Time Machine

Seen: 2002.03.11 ¶ Reviewed: 2002.03.17

I did something different for this one: I organized a Movie Night. Among various invitees, only a few could make it: John Hauber of Galaviz & Hauber, who do audio description for TV here, plus his gf unit and daughter unit, and three fellows from the Toronto International Film Festival.

I stood in the theatre lobby with blind-date anxiety waiting for everyone to show up. I had implored Famous Players not to blow our cover and alert the theatre that we’d be coming. (So why did I tell them in the first place?) John and the family arrive, then the TIFF lads, and upstairs we went. At Guest Services a whole lot happened:

A couple (he blind, she sighted) were signing out a description headset. That’s twice this has happened. I introduced us and the nice couple said hello and immediately booked for the theatre. That’s twice this has happened, too.
All of a sudden the theatre manager appeared from nowhere and stole my show, digging out all the hardware and chatting up the lads from TIFF. He led us down the hallway (and since there were seven of us in a noisy theatre, only the chosen few right behind him could hear what he said) and pretty much acted as though only those chosen few actually mattered. A relatively large (unduly large) scene was made inside Cinema 8 as we stood around conspicuously and chatted more. ¶ I had to correct a few mistakes (captioning and description of MoPix movies does not always or even very often happen in Boston anymore) and we both traded information about the “hardwiring” of the theatre. (A second auditorium is wired for MoPix; they can move the expensive display between them. And presumably the projection-room equipment, too. But the upstaging manager implied that, after a second auditorium is fully MoPix-equipped come May, a third will be hardwired, meaning that two displays could be located within some combination of three auditoriums. I am not sure this is true; he may have misunderstood my use of “number three,” as in “number three auditorium to be hardwired,” to mean Cinema 3.)
We were then faced with finding seven contiguous seats. I did it, on one side of two unrelated people, but the TIFF lads sat by themselves on the other side. I didn’t know what to make of this, and I expect even you would have found that odd, if not an actual slight. To make matters worse, John’s gf and daughter were sitting somewhere else entirely! (Apparently those two do that a lot. I was to think nothing of it.) But that made three seating locations for a single party of seven. Come on, people: I’m not that bad. (We got the grrrlz to come sit with us, but there was no budging the TIFF contingent.)

The movie ran. There were no captions for the first five minutes. Great time for the system to crash, I thought.

I almost never find it overwhelming to deal with captions, descriptions, main audio, and film or video all at once. Now I know, however, what you have to add to make me zone out of the whole experience: Getting upstaged at my own movie night and wondering what the fork is going on with the seating arrangements. I eventually calmed down enough to recognize that:

The Time Machine is barely coherent as a story (three-act screenplay structure, while too restrictive and errantly claimed to be the only way to go, might actually have helped here)
the film is implausible even given the Asimovian precept that we grant a single clearly impossible premise per work of science fiction (in this case, time travel): An “aboriginal” race that learned to speak English from fragments of written signage 800,000 years in the future; computers that continue to function 800,000 years after construction; a destroyed moon that doesn’t also destroy the earth due to gravitational perturbations; conscious, directed evolution of telekinetic abilities; branching of homo sapiens into three subspecies; sandpits that change from tunnels to the bowels of the earth to the firmness of a wooden-bottomed sandbox in the blink of an eye; the construction of a time machine (a granted premise) out of solid precious metals; continuous location of the time machine at one coordinate within the earth impervious to changes in elevation (the ground would eventually swallow it up); no allowance for the fact that the earth is moving through space, meaning if you went back or forward in time so much as a day you’d materialize in a different absolute position from where you started
the depiction of the “aboriginals” is colonialist, retrograde, and fetishistic and doesn’t hold a candle to Quest for Fire’s even at a linguistic level; among other things, the elders would be the ones with advanced diachronic language knowledge (young people cannot be the only bilinguals; who taught them?) and 800,000 years of technology could not be eradicated entirely. That is lots of time to relearn how to make computers and robots, me son

John phased in and out of caption-watching and description-listening. He loves the captions, hates the audio quality of the descriptions (the fabled hiss, which I didn’t notice tonight). John has very keen ears for dialogue audio, as I’ve witnessed firsthand. I couldn’t tell what his gf and daughter units were doing. Nor did I know about the farings of the TIFF satellite group.

Remember my perennial complaints about the red LED atop the description headset? How it lets everyone behind you ray-trace every jot and jiggle of your head? Well, newsflash for Joe: Blind people won’t move their heads much! (A low-vision person might.) I had to look around to find the actual blind person in the theatre.

The movie ended. John rushed down to talk to the blind fellow. I went over to the TIFF lads. “Now may I sit?” I said, channelling disagreeable vixen Samantha on Sex and the City. The lads took the question in the light-hearted vein in which it was partly intended. We had a very fast and dense conversation about all manner of captioning and description technologies. (A “playa” of course came up and asked us if we enjoyed the show. One is accustomed to this level of good service.)

We mosied on down the hall. Fortunately, no upstaging manager was present. John had to go (three more hours of work that night!), but the TIFF lads and I kept on talking as I walked them to their car. Nothing has been decided yet, but something has to be possible, and I’m already volunteering to set it up.

Caption quality

To my great surprise, the Caption Center has decided that we don’t need to indicate when a quoted work is read aloud – except for the first and last captions.

The right way

For a spoken quotation that extends beyond one caption (even if it’s only two captions), place an open quote at the beginning of all captions but the last, which has only an end quote. There are no other quotes. Example:

“And from somewhere
in our black subconscious minds
when we’re asleep

“comes a haunting, swirling
mass of voices resonating.

“It screams of forgotten voices
and the cries of innocents

and the desperate plea for recognition
and recompense.”

The wrong ways

Opening quote at first caption, end quote at last. (That’s the MoPix way.)
Quotes around all captions (indicates each caption is a completed quote; there’s no arguing with that one, try as you might).
No quotes.
Italics. (Quotes within quotes follow the same pattern, and yes, I have seen them done right and wrong, the latter chiefly by NCI, who use italics.)

Worse yet, in The Time Machine this extended quote was broken up by a caption of non-speech information. (You have to close the quote with an ellipsis or dash, run the NSI, then reopen and restart the quote.)

Also, as I had half-noticed before, captions default to the top of the screen rather than the bottom. This is perhaps defensible given that nearly everyone adjusts the reflectors so the captions are just below the picture.

I also have noted a definite tendency to notate all the music they can possibly fit in. I assume this is because it is assumed that everyone with any kind of hearing will be able to tell that music is playing in a loud movie theatre. I suppose (dramatic music playing) is all right; (playing Viennese waltz) might or might not be (isn’t there but one Vienna waltz)?

And by the way, how do we know the “aboriginals” are speaking a “native” language? By definition it could have been imposed by the psychokinetic/telepathic overlord Über-Morlock, Jeremy Irons in drag. (Another of the implausible conceits. I haven’t exhaustively listed them.) And after we learn that the “aboriginals” call themselves the Eloi, are they not suddenly deemed to be speaking Eloi, if not the true generic, speaking foreign language? Also, when Eloi was transliterated, what’s with the ugly apostrophe after every syllable?

Still no caption-ending commas. Get with the program here.

Description quality

Listen, I couldn’t follow half of what was happening. I am sure this was due to my distraction, but I wasn’t distracted the whole time through. The mofos just wouldn’t shut up, but managed to fail to describe what the “aboriginals” really looked like, or what anyone other than Alexander (viz. Guy Pearce) looked like. “Trepidatiously” was, however, my favourite adverb of the evening.

John immediately entered dudgeon mode over the DVS trope “our view,” as in “Our view drifts down,” “Our view changes,” “Our view pulls back.” I think he objects to the presumptuousness of “our.” As if reading his mind, in the rest of the film descriptions merely stated “the view,” which works well.

Here’s a special note for faux-purists, especially at cinema-ignorant AudioVision Canada, who deny outright that blind people know or care anything about cinematic structures as simple as opening credits: Cinematic devices are often foreground information in modern films, particularly effects movies like The Time Machine, and there has to be a way of telling us about them that recognizes that sighted people will recognize they’re devices. We cease to natively and immanently understand the visuals; we become aware that we are watching.

Miles Neff was yet again the narrator. The only MoPixed movie I’ve seen with a narrator other than him was the snippet of Monsters, Inc. There’s consistency and then there’s I’m Getting Tired of Always Hearing Miles Neff.

Exit interview

None, except with the TIFF lads.

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