The sounds of near-silence (and deafening roars)

Home sick with The Mother Of All Colds, I yesterday discovered (to Comcast's money-grubbing delight) the joys of On Demand pay-per-view. I swore to myself that I'd only ever do it when I'm sick, because I hate giving more of my money to those Comcast bastards, but...it's a pretty great service. I don't move from my couch and there's all these new movies that I've been meaning to see. It's a sick boy's dream (now playing in my head: "Sick Boy" by Social Distortion).

I started the day off with Friday Night Lights, a movie that I really liked a lot in spite of the its-more-exciting-if-the-camera-never-stops-moving style of direction. The music was fantastic (mental note: pick up soundtrack), but mostly, it was really fun to relive Texas 5A High School Football, with the huge Friday night games that everyone would go to (football as God intended: Friday, High School; Saturday, College; Sunday, pro), the disgusting adoration of the football players (the player-shaped rice krispy treat was nothing compared to the stuff that happened at our high school...ask me about it sometime), and the excitement of the high school playoffs (the playoff game in the Astrodome reminded me of my school's own short-lived playoff run in the Astrodome my freshman year). And all that was more words (and WAY more parentheses) than I should have used on this subject.

What I was really here to talk to you about was the annoying sound of most movies now, something I was particularly annoyed by when watching the latest Harry Potter movie. While I appreciate what they can do with sound and that these movies are really made to be watched in the theater or on some insanely large and expensive home theater system, a large percentage of us movie-watching folk only have the speaker(s) on our TV, meaning that we have to watch these movies with our hands on the volume button the entire time.

Almost all the sound in this Harry Potter movie (and a lot of the other big movies I've watched) falls into one of two categories: near-whispered dialogue and ear-splitting action. The action I can understand...action is loud. But do people in real life actually speak that quietly that much? My experience is that people in real life speak way too loudly, and almost never whisper, especially in the movie theater. On the screen, though, people prefer to whisper very emotionally all the time. That's fiction for ya.

The last movie I watched was Mean Girls, a movie that I thought was actually pretty brilliant. It's like one of those rare pop songs that's sugary and formulaic on the outside, but has a complex, interesting center that's fun to analyze by those of us that want to, and easy to ignore for the people who don't want to be bothered with things like social commentary. Also, I want to marry Tina Fey.

<fade>