MovieChat Forums > Sweet Nothing in My Ear (2008) Discussion > What's the point of a video phone when y...

What's the point of a video phone when you can text?

posted 15 years ago by MisterZed
1 reply | jump to latest

OK a few questions about this movie:

1) What's the point of having a video phone when you can text message?

2) Why does Jeff Daniel's character talk to his wife and sign at the same time? Why not just sign?

Minor issues/nitpicks:

3) Why is the movie they go to see so old? Who goes to see B&W movies in the cinemas?

4) When he's looking up cochlear implants on the internet, the site is clearly Google, but they replaced the Google name with some fictional search engine. Why can't they show the Google name on screen? They had no problem showing the Hyundai brand of the monitor.

Misc:

5) Does anyone know the name of the actress who played the woman who was doing the voice of Dorothy in the school play?

[–] Brucewh 15 years ago

1. ASL is a far more expressive means of communication than text, even when using the text constructs unique to the Deaf community (it sure ain't hearing-world English).
2. A couple of reasons:

Many hearing people are not particularly good at getting across intent in their signing. The same statement may be humor, sarcasm, irony, anger, boredom, etc., with different signing needs in every case. A Deaf person can pick up important clues as to intent by watching a hearing person speak. Remember that a hearing person can listen to someone speak an unknown foreign language and still pick up the speaker's emotional state. That doesn't work for the Deaf.

Also, dramatic license... if the hearing character does not speak aloud, and does not interpret aloud, the hearing audience has a tough time following along.

3. ?
4. At a guess, some kind of licensing or permission thing.
5. ?

[N.B., Above answers written by a hearing person.]

/Bruce/ [aka Slasher]
DPC, USN (ret.)