We were watching a popular Netflix series when the main character checked out a text on her phone. Stop action. Freeze. Let me walk up to the screen and see what the heck it says.
“What director thought it was a good idea to make the tiny phone screen an important character in this show?” That was the question I asked my man as I walked back to my recliner after reading the fine print.
He always hates it when I get agitated during a series or movie, and it has nothing to do with the plot.
“Beat’s me,” he responded.
Of course he didn’t know. There was no rational answer.
Did it occur to the director that we might have problems trying to make out the tiny letters on our sixty-five-inch TV from twelve feet away? He or she obviously didn’t give it one thought. It was so “authentic.” So today. It might be all those things, but that didn’t make it any easier to read.
There’s a chance that using text messages as part of the plot might work if everyone went to the movie theater, and the cell phone was twenty times its normal size. But that’s not how most people watch a film these days.
Am I the only one who has this problem, I wandered?
I checked with my son. “It depends on the clarity of the message,” he texted back. “Sometimes it’s difficult to read.”
My 19-year-old grandson admitted that he also struggles. “It happens a lot. It’s so frustrating. Why put something in a movie that people can’t fully see? It’s always seemed stupid to me.”
Smart kid.
A survey of the four people we had dinner with last night yielded the same response. Using a cell phone to convey a message in a series or movie just doesn’t work.
Equally frustrating is closed-captioning, which becomes more important the older you get.
The other night we watched Kandahar with Gerard Butler on Netflix and every Scottish-sounding syllable that came out of his mouth was perfectly captured and displayed for us to read. There wasn’t a lot of dialogue, but when you’re watching Gerard Butler, who cares?
Then we tried to watch Bad Monkey on Apple TV. The print was small. Whole sentences and thoughts were lost as the closed captioning wrestled with keeping up with the dialogue. Although we got the gist of what was happening, the subtleties of conversation were lost on both of us. And I can hear . . . most of the time.
If there is a closed captioning war taking place between Netflix and Apple TV, Netflix is the clear winner time and time again.
Maybe AI needs to tackle the closed captioning problem. That would be a true test of its capabilities. And as for my question about using text messages to move a plot along, there seems to be only one answer. Don’t do it.