Captions in the City

Happy Memorial Day!  Brandt and I got to spend a nice evening out, watching an Open Captioned movie in our own (nearby) city, for the first time.

Our local movie theater company knows me pretty well, since I’ve been writing them letters and e-mails for the past 4 years asking them to provide captioning.  We lived here a full year before I even knew there was captioning available—one location in the city had Rear Window Captioning, but the only captioned movies offered were bloody horror films and stupid kids’ movies.  I kept calling and e-mailing the company, asking them to please offer something decent, but they never did.  Two years later, they completely removed the RWC system because that location had gone all-digital, and the digital system couldn’t support the captions. 

After a year of no captions, where we had to drive 2 to 4 hours away for a captioned movie, and several persistent letters and e-mails from me, the company reinstalled their RWC in a smaller theater that still used the old film system for its movies.  The theater was an hours’ drive away, and they only offered one movie per week, but it was certainly better than nothing.  With RWC, we could go to any showtime we wanted. 

But Open Captioning is still preferable to Rear Window Captioning, because it doesn’t require the user to have any special equipment.  The text is right there on the screen, and is much more enjoyable than RWC.  I bugged the company about OC (again) and they finally installed it in their biggest theater—which is only half an hour away from us—a few months ago.  Since they know me so well, they were sure to e-mail me with the news.

There were two major problems, though.  First, they weren’t offering any movies that we were interested in.  The Green Zone, The Last Song, Death at a Funeral, etc. were not our preferred kinds of movies.  The company usually offers the biggest, most popular movie in RWC on opening weekend, so the OC movies were second-rate at best.  The other problem was the timing.  They only offer OC on Monday afternoons and Tuesday nights, despite my explaining to them that this wasn’t going to be enough.  Even though they installed two OC projectors on two different screens, they were showing two movies in OC at the exact same time, only twice a week.  Weird!

Blogger Deafinitely Girly said it best, as she couldn’t attend any of the captioned showings of Sex and the City 2 in London because they were almost all offered on weekday afternoons:

“I don't understand!! Are deaf people not supposed to work or something? Is there some Government initiative that gives us the right to take paid time off to attend subtitled cinema screenings?”

Because I have ASL class on Tuesday nights, and Brandt is of course at work on Monday afternoons, today was the first time we were able to see an OC movie in our own city.  We had the choice of Macgruber, which had horrible reviews and looked stupid, or Robin Hood, which had equally horrible reviews and looked possibly-decent (and possibly-boring).  I let Brandt pick, so off we went to Robin Hood. 

The theater had signs taped on the entrance doors and all 4 ticket registers warning that the two movies would be “captioned for the hearing impaired.”  I took that as a good sign that they wouldn’t forget to turn on the captions (which has happened before).  We sat close to the exit, so I could bolt for the manager if there was any problem with it.  When the previews started, something was horribly wrong with the audio and the dialogue sounded like robots shrieking loudly.  After the third painful preview, people started getting up to complain.  I looked at Brandt, who wasn’t reacting to the screeching noises.  I asked him, “Can you hear that?”  He shrugged and said, “I can’t really understand it, no; but I knew I wouldn’t be able to.”  I explained that there was something wrong and it all sounded like robots; he said, “Oh really, the audio is messed up?  I couldn’t tell.  Good thing there’s captioning, then!”

Thankfully they got the audio fixed, and when the movie started the big yellow subtitles appeared, describing the “opening fanfare and orchestral crescendo” of the opening credits.  I did a little happy-dance in my seat, relieved that it was working properly, as most of the audience laughed at the continued descriptions of the music.

The movie turned out to be really good!  I’m not usually a fan of action flicks, but I love historical books and movies.  And while we doubted the accuracy of most of the plot, it was well-acted, the costumes were great, and the scenery was gorgeous.  There is no way I would have been able to understand all those accents without the captioning, and I bet a lot of others in the audience were thankful for them as well.