My ears! my ears! (bad accents in movies)

Cafe Society
21

Nicole Kidman’s accents are excellent. Actually, MOST actors and actresses in big films put on decent accents. Remember that they’re trained by dialect coaches, so it’s not hard for them to get it right.

The best accent ever was John Hillerman’s English accent as Higgins in “Magnum, P.I.” Many Englishmen swore up and down it was the real article, but it wasn’t. Hillerman’s from Texas.

Worst I’ve heard recently - gotta throw my two cents in with Ewan Macgregor and Orlando Bloom in “Black Hawk Down.” Just dreadful.

The king of bad accents remains Kevin Costner.

22

William Hurt in I love You to Death, doing a Southern accent that was painful to hear.

Otherwise, it’s a movie which was textbook in actors expertly picking up accents. Kevin Kline doing Italian, Tracey Ullman doing American, and Joan Plowright doing a very convincing Yugoslavian…at least I haven’t heard any Yugoslavians complain.

23

Russell Crowe’s accent in The Insider was unbearable.

24

Worst accent has to be Brion James attempting an English accent in Tango and Cash. He sounded something like an Australian with terminal throat cancer.

[hijack]
Someone mentioning James Doohan reminded me of an interview with him I read in a magazine years back - he was talking (among other things) about how they’d considered various different ethnicities for the engineer character in Star Trek. AFAIR it went something like this :-

"So, when Captain Kirk shouted ‘Scotty, I want warp eight now!’, instead of hearing ‘But, Captain, the dilithium crystals cannae take it any more!’, you would have heard ‘Si.’

"Or " (Australian) "'Now look ‘ere, Captain, I’ve taold you I don’t like to gao faster than warp six. Oh, that’s an order. Well, orl right.’

"Or " (French) "'Ah, ah, ah, mon capitaine, you are 'aving ze joke with me, non? Also, back on ze planete, I notice you did not get ze girl… you should ‘ave stuck with lucky Pierre.’

"Or " (Long John Silver) "'Ah, ye be young Kirk, arrr? Well, belay that nonsense, or I’ll see ‘ee hanging from the highest yardarm in Starfleet.’

“Or my favourite would be Reggie, and he would say something like " (very, very English) “'I’m terribly sorry, sir, but I’m afraid I can’t get the little buggers to move along any faster.””

(If I’ve disillusioned anyone who thought James “aye, the haggis is in the fire fer sure” Doohan was genuinely Scottish, my deepest apologies.)
[/hijack]

25

Oh lord people! You forgot the worst accent in any movie ever. Brad Pitt as an Irish dude in the IRA, I think with Harrsion Ford. Painfrickingful

26

This probably isn’t fair, because I don’t think he was trying to do an English accent, but Tony Curtis in “The Black Shield of Falworth” is hilarious when he says, “Yonda is the castle of my fadda!”

27

Not counting the Australian accents in the Simpsons because that is a TV show, by far the worst accent I have ever heard in a movie is Michael Caine’s New England accent in “Cyder House Rules”.

Good movie and performance though.

28

They both do very good accents, in my opinion. Rachel Griffiths seems to have a pretty good subtle California type of accent though I’m not from that area so others might disagree.

Another good accent was Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers. I was surprised to find out he wasn’t an American.

29

I haven’t seen Black Hawk Down, but in Velvet Goldmine Ewan McGregor plays an rock star (based on Iggy Pop) who grew up in a trailer park in the Midwest but sounds like a Scot trying with limited success to fake a West Coast accent.

A Beautiful Mind, a hideous accent – Russell Crowe as Foghorn Leghorn as John Nash.

Any fake Southern accent will almost certainly be awful. This is true even when an actor who naturally has one Southern accent tries to fake another Southern accent.

And I hope Eve can forgive me for beating her to this one, but Marlene Dietrich’s fake Cockney in Witness for the Prosecution was truly painful.

30

Oh, I almost forgot Brad Pitt in Interview with a Vampire, where his accent flew back and forth from bad Southern to bad French with occasional stops in California.

31

You obviously weren’t anywhere near any Australians watching Evil Angels when that infamous “A dingo’s got my baby!” line hit our eardrums. I was watching that with a largish group of family and friends and, 100%, we were in convulsions of laughter. Believe me, we weren’t laughing with her.

That has always been my nomination for worst accent - but Kevin Costner in that Robin Hood dreck gave her a run for her money.

32

Well, scraping the bottom of the pool, I should say Adam Sandler in “Waterboy”. I have never met anyone from Louisiana, but I am sure that NOBODY speaks like that.

Also, Brad Pitt in Snatch, although I think the idea was to make his speech unintelligible. Has anyone heard a real pikey (however it is spelt). How do they really talk?

33

I have to confess I was about to correct you, since I remember “A dingo ate my baby” (I guess I did correct you a little) came from “A Cry in the Dark”, which it did, but when looking up Evil Angels in the IMDB, I got “A Cry in the Dark”. I guess it was known by a different title in Australia.

Title?0094924A Cry in the Dark, IMDB

(sorry)

Lothos

34

Much as it pains me to say it, this is probably an urban legend., and one I’ve helped propagate on this Board. We’ve had a thread about this in the past. People chimed in to say that they watched The Black Shield of Falworth all the way through without this line ever coming up. Other movies have been suggested, but Curtis doesn’t ever seem to have said this line. It’s OK, though. If you want to hear Curtis’ out-of-place Brooklynese, watch Spartacus. I especially like him saying that he was taught to “sing songs and tell tales”, but later when he “sings”, it’s just recitation.

We’ve had this discussion about accents before, and I have to chime in that the recently deceased Leo McKern couldn’t do an American accent to save himself. He tries one on at least two occasions on Rumpole audiotapes, and he does it by speaking very slowly and deliberately. He draws words out in very strange ways, and it doesn’t sound like any accent I’m familiar with.

35

I have to confess I was about to correct you, since I remember “A dingo ate my baby” (I guess I did correct you a little) came from “A Cry in the Dark”, which it did, but when looking up Evil Angels in the IMDB, I got “A Cry in the Dark”. It was known as “Evil Angels” only in Australia.

Title?0094924A Cry in the Dark, IMDB

This completely validates your point

I apologyse for doubting you.

Lothos

36

Since Star Trek has been brought up, how about Patrick Stewart? He sure doesn’t sound French to me. :smiley:

37

While I thoroughly enjoyed the movie “13 Days”, I found Kevin Costner’s accent from Boston, Mass to be thoroughly strange. It took me about 15 minuts of the movie to move beyond how he was saying things before I could listen to what was being said. Still, darn good movie.

Guy Pearce isn’t American? Good grief, he did a darn fine accent in “Memento”.

38

I’d like to cite generally the film On the Beach, where we are led to believe that the entire city of Melbourne speaks a charming variant of American Midwest.

Have any of our Down Under friends seen it? Which do you prefer, Anthony Perkins’ American Lite, or Fred Astaire’s complete non-attempt?

(Come to think of it, I’m not even sure Astaire was supposed to be a native-speaking Australian in that film. If anyone knows, please tell me.)

39

I’m noticing a strong correlation between where people are from and which fake accents irritate them the most. Doesn’t surprise me.

In that vein, as one who grew up in Georgia and now resides in Arizona I have to say two things:

  1. I completely agree with Mr. Blue Sky about 99.999% of fake Southern accents sucking major wanker, and

  2. What the hell was with the accents in Raising Arizona???

40

As a south Louisianian I can vouch that his had to be the most insulting accent in a movie ever. What is ironic about it is his Cajun Man character on SNL wasn’t all that bad.

And speaking of horrible south Louisiana accents, Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy went from completely mauling the accent in the beginning to just sounding a bit irritating by the end.

To be fair, its not an easy accent to mimic. I grew up listening to my grandparents who are 100% coonass (cajun) and still can’t fake the accent.