Captioning for movies

Closed captioning is a mashup of two cultures: the deaf and those who can hear. The "mash" part sometimes rears its head in the form of odd captions for movies. I find this fascinating. Captions are essentially a translation sent from the hearing world to the deaf world -- but this translation is not always clear-cut. (BTW, my hearing is fine but I sometimes turn captions on because I find them interesting.)

Here are some examples from my recent viewing:

• The caption said "stay there" as an actress sort of mimed the command. But she never actually said anything. I wondered about this. But then I realized that she had mouthed the words in addition to miming the meaning with her body (shush face, palms-down gesture). Perhaps the caption was included because deaf viewers might otherwise wonder what why "stay there" wasn't captioned. Mind you, deaf viewers would have already grasped her meaning because she said it so clearly with her gestures. Interesting!
• When music plays, the caption often tries to define its mood. I get a kick out of their choices. "Ominous music" is a fun one. I also like the occasionally meaningless captions, such as "inaudible chanting". Indeed. (And I never heard any chanting, making this kinda weird. Maybe there really was inaudible chanting! Funny.)
• In one movie, as a couple engaged in a sloppy kiss, the captioning said "Muah!" Gotta love that.

Of course, captioning can be helpful even to those who can hear. For instance, when I watched a movie that was set in New Orleans, I couldn't understand the heavy patios of one of the actors -- and I'm pretty good with accents. So I turned on captioning. It listed his sentences in clear, proper English, as if he had no accent. Very nice.

Have you had any adventures with captioning? I'd love to read comments from deaf readers. Are you satisfied with the captioning system? What needs to be improved?

I think it's great that captioning exists for any broadcast, though live shows are still problematic. There are lots of misspelled words and garbled phrases. Sometimes I wonder if they have two people typing the text, to keep up with the pace of the speakers. I say this because sometimes there will be one sentence haltingly typed on the screen, and then a full sentence or two will instantly appear after it. I'd love to know how they handle these live broadcasts. It would be interesting to be present as the typists create the captions. 

I'm gonna go put that on my bucket list.

Which movies did you watch the most times?

Let's do our top three. For me, the movies I've watched more times than any other are:

• The Big Chill
• Alien
• American Werewolf in London

This doesn't mean these are my three favorite movies. It's just that I watched them more times than others. What are your most often-viewed movies?

Classic sci-fi movies

Until baseball comes back, I won't be watching much TV in the evenings. There's nothing on, as you know. It's too bad because after a day of writing or editing, I want to collapse in a chair and stare at something. It helps to bring me back to Earth (literally, given the things I write about).

So last night I broke out the old sci-fi movies. I've got a stack of DVDs to watch. Here's what's in the batch:

First Spaceship on Venus

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet

Things to Come

Rocket Ship (Buster Crabbe!)

Crash of the Moons

They Came from Beyond Space

Teenagers from Outer Space (oddly good in a bad way)

Rocketship X-M (wonderfully depressing)

Not to say these are my favorites. They're really sub-par, in fact. But I love them anyway and they'll fill up my evenings until the damn calendar changes to Spring and everyone comes back to the baseball field.

Is the pool really that small?

Isn't it amazing how movie after movie comes out, allegedly fresh and new, but with the same damn actors? American movies can only star Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and maybe 20 other people -- and that's it. So I guess that's the entire pool of American actors.

What happened? People aren't studying acting anymore? No one wants in? Or is it such a special skill that only these 22 people have it? Apparently, because the pool always contains the same number of fish.

Same with baseball. How many damn years have the same players been in the game? Are there no other talented baseball players out there? Only this small bunch of guys? I mean, I know new, young players come up every year. But let's face it, they only replace the very old players who are finally breaking down after a lifetime of playing the game. That's not much turnover. I guess there really are no talented young players out there.

Same with politics. Please tell me that our country isn't going to elect yet another president from the same low-brow, cold-blooded, hare-brained family. Is Jed really on his way to the White House? The problem doesn't stop with the Bushes, of course. Take the last election. Did one of the leading Democratic candidates have to be the wife of a former president? I mean, I know she's a nice person and all, but seriously. There was no other great candidate out there in our gigantic country? That seems so odd to me, unless we're suckers for this sort of thing. Family trumps all. Is that it?

It's everywhere. In New York we're just about to crown Andrew Cuomo as governor. We had to choose the son of a former governor, apparently. There's such a dearth of good people out there, you know.

Why is it that nepotism is fine in politics but poison everywhere else? Just look at the dynasties in Congress. Ron and Rand indeed. And it was truly horrifying to see Quayle II pop up on the political radar screen recently. Like we needed another one.

It's sickening. We are a nation of 300 million people. Surely there are some fresh, promising candidates for political positions out there. Surely.

Movies, sports and politics. Shouldn't these huge, important and vastly different arenas have a ton of talented players? Wouldn't that enrich the mix (and our lives)? And if it did, wouldn't that be a very good thing?

I know that part of the problem is our tendency to see those three areas -- movies, sports and politics -- as magical realms peopled by celebrities, folks who are bigger than life. We revere them and want to keep them around. That much I understand. But why can't someone new enter the group? Think how rarely someone new thunders onto the acting scene, for instance. How many fascinating new actors did you see last year? The year before?

Why do we accept such narrow choices? I don't understand.

UPDATE: I wrote this post about three days ago (yes, I write a number of posts in one evening and put them up on successive mornings). Then, yesterday morning I found PZ talking about the same thing (sort of) and he offered an explanation for why we accept such a small pool:

"But sometimes we seem to be prone to a pathological degree of attachment, where because once we favored some strange object of worship, whether it's Jesus or Spock or America or the Green Bay Packers, we can't let go. Changing our minds would be an admission that we were wrong and could be wrong about something we regard as important in our lives, and there's a reasonable fear that opening the door to that kind of uncertainty might lead to chaos."