Slate‘s Matt Feeney suggests that one reason for the huge popular- ity of Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake on DVD (it’s earned about $20 million, or nine times the U.S. theatrical gross) is that it’s easier to understand the dialogue on a disc. The film’s Cockney accents were indecipherable to most American viewers in theatres, but Cake‘s popularity on DVD suggests, says Feeney, that “viewers are willing to abide this type of difficulty when the ‘pause’ and ‘rewind’ buttons are only a thumb’s-length away.” Maybe, but why would pause and rewind when you can just turn on the English subtitles? This is why, for me, I made a point of getting the DVD of Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, which I understood about 20% of, at most, when I saw it at Sundance three or four years ago.
