MovieChat Forums > Noise (2007) Discussion > Problems Understanding Dialogue (and, Wh...

Problems Understanding Dialogue (and, Why No Subtitles on the DVD?)

posted 13 years ago by JosephDinda
10 replies | jump to latest

Hi All,

I really enjoyed this movie, but I had difficulty understanding a significant amount of the dialogue. While I expected to have some difficulty understanding certain words due to differences in accent and slang, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the fact that I couldn't make out what people were saying in many scenes, even with the volume turned up fairly high on my TV. Part of the problem was due to the fact that characters spoke with their backs to the camera in several scenes, but I feel that the volume level of the dialogue was too low in the sound mix.

While I'll admit that I sometimes have trouble understanding the dialogue in some movies and TV shows, I am far from deaf. However, I had much more difficulty with this movie than anything else I've seen. While it is possible that the unintelligible dialogue was intentional (perhaps to make us more sympathetic to Graham), it really made the story hard to follow.

With this in mind, I'm also wondering why no subtitle track was added to this DVD. It seems like a major oversight for a movie about a person with hearing difficulties. The DVD is closed-captioned, but the captioning doesn't always work well on some TVs (for example, my TV skips about 1/2 of the lines of text it should display).

Did anyone else find the dialogue particularly unintelligible on this film?

Thanks,
Joe

[–] 13 years ago

[deleted]

[–] wsjo69 13 years ago

Joe, I completely agree with you. I had to restart the DVD after watching the first hour or so. By then I had an idea as to what was going on, and I could pick up some more of the dialogue the second time through. I suspect you hit the nail on the head, so to speak, when you surmised that maybe the difficulty with the dialogue was intentional. I still thought the movie was excellent, however.

Cheers,

Bill Johnson

[–] Nemesis42 13 years ago

I understood every word, though I was born and raised in Australia!
Perhaps they could add subtitles for international editions, but it certainly will not need subtitles in Australia.

[–] rooprect 13 years ago

I think a lot of the problem is in the Australian phrases and perhaps a little of the accents. I had to rewind a few times before realizing it was probably just some saying I'm not familiar with. Like in the beginning he refers to his radio battery being "cactus". I guess that means "kaput"? Even without understanding all the dialogue I thought the acting was so good I was able to keep up. Subtitles definitely would've been a plus though.

[–] BlackDog123 12 years ago

I had trouble with it too, and it seems like the accents are a component but the overall sound is not great. Even with the sound turned up high (too high for everything but dialogue, in fact), I had trouble understanding. I'm the first to admit I have a pretty terrible ear for accents, no matter how much I travel or how many foreign movies I watch, but the dialogue seemed garbled on top of that. Maybe to show what it's like living with Tinnitus? I don't know, I would have appreciated subtitles. It felt like I missed much of the dialogue - for example, I could barely understand a word in the scene preceding the girl's slip into a diabetic coma.

They're coming to get you, Barbara!

[–] morgand-2 12 years ago

I liked the film very much, and I am used to watching a lot of foreign movies along with movies with interesting accents, but I had not expected to have difficulties with this one. It reminded me of trying to watch the Irish film Hunger, which I tried to watch without subtitles first. I thought there weren't any because I saw it streaming on Netflix... I also thought that it probably had to do with his tinnitus, but... even scenes without the main character were a struggle, I had the feeling I was becoming hard-of-hearing!
But still, a very good film!

[–] RayDennisStecklerRules 10 years ago

Cactus is a slang word in Australia for something not working any more, it has died.

"It's always opening time in the Sailors Arms".

[–] rooprect 10 years ago

Cactus is a slang word in Australia for something not working any more, it has died.

Cool, I think I'll start using that phrase. I guess it's like saying "it's toast" in the USA.

[–] somesunnyday 10 years ago

I'm Australian and live in Melbourne so the accent and language wasn't a problem for me. I had the luxury of seeing this in the cinema when it first came out and the dialog was easy to pick up. Getting it home on DVD was a problem though. I agree with the opening poster that the dialog mix was very low in comparison to the other sounds going on in the film. At one stage I turned it right up to hear what was being said only to be hit in the head with a mallet of sound the next minute.

[–] [deleted] 4 years ago

Fair shake of the sauce bottle digger! Whaddaya mean ya couldn't jerry the lingo? In Straya we talk the Queen's English!