I have been learning English for many, many years now and think I have acquired quite some mastery. Yesterday I saw just another English (American) flick and thought it was a different language, but definitly not English. I had to turn the (English) subtitles on... :-(
Why is it so very hard to understand movies - and do you have a panacea to it?
I'm a native English speaker (American) and have trouble with American movies. The younger the actors, usually the worse it is. I believe it has to do with mumbling and slurring and rapid speech (sometimes dependent on the way the actor does the character, rather than the actor's natural speech patterns). It also has to do with hearing loss that comes with aging (I'm past the middle of life). It further has to do with the content, if it is a topic I am not familiar with, or if the dialog has little lead-up (if I'm anticipating what's going to be said based on the plot or the visuals, it's easier to comprehend. I found the same thing to be true when attending university lectures; if I'd already read the text I could keep up with what was said much better).
What I do about it is, have a good sound system at home that I can turn up, adjust the bass & treble if necessary, and I try not to have other distractions while watching something (such as running the dishwasher). If I go to a movie, especially one where there are likely to be children, I prefer to go to a second-run theater (cheaper, too), after they've had the movie a while so there will be fewer people in the audience. Also helps to go at off times. I've found that going to the late movie (9 or after) does not seem to significantly reduce the number of children in the audience, who actually are noisier because they are more tired (at least until/unless they fall asleep).
I used to feel the same. I'm not a native English speaker either.
I think I got used to reading the subtitles when I was younger and didn't speak English. And even when my English became good enough to understand most of what was being said in the movies, I would still turn subtitles on because I didn't want to miss any lines. That's how you become dependent on the subtitles. Start turning them off more often and you will notice that gradually you will be missing less and less lines. That worked for me. You can try that with a TV series. As you become familiar with the characters and stories, you will be able to guess more often what they said when you missed a word. And then you will notice your improvement over the episodes. When you feel that you missed an important line, rewind a bit and listen again. Learning a language really requires a lot of commitment!
I think it's not just English-language movies. I'm a native English-speaker, and my Spanish is pretty good, but I had to turn on the Spanish-language subtitles for the movie "El Laberinto del Fauno" (Pan's Labyrinth). This helped me understand that the word was "un hada" (fairy) and not "un nada" and "sofocarlos" (quell them), not "sobrecarlos".
Ha! You have touched on one of my greatest bugbears concerning the comprehensibility of speech in films and TV. One reason that this is so annoying is that so many of the individual comprehensibility problems would be avoided if only the makers would pay proper attention to what they were doing.
These are the factors I have identified as making it hard to understand speech (regardless of setting), in no particular order:
Mumbling or whispering
Speaking very fast
Highly emotional speech (e.g. when crying, shouting or ranting)
Speakers who hesitate, change their minds in mid-sentence, forget how they started their current sentence, or stumble over their words (including misreading words from a script)
Use of unfamiliar words, including dialect words, novel or regional slang, professional jargon and abbreviations
Non-standard or grammatically incoherent constructions
Speaking in an accent that is unfamiliar to the listener
Unexpected or eccentric mispronunciation of standard words
Monotonous delivery: little variation in volume, stress or emphasis
Song lyrics. These are particularly hard to decipher, not least because they often make very little sense to begin with (either grammatically or semantically)
Uninteresting or excessively complicated or specialized topic of discussion: lack of engagement or subject-matter comprehension encourages the listener's attention to wander, leading to misunderstanding of subsequent utterances (with associated sense of frustration)
Unfamiliar subject matter, especially popular-culture references. When such references are not understood, the wider significance or general context of the utterance that contains it may be lost. Typical examples are references to decades-old TV shows and celebrities, actors and singers
Ambiguous statements or puns, especially if the references are obscure
Speaker's lips are not visible (e.g. due to facial hair, or if the face is turned away from the camera)
Speaker's facial expressions and/or body language do not match the informational or emotional content of their utterances
Conversation contains excessive non sequiturs, hence minimal context for interpretation
Poor quality of recorded or transmitted sound (mobile phones/cellphones are abysmal for this -- mostly affects live broadcasts)
Clipping of frequency range (again, mobile phones are a terrible offender -- mostly affects live broadcasts)
Sound cutting in and out (e.g. due to poor phone reception or satellite link -- mostly affects live broadcasts)
Masking of speech by excessively loud music and/or other background noise
Other sensory overload: too much concurrent physical on-screen action, rapid cutting, or the emotional content and rapid speech overwhelming the viewer's ability to decide what information is most relevant
Excessive difference in speech volume between speakers: listeners find it hard to adjust their expectations of what they are about to hear quickly enough
Except when the listener is conversing with someone in a live setting, no possibility of asking for clarification or repetition of what was said
Deafness of the listener, including difficulty hearing particular frequency ranges
Age-related slowing of speech processing: as most people get older, the rate at which they can interpret what they are hearing decreases, which means that rapid speech is harder for them to keep up with
Incomplete, inaccurate, unavailable, uncontrasty or badly synchronized subtitles (including the nasty habit some subtitlers have of substantially rewording sentences. And there ought to be a particularly unpleasant punishment for those people who are responsible for plastering subtitles right across the faces of the individuals speaking the lines to which they relate.)
I know exactly what you mean, but frankly I think it is less a matter of accents or dialects and just that the sound mixing of a lot of recent movies is especially bad. They have so much going on with the soundtrack and bass heavy sound effects that the dialogue gets drowned out.
A good example of this was Pandorum (2009), nobody had any pronounced accent yet I had to turn on the subtitles for half of the movie because it seemed like everyone was mumbling.
Funny side note: I have a friend who claims to have learned/practiced his English after he moved to the US by watching Stallone/Schwarzenegger action movies. Not exactly the language teachers I'd suggest.
For me the big difficulty is the tendency for the director to make the vocals too quiet, and the background noises too loud. So in a very much native English speaking household, you will find the channel clicker being not only used to replay dialogue in rented movies, but you will find the native English speakers arguing over what's been said. And then we turn on the closed captions too.
I'm not a native speaker, been taking (American) English seriously for only 1 year (after 8 of "School English") and usually have no problem watching American movies. In fact, I hate subtitles. That video with quotes from "The Wire;" I understood almost everything. Though I think it's impossible not to have trouble understanding some African Americans talking. I also took a look at the Sopranos, and that was already harder for me (i.e. took more concentration to understand). I watched a lot of videos and movies on my computer with headphones, and that seemed to have helped me with the gradual elimination of subtitles.
I think there are a lot of things to consider, like the person talking, the quality of the audio, the volume, your concentration etc.
That is, as far as American English goes. When it comes to British English...that's another story. British English goes from hard to comprehend to plain irritating.
I'm a native English speaker and have a lot of trouble understanding the dialog in some movies. The main reason is that the actors don't enunciate. (I guess it's more realistic to have people mumbling-?) This has been increasingly a problem in the last few decades. Watch old movies - from the 1950s or earlier. The mumbling started in the 60s/70s. (OK, I'm getting up there in years, but my hearing is still very good.)
I felt this way when I started to watch the The Wire, and English is my first language.
It got better after a while, though I still struggled with the gangster slang.
Which is all anyone can advise, I think; it gets easier with practice.
Television and films are probably the toughest listening you will ever encounter as a foreign language learner, so if you can beat that then you can be confident you have mastered the language. You might like to note that the people who translate film subtitles don't work from listening to the film but from a written script.
The problems with listening to foreign language films are kind of obvious if you think about them: the speech is very fast, the vocabulary may be unfamilar, etc. The solution to the problems is just to practice listening, increase your vocabulary, etc. Can always watch the DVD with the "hard of hearing" subtitles turned on.
I agree with Shinto Sherlock's answer, but I might add "telephone conversations" to that list as well.
My French is good enough that I can sometimes be mistaken for a native speaker (at least until I make a gender error -- English brains aren't wired to store genders for nouns), but I find certain French films quite difficult to follow. Even some English-language films can be relatively difficult for me, and I'm a native speaker. (And while I'm in my 40s and long past peak hearing, I've found this to be the case for my whole life, even though I have always tested normal for hearing sensitivity.) I think there must be something about the lack of actual interaction with the "interlocutor" that makes comprehension so difficult.
As a non-native English speaker, I can understand very well American movies. But it depends on the kind of movie. There're some things you can do to improve your comprehension:
Inaudible dialogue and incomprehensible actors seem to be a mounting problem in the US as well as in the UK. More and more native speakers watch movies and series with subtitles on!
See the following articles and comments:
UPDATE
Spoiler alert: It has gotten worse! See this illuminating documentary from Vox:
