More Phony Accents. Matt Damon, an American actor from the Boston area, is affecting a BRITISH accent to play a GERMAN in the soon-to-be-released film The Brothers Grimm. Is everybody in Hollywood an idiot?
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Does moving from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Hollywood, California cut one's IQ catastrophically?
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Let's be clear here. Germans trying to speak English do so with a German accent, not a British accent. And when they are speaking in their own country, to other Germans, in German — as they are supposed to be doing in this movie — they have no accent. If this is an American film, it should be filmed with everybody speaking American English unless a given character is non-German, in which case each such character should be assigned suchever accent as his nationality mandates: a British accent only if he is British; Danish if he is Danish; Czech if s/he is Czech.
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You'd think that would be obvious, even to Hollywood. You'd be wrong.
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Every American actor or actress — yes, I know that "actress" has, of late, become "politically incorrect", but, like In Living Color's Homey the Clown of old, I "don't play dat"— who takes the role of a foreigner, of almost any nationality, ends up affecting a British accent. Have they no pride in this greatest of all countries, ever?
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There are, it would seem, only two types of people on this entire planet: Americans and everybody else. Americans speak with an American accent (correctly). All foreigners speak with a British accent (defectively).
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As Ed McMahon might say in a Carson riff, "I did not know that!"
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I thought that Germans spoke with a German accent, Frenchmen spoke with a French accent, ancient Greeks would be expected to speak with a modern-Greek accent, ancient Romans would be expected to speak with an Italian accent, and anyone from an unfamiliar speech community wouldn't speak with any accent whatsoever but would speak to us normally as he would be perceived to speak normally in his own language, since any depiction of him speaking with his peers in his own country would be designed to give us insight into the person and culture from within, not without. But that doesn't always happen.
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Sometimes it does, or at least used to. There is a 1940 James Stewart film, The Shop Around the Corner, that ranks among Time magazine's 100 films of all time. It is set in pre-World War II Budapest, Hungary (Note: the very next year, Hungary became a military ally of Hitler, a fact few Americans today are aware of). In 1940, however, Budapest was a quaint Central European backwater where an innocent romance could be set. And so we were allowed to see Hungarians as they saw themselves: with no accent. James Stewart and his eventual (tho initially concealed) love interest, Margaret Sullavan, spoke perfect American English, since their characters would have spoken perfect Hungarian and we, as viewers of their life as tho from within, would also have spoken perfect Hungarian. Thus, we hear perfect English. That's the way language should work: accents only BETWEEN cultures, not WITHIN cultures. And even then, the accent should be authentic to the culture in question: German accent for Germans, French for French, Russian for Russian. Not British for everyone.
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That's not the way the idiots who run Hollywood today operate. Dreamworks, an American company, produced Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe, an Australian. Joaquin Phoenix, an American playing a Roman emperor, affected a British accent. Why?
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ABC recently showed a miniseries entitled Rome, in which everybody spoke with a British accent, even tho there was no such thing as a British accent at the time the series took place. Why? The mere fact that this was an ABC/BBC co-production is no explanation. Why should the British partner dominate? ABC/Disney is much bigger than the BBC, and much richer. The United States is 5 times as populous as Britain. Why is American speech denigrated on American TV?
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Now Miramax, headquartered in New York City, has put out a movie about Germans in which two co-stars, one American and one Australian, speak with British accents. Why?
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It's got to stop.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,869.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:05 AM