We went to see “Pirates of the Caribbean 2″ last night, and I noticed it had Rear Window captioning available so I asked for the reflector. I’ve heard bad things about Rear Window from deaf friends and clients, and I wanted to try it for myself. For one thing, I was surprised by how big it was - I thought it would just sit right down in the cupholder, but the reflector itself is on a big tall bendy pole. I had very little trouble setting it up; we were there kind of early so I had plenty of time to play with it. I was surprised that the captions were orange, for some reason I was expecting red - maybe different theaters have different colors, or maybe I was just assuming incorrectly all this time.

The previews and commercials were not captioned. When the movie started, I noticed a problem immediately: the captions were one-half to about one full second ahead of the movie. I’m not sure if this was intentional so you have time to look back and forth, or just a matter of the projectionist starting the Rear Window track and then the movie itself a moment later. It was a bit annoying for me, but I suppose if you can’t hear the audio you aren’t bothered by the slight difference.

Looking back and forth was a drag; I now see why many deaf people I’ve talked to prefer open-captioned movies. The captions were pretty small on my reflector (perhaps because I was seated toward the front?) and I found it hard to fix on them visually as I looked back and forth. I had no trouble following the general action, but I spent too much time looking back and forth to really appreciate any of the visuals of the movie. By the way, I use captions regularly at home to help me follow the plot, so I really did use the Rear Window captions - but admittedly I didn’t need them, so I had the luxury of leaning on A’s shoulder part of the time and still following the movie.

I was not super-impressed by Rear Window. I’m glad I tried it so I now have a frame of reference for discussing it, but I wouldn’t like to use it regularly. I think it is probably worth it for popular films that everyone will be discussing around the water cooler, which will then come out on DVD with captions or subtitles at a later time. But in general I see why open captioning is often preferred…Rear Window is just very tough to use without getting dizzy or a stiff neck.