For me, the throbbing, bassy sound mix at New York’s Alice Tully Hall killed a good half of the dialogue during the 10.4 screening of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice. Which I mentioned that night and in a morning-after piece the next day. I noted in the second riff that “I was able to understand somewhere between 15% and 20% of Katherine Waterston, Joanna Newsom and Jena Malone‘s dialogue, largely because they all seem to converse in hippie-chick fry.” Well, deliverance has arrived with the Inherent Vice screener, which the UPS guy dropped off an hour ago. I popped it in and watched the first scene (i.e., between Waterston and Joaquin Phoenix) and could hear 95% of the dialogue without the slightest difficulty. I still don’t understand what’s going on and Phoenix still sounds slurry-muttery here and there, but I can hear the words. Finally! Don’t even suggest that the Avery Fisher problems were about my own ears. Some readers tried this after I moaned about the Interstellar sound mix, and look what happened with that one. In all modesty I’m a Zen master of theatrical sound assessments.