extraneous noises, (like the fountain), which were not plot relevant and so made the speech,
for me, difficult to follow.

Many TV productions too have this fault, probably because the editors have the scripts in front of them and so know it back to front.
So they lay noise/music on top of speech and can still follow what they already know, whilst we on a first viewing cannot.


I shall watch the last part again with the subtitles on.

Albert,

Nice to know others have the same problem with Music and Fx making dialogue unintelligible.

Like you I have resorted to sub titles.

Cheers,

Graham

Viewmaster wrote:Interesting but I kinda lost the plot near the end.

One reviewer said that "anybody who claims he fully understands what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar."

As I mentioned earlier I watched it first time with the subtitles on (I realised after 5 minutes I would need to), so you are a brave man indeed going through first time without.

I find I need the subtitles on these days for most US movies, even the big budget ones. It seems everyone these days has gone to the Marlon Brando style acting school. I think they call it "method acting" - I call it "madness acting" .

Of course, like everyone, my hearing has deteriorated with age over the years, but I have no problems hearing and discerning pre 70s stuff - and I haven't committed it all to memory.

An interesting comparison I have noted recently is within the "Dark Knight" series of movies when listening to dialogue between Michael Caine (Alfred the butler) and Christian Bale (Bruce Wayne NOT Batman which is even worse).

Even with Caine's rather strong south London accent his enunciation is much clearer than Christian Bale's (IMHO).

Admittedly Bale (a taffy brought up in England) "affects" an American accent. I have never heard him speak in his native dialect so cannot say whether he normally speaks clearly.

I haven't been to a cinema in over two decades. The reason why? The dynamics are too great. It's either simply deafening, and the next second below my noise-floor.

It's all very well having 100db of dynamic range...but you don't have to use it!

And correct, they know the script word-perfect, so extraneous noise is no hindrance to them. Knowing sound mixing guys as I do they also mix the sound track at a far greater level than you or I would listen to it at home, and on monitors (loudspeakers) that in no way resemble the puny 1W versions you have in your TV.

Generally I rarely, and I mean rarely, watch movies at all.

Steve A.

gary wrote:

Viewmaster wrote:Interesting but I kinda lost the plot near the end.

One reviewer said that "anybody who claims he fully understands what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar."

As I mentioned earlier I watched it first time with the subtitles on (I realised after 5 minutes I would need to), so you are a brave man indeed going through first time without.

I find I need the subtitles on these days for most US movies, .

My wife and I need sub titles on many TV productions these days.
Not because we are old but because many TV actors just mumble.

The long stage experience of old uns like Olivier and Gielgud resulted in their never mumbling and their diction was clear.

John Nettles of 'Midsomer Murders' and Honeysuckle Weeks in 'Foyle's War' spring to mind as two recent bad offenders.
Weeks was eating a sandwich whilst talking in one episode some years ago. That was a priceless TV moment for us.!
Nettles never opens his mouth and we think he should have been a
ventriloquist.

How they, and many others, ever became TV actors I will never know. Mumble, mumble, mumble.

And I thought it's just because I'm German.

In our TV programmes this is of course not better...

I purchased a sound bar for my LCD TV.
The sound out of the TV alone is terrible, very thin.

The sound bar has a separate (small) woofer and controls to enhance bass and speech.

I suspect the speech enhancement is peaking around 3kHz, what used to be called 'presence'.

Regards,

Graham