I have little doubt that movie dialogues have gotten more difficult to understand. My viewing has spanned films from the silent era wirh subtitles through to th

I have little doubt that movie dialogues have gotten more difficult to understand. My viewing has spanned films from the silent era wirh subtitles through to the present so I've a wide range to compare. It's big topic and too complex to discuss in detail so it's best to illustrate with examples. A decade or two ago the local national broadcaster used to show old movies from the 1930s or so on the midnight/dawn graveyard shift and often I'd be working at that time. I'd have the TV running and listen primarily to the sound with an occasional glance at the screen and I could easily follow the movie with little effort. Some of the easiest films to follow were English ones such as those that came from Gainsborough Pictures and so on. Now to the present, I like the raw, rough and profane Canadian sitcom Letterkenny which is about the lives of people in a small Canadian farm town of 5000 people. (Right, this is television but the trend is the same as movies.) The trouble is its dialogue is so fast and punctuated with interruptions, asides, innuendo and oblique references and in-jokes (that are only partly stated because the characters already know them) that I have to record the show and view it several times to get its full impact. I've even turned subtitles on to help but they flash past so quickly that they hardly help especially so when many people are talking at once (they're almost too fast to read). Even when one becomes familiar with the voices of the characters I doubt if most people would have much hope of fully comprehending the action without the vision. Letterkenny is new and very cleaver television but it's miles and miles away from the nice well-ordered dialogues of those old 1930s movies. __ Edit: I don't want to give the impression that I can't follow the dialogue or understand the references as I usually can. It's not intrinsic understanding that's the problem, rather the issue is the type of presentation, essentially Letterkenny's dialogues which are usually both disjointed and multithreaded whereas oldstyle presentation was more ordered, linear and presented in serial fashion. The differences are thus vast.