How about Time Bandits? Ancient Greek? haha!
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Was hoping he’d cover Cumberbatch in Dr. Strange. That was certainly… something.
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How does Dennis Reynolds know so much about voice acting?
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A lot of directors don’t want authentic accents. They want a conception of what the audience thinks.
I cringe when I hear southern accents at the movies, but mostly it’s done badly and exaggerate when the character is supposed to be comical, stupid, evil or racist.
That what was going on with Micky Rooney…it was supposed to be a characterture, down to the buck teeth and glasses, the accent was part of the package.
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It took a couple of centuries but Ireland finally had its revenge on the English.
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People so often read “critique” as “diss”.
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That character was a product of the period when many Americans still didn’t know any Japanese people personally but were well acquainted with the ridiculous stereotypes that became widespread during WWII.
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Pitt’s accent in Inglorious Basterds confused the hell out of me. He sounded like an actor striving for an American accent, but failing. His performance is the first and only instance I can recall where an actor’s accent belied their own nationality.
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I still got a chuckle out of the way he said “bwon-jurrr-no!” with a thick Texas drawl while trying to pass himself off as an Italian dignitary in front of the Nazis.
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Isn’t that John Cleese?
I could be wrong but I always thought it was John Cleese.
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Actually the movie where an actor was wearing a wrstwatch, I believe, was Lawrence of Arabia
Not such a bad mistake then. They had wristwatches in 1915—T.E. Lawrence himself even wore one.
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First Observation: The word “accent” is used for two quite different phenomena.
The first is how the average Texan speaks differently from the average Londoner.
Those are different variants of the same language, but each language has its own vowels, its own consonants, its own intonation, etc.
The second is how second-language learners of English will usually be influenced by their native languages to varying degrees. Some slight pronunciation mistakes will be more common, others will almost never occur, but not everyone will make all the mistakes, and everyone is trying to speak the language more like a native speaker.
Second Observation: Dialect coaching is cool.
Unfortunately, professional dialect coaching for amateurs does not seem to be a service that is readily available where I live.
Third Observation:
I have noticed that Americans are often reluctant to use terms like “pronunciation mistake” or “wrong” in connection with foreign accents, and tend to accept foreign accents as “just another way of speaking English”. That’s nice of you guys, and it’s probably vital for an immigrant nation, where immigrants would sooner or later get pissed off at being corrected all the time. But for us foreigners outside English-speaking countries who are trying to learn English, it just doesn’t make any sense. We don’t need you to respect the way we speak English here in Austria, because we really don’t speak English in Austria. We’ll pick either an American or a British pronunciation standard and try to emulate it to the best of our abilities. We’ll all fail in the end, but some of us less than others.
This different way of thinking about foreign accents has an interesting effect on movies: when an American movie is set entirely in a foreign country, all the actors will speak English to each other in a foreign accent. I hear that and I keep thinking: “why do they keep struggling with a foreign language when they are among themselves?” and sometimes “wow, that four-year-old has already studied a foreign language!”. A German or Austrian movie would just use regular, fluent German as a substitute for a language we wouldn’t understand.
So, on to Tibet.
There are many things wrong with Pitt’s imitation of bad Austrian English, but what Herr Singer says is mostly wrong.
First, Patriotic Protest: Heinrich Harrer, Brad Pitt’s character in Seven Years in Tibet, was Austrian. He attended high school and university in my home town. Yet they circle present-day Germany on the map, excluding the area he actually lived in.
Yes, it’s true that German tends to harden (devoice) final consonants. This applies to the northern varieties of the language. The phenomenon is much weaker and for some speakers even nonexistent in Austria. Also, “hard” consonants in Austria are a lot softer than in Germany. Singer claims to know how it’s supposed to sound… and it sounds… well, like a German accent. Northern Germany. Definitely not an Austrian accent.
One thing that’s completely wrong about Pitt’s accent is that it is based on an American accent. In the 20s and 30s, schools in Austria exclusively taught “the King’s English”. So, “glasshouse” should be /ˈɡlɑːshaʊs/, not /ˈɡlæshaʊs/.
But anyway, you can’t treat foreign accents the same as different regional accents among native speakers. Because all language learners try to minimize the influence of their native language, and some will succeed in some respects. So even if a certain mistake is common among native German speakers, it’s ridiculous to criticize an actor for not imitating that mistake enough.
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They’ve shown up in a number of movies, including Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments. But a wristwatch in Lawrence of Arabia wouldn’t be a blooper, for the simple reason that wristwatches already existed in that time period, and the war made them very popular.
It would take a global war to catapult the wristwatch onto the arms of men the world over. Though the wristwatch wasn’t exactly invented for World War I, it was during this era that it evolved from a useful but fringe piece of military kit to a nearly universal necessity. So why this war? Firstly, the development of the wristwatch was hastened by the style of warfare that soon became symbolic of the First World War: The trenches.
Of course, there’s always this…
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While a very interesting little film, Accent Coach Man blew it when he suggests Brad Pitt’s accent in Snatch was “Belfast”. It is not, not at all. It is Irish Traveller, which if anything is from rural Republic of Ireland. If it’s “from” anywhere, you might say it’s from maybe somewhere in the East Midlands of Ireland, perhaps Co.Meath? Don’t quote me on that though. I didn’t have too much time for Pitt as an actor prior to Snatch but he absolutely 100% nailed that accent and character in that film - and that’s not an easy accent AT ALL. I’d love to hear what Travellers thought of it.
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Previous experience.
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Bring on the holiday offers of ‘free 14-foot subtitle monitor with “liberator” style scrollback (and language select) jog control; with purchase of mattress.*’
*Not all models include improvisatory mumble translation and GPS spoof accent macking. <–expected features to the @Midnight BlyRay Pack
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If you close your eyes, it sounded like he was mimicking Kiefer Sutherland.
