Sign language is fucking up!

I'm all for sign language, but shouldn't our failing school system be teaching deaf people how to read too? Are subtitles really that hard?


I mean, how can this be pleasant for deaf people? Instead of watching the movie you have to watch a neon madball in the corner signing and acting things out, making dumb faces and just generally taking up a quarter of the screen. Terrible. And whoever decided that it was appropriate to let this lady wear a bright red shirt while standing in front of a black and white movie should be slapped with a hearing aid.


EDIT: Updating this post to answer Cecil's question.

Right, so I've been in Ireland since October (just got back to America on Monday) and I watched a SHIT load of movies over there on Sky+ (a satellite dish cable service thing) because I had access to ~15 movie channels that played unedited shit night and day. Sometimes at night they would play movies with this sign language thing. Most of these movies also offered closed captioning subtitles which made the sign language effectively redundant, especially since these movies were generally played at four in the morning when nobody (except me) was watching. The first time I noticed the phenomenon was when I started watching American Gigolo. I was excited to see it because I'd watched a few other Paul Schrader movies recently and had enjoyed them and Gigolo is a get money movie and I'm a get money man. So the opening credits start going and they are AWESOME, you got Blondie and Giorgio Moroder doing Call Me and Richard Gere tooling around in a Porshe, classy neon light style font for the credits, Gere trying on suits and buying out stores, I mean I was in the MOOD you know. And then the credits stop and he walks into a madam's house and there's titties out and it's all good and then they start talking and boom, one of these little hand talking people pops up and I was so heated I had to turn the movie off. It was months before they played it normally and I finally got to see it the way god intended (verdict: not worth the wait). Another oddity of the service was that they didn't give the hard of hearing much choice. On the main movie channels, over the 8 months I was over there, they only seemed to play three movies with the sign language option: American Gigolo, The Ice Harvest, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. They would generally play these at least once a week. Just before I left I saw that Channel 4 was going to be playing Ministry of Fear, but that it had sign language. I decided to suck it up since I like Lang a lot and I'd never seen this one, so I went and recorded it. What I hadn't counted on was how much worse the effect is when it's applied to a black and white movie. So then I made this post. I mean, in all honesty I think it's a nice that they do this and they obviously mean well, and I'm just a dick, but man, this is dogshit.