I mostly agree. Sometimes it was good, and sometimes it was kind of jarring. At least it was better than whoever it was played Turtle in North Shore. That was horrible.
When I heard Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, I actually believed I was listening to a… Hollywood movie star imitating a West Virginia girl.
(And don’t get me wrong – I love Jodie Foster).
Well, now you know why Abe Simpson won’t recognize you.
Not quite the same thing, but I was…surprised when I read that Kryten’s accent in Red Dwarf was not only supposed to be Canadian, but was inspired by some time Robert Llewellen spent in Vancouver. I’m not sure there’s actually anyone on the planet who speaks English with quite the accent he managed to come up with, though I guess that’s appropriate for a show set in outer space.
A dingo ate my baby!
I agree. It was pretty awful.
(for the Americans reading this, the movie we’re talking about is A Cry in the Dark. It got a different title for the Australian market)
It goes a bit beyond accent, but Russel Crowe’s, “I speak Japanese” in The Insider was hilarious. One of only three times I have heard a Japanese audience laugh at the movies.
Onee-san, sake mo ippai! 
I thought the accents in Fargo were pretty good as well. Yes, they were exaggerated for comic effect, but I know lots of people who do actually speak like that. I don’t, but I do notice my broader vowels and pronounciation of “about” and “out” are definitely more Canadian than American.
My brother’s mother-in-law hates that movie. Absolutely hates it. Why? Because everyone, even random strangers, tells her how much she sounds like the wife that was abducted in the movie. Once when it was on at my house, I had to look up (I was reading or something, so wasn’t paying close attention to the movie) every time that actress came on the screen to make sure it wasn’t Barb.
So I’d say that the lesser characters - the wife, the bar girls, the older man Marge interviewed - these accents are spot on. The main characters? Probably too exaggerated, but still not so bad.
I’m not from the South, so I can’t hear regional differences, but I always thought Steenburgen just sounded “Southern.” Yes, you are welcome to mock me mercilessly. Turns out she’s from Arkansas.
Er, how “Southern” is an Arkansas accent?
But Ewan Bremner, his fellow actor in Blackhawk Down and alum from Trainspotting, did a good american accent if I remember properly.
I’m from Atlanta, and think Burt Reynolds, Jon Voigt, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox all did a very good job of sounding like Atlanta suburbanites in Deliverance. Now then, Reynolds is from Georgia, albeit south Georgia, and Beatty is from Kentucky, so not that tough for them to do southern. But Voight is from Yonkers, NY, fercryinoutloud, and he did an excellent job. Ronny Cox is from New Mexico and did a fine job as well.
If you saw it: how did Chicagoland native Gary Sinise do playing Harry S in Truman?
I’ve posted this a jillion times, but: did you happen to catch Cate Blanchette in The Gift? I think that was a solid and appropriately understated vocal performance of a Southern accent.
Agreed.
Some people give Tommy Lee Jones grief for Clay Bertrand’s “old New Orleans money” accent in JFK. Jones may have overshot the target a tad, but the real reason that accent may have jarred present-day New Orleanians is that it’s very much a dying accent. In the early 1960s, you would have heard it more often. These days, the few New Orleanians that talk like Clay Bertrand (and there are a handful) are over 75-80 years old.
I have never in my life heard anyone in a movie actually sound like they’re from New Jersey. I was born and raised in western Essex County, and no one can tell where I’m from because (with the exception of talking too fast) I have no regional vocal cues. My mother sounds definitively South Jersey, and only people from Union, Hudson, and Bergen counties sound even close to that crap they push in films.
Only Kevin Smith movies get the Jersey accent right–and that’s because nobody’s faking it.
As I said in the other thread, I thought the New England accents in Miracle were excellent.
FWIW, I had a friend from Minnesota who thought the accents in Fargo sucked, but I can’t tell the difference between them and the real thing.
I also recall Tom Bosley in Murder, She Wrote doing an atrocious Maine accent as well as Kathy Bates in Dolores Claiborne.
I wouldn’t know personally, but a cousin of mine from Atlanta thought that Kevin Spacey’s Savannah accent in Midnight in the Garden or Good and Evil was pretty good, whereas others in the same film like Jude Law only managed to spew out a GWTW sort of Southern. People from Savannah have a smooth and somehow inviting accent (makes the women all the more charming), which Spacey was able to emulate pretty well.
So I’m told anyway.
After hearing Hugh Laurie speak in his British goofy-guy accent (like the prince in Blackadder), I have to say he manages a good “American” accent in House M.D.
I’ve always appreciated Voigt’s ability to do this. He can differentiate dialects, too. In Rainmaker, he did an amazingly authentic Birmingham upper-crust accent.
I said this in the other thread, but Rachel Griffiths does a convincing American accent in Six Feet Under.
A lot of people from Kentucky claim that Edward Norton’s accent in Primal Fear was overdone. Not being FROM Kentucky, but living there, I disagree. His rural, Eastern Kentucky was pretty good.
After all, he went into the audition using the accent, and they thought he was from there.
I think this thread is just another example of hearing your own voice and sayind “That doesn’t sound like me!”
Getting anyone to agree on what a regional accent sounds like is just futile.