All the Sioux characters spoke Lakota with female syntax.
at least those are intelligible accents. most of the time, when you hear any form of Chinese on an American movie or TV, it’s gibberish spoken with a mouthful of tapioca balls soaked with drool.
Not a movie, but the videogame Resident Evil 4 is set in Spain but the side characters all speak in Mexican accents
Not a movie, but I watched the first season of Lost and it really annoyed me that the Korean dude was supposed to be a Korean who had lived in Korea his entire life and was unable to speak much English. Every time he said anything in Korean, you could immediately tell that he was Korean American. He had the thickest accent ever.
I watched one episode of Without a Trace where the story was supposed to be about a Korean family. They all spoke Korean with Chinese accents.
In that terrible James Bond movie with Halle Berry, the supposedly North Korean dude spoke like he was from South Korea.
Rosanna Arquette sounded like she had a Martian accent. Seriously, I couldn’t tell what the hell she was aiming for.
Russell Crowe in Gladiator, playing a Roman nicknamed “the Spaniard” who spoke with an Australian accent.
German officers in WWII movies were invariably Englishmen. I grew up thinking that James Mason was German.
Which is why I hate when Swedish television shows imported programs with voiceovers instead of the original recorded sounds with subtitles. Why can’t American/British/Whatever TV companies provide copies without them when selling the programs abroad?
White guy who speaks Korean here. I was thrilled to hear that even I could tell they guy from Lost had an accent - I was like “hey he speaks Korean worse than me!” Then I saw him on Hawaii Five-Oh and realized that his English is that of someone born and raised in the US.
In the recent remake of the film Red Dawn, North Korea launches an invasion on the Pacific Northwest (the first of many idiotic premises you need to overlook in order to enjoy that movie). In that one, not only did they have bad accents, most of them didn’t even look Korean.
I knew the actor from his previous work - for instance, he played a recurring character called “Gavin” on *Angel *- so my first reaction was “Hey, I didn’t know he spoke Korean.” The fact that he had an accent was no surprise - not many people can speak two languages with no accent in either.
Yes, but accents were not a particular part of the “realism” of that movie, which was emphatically a mythologized slice of Roman culture than specific, real events and people. And nobody spoke Latin in it.
I read somewhere that Crowe actually wanted to use a Spanish accent, but Ridley Scott wouldn’t let him.
Isn’t that supposed to be a clue? He speaks differently, because he’s a Balt, not a Russian.
Everyone on this thread seems dauntingly brilliant about accents ! I’m very bad at telling one accent from another, so nearly all the annoyances told of here, would go right over my head. I maybe have the excuse of being British, resident in Britain – but I couldn’t tell a Spanish Spanish accent from a Mexican from a Puerto Rican from a Bolivian one, to save my life. And the matter of translators speaking in the interviewee’s accent, usually badly: something I’m not aware of ever having come across. Is it maybe a particularly American thing?
It’s possible to feel that occasionally, there’s something to be said for ignorance – it can save one a good deal of irritation ! Though nitpicking mistakes in films, novels, etc., can be a pleasure in its own right. There are subjects on which I can be a purist and pedant in that way; but with accents, I’m utterly at sea.