XANDER CAGE
Member
he sounds like his sinuses have completely shut down
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Characters on tv shows or movies with wrong accents
- Thread starter Charles Foster Kane
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he sounds like his sinuses have completely shut down
Trent Strong
Banned
Damian Lewis on Homeland. He doesn't sound American.
Oh man he's going to be playing an American version of his Broadchurch character on Fox next season. I can't wait to see what he does with that.
WyndhamPrice
Member
what does "American" sound like? I'm pretty sensitive to accents and he's never bothered me, even in Band of Brothers.
Farscape always made me laugh because of how Australian everyone but Crichton and Aeryn are.
Yeah Gus was awful. My spanish has evaporated over the last decade but even I was cringing every time he spoke it.
To be fair, everytime I hear english in an Asian film here, even if it's by an english speaking actor, it's absolutely terrible as well. It isn't just the accent that is the problem, it's the writing which is almost always one step away from stereotypical enrish mistranslations. Someone asked my ex and I to do voice overs for a film here and the writing was so atrocious it was impossible for us to sound natural. "A ha, see maybe you'll know I'm bad boy, right, because tonight, later I'm bad now good. You like?"
To be fair, everytime I hear english in an Asian film here, even if it's by an english speaking actor, it's absolutely terrible as well. It isn't just the accent that is the problem, it's the writing which is almost always one step away from stereotypical enrish mistranslations. Someone asked my ex and I to do voice overs for a film here and the writing was so atrocious it was impossible for us to sound natural. "A ha, see maybe you'll know I'm bad boy, right, because tonight, later I'm bad now good. You like?"
WyndhamPrice
Member
That's one of the most bizarre things about some anime. I know we had a thread about it a while back but the clips of English being spoken in the original Japanese versions of some shows are so, so bad.
Littlefinger's accent is so weird I've just sort of retconned it in my mind as him desperately trying to cover up his kind of country, lord-of-the-middle-of-nowhere accent and trying to sound more traditionally highborn. Really, all of GoT is pretty inconsistent. In the first season they kind of tried to have all the Northern characters have a North English accent versus all the Southerners, but that kind of fell apart over time.
Charles Foster Kane
Rosebud
Gus, Hector and many of the extras/small characters in BB make Keanu in Dracula seem like a natural.
Anticitizen One
Banned
Bane in Dark Knight Returns. Why does he have a british accent?
Devolution
Member
The places I lived in, "American" was all over the place because adults living here longer than I've been alive still retain their accents.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
For me, this typically happens specifically when shows do a "Chinatown" episode and they just have people who speak Mandarin and Cantonese interchangeably. Alternatively, they have a non-Chinese actor try to fake the Chinese sounds.
D
Deleted member 30609
Unconfirmed Member
to be fair, it's impossible to find a video of Aiden Gillen talking like a regular person in any context.
Or that don't speak the language properly when they're supposed to.
I've been watching Breaking Bad (seen the first 3 seasons) and as you probably know (at least those who have seen the show) there are plenty of instances where characters speak Spanish. These are actors playing Hispanic characters. In what should be regular talk, they speak this butchered, awful, cringe worthy Spanish that completely breaks the immersion.
Now, I understand someone who doesn't speak the language might not notice or even care, but it is still very, very lousy. Sometimes it's not even that the accent is wrong but that the phrases are wrong or they have trouble finishing a word. A way to see what I mean would be like if there was an American character on a show or movie played by an actor of any nationality with a language other than English who doesn't speak English properly. Yeah, lame.
At least get actors who can speak the freaking language /rant.
Stuff like this is so annoying to me and takes me out of whatever I'm watching. So distracting.
Edit: Thanks for moving it!
You need to give me some examples. In the case of Breaking Bad, you have Mexican Spanish, Spain Spanish, Columbian Spanish, Chilean Spanish.
Being from Texas I can discern Northern Mexico Spanish, but that is about it.
As far as English speakers in US television shows. As much love as I can give to Idris Elba, he does not speak like any American I have ever known. The same with Dominic West when considering The Wire. Again it is like he is hitting the right notes, but it does not sound right at all.
What is funny about those two examples, is that they are not bad American accents. You cannot tell what their natural accent would be or where they are from, but there is just something off about them. Nobody talks like that but there is not a hint of where they are from. Hugh Dancey is another one with his role in Hannibal. It is a weird alien American accent, but not so bad that you would call him out on it. But nobody talks like that.
As far as really good ones. Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Naomi Wats, Jamie Bamber, hell even Yvonne Strahovski. It seems Australians are better with an American accent then Brits in general.
Discotheque
Banned
aiden gillen is a decent actor but he has a stupid ass accent in everything he's in. i just think it's the way he naturally talks...weirdly.
Trent Strong
Banned
D
Deleted member 30609
Unconfirmed Member
you, sir, need to watch the end of season five again.
Devolution
Member
What? I'm saying "American" goes in all directions. Those people have been "American" longer than I have so I'm not sure what "sounding American" is like unless we're talking specific regional accents.
This. Recently Band of Brothers pissed me off. The production values are so great but the British in that (when they appear) are just ridiculous caricatures. Much of the show is a total american bastardisation of the war, really takes you out of it. I don't get why it's hard to understand that there are different regions and countries and thereby accents in the UK.
I've never really heard a convincing Scottish accent in a US show. Quite often Scottish just equals a terrible Irish impression. Again there's many different Scottish accents, which is why Johnny Depp impressed me in Finding Neverland - it wasn't perfect but he tried to get a specific accent and manner of talking down, which is more than what most do.
Atraveller
Banned
Keanu in the day the earth stood still is the worst.
Trent Strong
Banned
Damian Lewis is English, but he purposely does an American accent to play his part in Homeland, because he's playing an American. He doesn't use the American accent, mind you, but an American accent. I don't think his American accent is all that convincing. I think his accent still has an English sound. I didn't realize that the idea of an American accent that was distinct from an English accent was some sort of racist construct created by white males. I guess I'm Hitler.
Daffy Duck
Member
Richard "The Irish man" Gere in The Jackal.
If you haven't seen it, you should treat yourself. It's hilarious.
If you haven't seen it, you should treat yourself. It's hilarious.
Every accent in the movie was fucking weird.
However, Idris Elba in Prometheus was the most offensively bad accent I've heard in a recent film. What the fuck was he trying to do? Southern? Texan? Generic redneck? And he didn't even need it. There is nothing in the movie or his character that called for anything but his natural voice.
George Oscar Bluth II
Banned
Halle Berry as Storm pops into mind...
George Oscar Bluth II
Banned
But Liam Neeson is Irish.
Playing a German. Listen to the difference between his accent and Fiennes accent.
George Oscar Bluth II
Banned
Oh...now I get ya.
Her French accent in Charlotte Gray is atrocious as well. It's one of those movies where everyone speaks English and the audience just has to accept they are actually talking French, but she does say a couple of sentences in actual French at the beginning and it's just laughable. I mean, IIRC in the movie, her French is supposed to be so perfect that people can't even tell it's not her first language...
Actually, while I'm at it, actors should just stop imitating French accents, it always sounds off and sometimes it's borderline offensive - I'm looking at you, The Pink Panther (the ones with Steve Martin are so bad, I was cringing the whole way through). I can probably count on half a hand the number of times I've heard a somewhat convincing French accent from an actor that wasn't French.
Devolution
Member
I don't watch the show, he could keep the brit accent then instead of failing hard at whatever regional accent he's trying.
It is part of the joke, the bad over-the-top accent is part of the character and if it offends you, it is succeeding.
Yeah I know it was done on purpose but still, it was painful to watch. It's almost on the level of making a movie with a guy playing an Asian character whose only lines consist of "ching chang chong".
Invisible_Insane
Member
Elysium. Jodi Foster.
Gods what a terrible movie.
Gods what a terrible movie.
The worst thing I ever heard was in Hitccock's "Foreign Correspondent". A large part of the movie takes place in the Netherlands. To add a "coleur locale" to the Dutch scenes, at a certain point a Dutch girl tells a policeman about a murder having taken place. In Dutch. Unfortunately, the English/American child actress for this part obviously had never heard spoken Dutch in her life, nobody had taught her how to pronounce her lines so she declared the text using English pronunciation rules which made the scene complete gibberish to a Dutch speaker. I've watched that scene almost a dozen times but I've been unable to descramble her speech. I can pick out at most 50%, the rest is still abracadabra,
You can watch that scene on http://blip.tv/letconex/1940-foreign-correspondent-1-5006495
(skip the movie to 41:16)
You can watch that scene on http://blip.tv/letconex/1940-foreign-correspondent-1-5006495
(skip the movie to 41:16)
Moff
Member
99% when people speak german in american movies, its absolutely terrible and quite hard to understand, yep, breaking bad has those, too.
one of the very few exceptions is inglourious bastards, the actors are german and of course they speak it perfectly, but the italian and french is great there, too.
one of the very few exceptions is inglourious bastards, the actors are german and of course they speak it perfectly, but the italian and french is great there, too.
You know what's really weird? When real French dudes have actual French accents and still sound like they have terrible fake French accents. Like this guy, Sylvester Lefort:
http://youtu.be/xrUaBYD-pVk
He's an actual French guy and that is his actual accent.
Yes, but he is French. You can insult the French. Martin wasn't even as bad as the last Sellers movies with the accent. And even then, it is not insulting the French, it is actually laughing at David Suchet for his portrayal of Hercule Poirot.
XANDER CAGE
Member
Oh shit, I forgot about this. I honestly still don't understand what she was supposed to sound like.
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