TV Shows Watched: Cobra Kai: S6E6 (Netflix) with audio description, Ghosts: S4E? (Paramount Plus) with audio description), Krapapolis: S2E? (Hulu) No Audio Description, the Day of The Jackal: S1E3 (Peacock) with audio description, Are You Smarter Than A celebrity: S1E4 (Amazon) with audio description, The Lincoln Lawyer: S3E4 (Netflix) with audio description, and Cross: S1E1 (Amazon) with audio description.
Podcasts: None
YouTube: Adam Does Movies (Review: Red One), Perry nimarovv (FYC: best Director predictions)
Movies watched: the outrun (Screener) no audio description, but hoping to hear back… might watch again? And also Family Pack (Netflix) with audio description, despite that Netflix couldn’t put audio description on France’s Oscar submission, i watched this random French movie instead because it had audio description.
Audio Description Thoughts? I keep going back and forth on Day of The Jackal.I’m not crazy, but when the show is just asked to describe a normal show in English, then you just have the question of whether or not the narrator is to your liking. but, anytime they have to flip into another language, the wrecking ball comes back, interpretative description dominates, and things just get summarized. Like, what someone says is summarized. You get that feeling you are listening to an audio book. I’m not that driven to watch this program for reasons other than talking about this bizarre audio description, so i might not finish it. or, the audio description could push me to finish it. Right now, i don’t know.
Then we have Cross, which is Amazon’s new entry into a genre that has worked very well for them before with shows like Bosch and Reacher. So they’re taking another detective off the page, and onto the TV screen, with Aldis Hodge in the lead role. I think the mystery here is intriguing, but this doesn’t beat Morgan freeman’s take on Cross. Freeman and the film kiss The Girls remains the best adaptation to screen thus far. Even his sequel, Along Came A Spider isn’t as good. Tyler Perry’s version of Alex cross is a mess. This is better than that, but it needs to prove itself now as a series. It can’t retread any of the movie tropes, because it has essentially 8 hours to tell a story Morgan Freeman would have been given likely less than 2. So I understand fleshing out the supporting characters, and some of the details around the killer are intriguing. but, there’s a scene where Alex cross, a somewhat famous detective, has his house pretty easily broken into, and he has a kid. You’re telling me he has no security system whatsoever? They actually have a scene later where he’s finally getting one installed. if this was taking a rookie approach to Cross, I could understand. but he’s already at legend status. He is literally brought onto a case essentially because DC loves him. He’s uncommonly famous for a detective. So, I need him to feel like he’s always 10 steps ahead and this show isn’t doing that. He’s like… one step. Just enough to make the show interesting, but at the level they’ve chosen to have him, he needs to feel like he entered a cheat code. And then, even with that cheat code, this killer is STILL eluding him. THAT is what makes this interesting. But, in terms of audio description, it is just this thing where shows with predominantly black casts or leads essentially have better audio description when it comes to mentioning ethnicity. Here, no one will wonder if Cross was cast typically, and an opening interrogation sequence will just solidify that anyway. But, it extends to the supporting cast around him. It is pretty decent for a start, with some attention to detail, like the specific color of the scarf, or the finding of “running shoes”. But, for a show like this, the devil is in the details, and only the person who has finished, knows whether or not we have been given all the right visual clues translated for us to follow and make the logical conclusion along with the show, without telegraphing anything too obvious, and too early. crime mysteries are deceptively hard to describe, as we seek out killers and motives, because an object could be important, or it might not be. And how do you point out something we’d see visually, without making it seem too obvious. We’ll see where this goes.
