And I Thought It Was Me

 Interesting article on why, in recent years, so much movie dialogue has become incomprehensible.  For a while I did think it was me as my hearing is declining and now wear hearing aids.  From my review of Wind River in 2017:

Awards:

Most incomprehensible dialogue in a non-Christopher Nolan film.  Perhaps they speak a different language in Wyoming.  I saw it with four other people.  None of us could decipher much of the dialogue.  Should have had subtitles.

I'm relieved to hear it isn't me, or at least it's not only my hearing.

Here's how Ben Pearson starts his recent article in Film:

I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films. But over the past 10 years or so, I've noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it's not due to hearing loss on my end. It's gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when I watch things at home, I've defaulted to turning the subtitles on to make sure I don't miss anything crucial to the plot.

Reasons the author attributes to this trend:

1.  It's deliberate.  Naturalness is in.

2.  It's the trend in acting.

Karen Baker Landers, whose credits include "Gladiator," "Skyfall," and "Heat," among many others, has her own term for it. "Mumbling, breathy, I call it self-conscious type of acting, is so frustrating," she says. "I would say a lot of the younger actors have adopted that style. I think the onus also falls on the directors to say, 'I can't understand a word you're saying. I'm listening to dailies, and I can't understand.' No amount of volume is going to fix that."

3.  Technology

The anonymous sound pro also pointed to what they view as an increase in the amount of music in modern movies compared to older films, bemoaning directors' over-reliance on music as "pushing emotion" on audiences and the way music and dialogue are forced to jostle for prominence in the mix. "The technology we have today is so vastly improved that there is no limit to what can be added: whatever the director wants, for months on end. We literally have hundreds of tracks at our disposal ... in a final mix, we therefore have a lot to deal with. Unending score smashed up against hundreds of tracks, with the client asking to hear every nuance above every other nuance."

4.  The Cinemas

One of the most fascinating things I learned when speaking with these folks is the gulf in quality that can sometimes occur between what a film sounds like in the mixing stages and what it can sound like when it plays in a multiplex. 

Several blame the transition to digital projection and the lack of projectionists who understand how to handle sound.

5.  Mixing sound for streaming is different than for the cinema.

Oh, and as I mentioned in the Wind River review, Christopher Nolan.

It's subtitles for me!