Cape Fear
The Godfather, Part II
This Boy’s Life
Frankenstein
I forgot about both Frankenstein and Godfather II, though I don’t know what accent he was trying to use as The Creature.
Oh, crap.
I also have never seen the other two films.
The first time I saw SWEp2 I was in a packed theatre. When the young Boba Fett (Daniel Logan) came on screen and said “Hey Dad, there’s a Jedi here to see you” (or something to thar effect) the whole theatre burst into laughter. Boba and Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison) both have very kiwi accents which to most New Zealanders sounds incredibly out of place in the Star Wars universe. Of course, if a New Zealander is in a big budget American movie, they are nearly always a villain (one of the few exceptions being Anna Paquin, but can you imagine her as a villain?)
Hey, that reminded me. I really liked Paquin’s southern accent in X-Men. Something about the way she drawled out “Rogue.” Of course, it could be just because I’m a big fan of Paquin, or just that whatever accent Halle Berry was trying to accomplish was so sketchy that it sounded good by comparison.
I don’t doubt that’s her normal speaking voice, but it’s still just… wrong. Hardly anybody speaks with that just-down-from-the-Plantation accent anymore.
No argument there. Although it’s probably more likely that between the time Hunter left the city and the time I left the city, it’d already been absorbed by metro Atlanta. It just bugs me that southerners in movies/TV are always either Deliverance or Gone With the Wind, when the genuine accent is somewhere in between.
Make that “An American transplant to Austrailia with a re-adopted American accent”, and I’m right there with you.
You’re thinking of Mel Gibson. Born in New York (upstate), moved to Australia around age 10, now once again a resident of the U.S. Crowe was born in New Zealand and has lived in Australia most of his life.
Ah! I stand corrected.
I think I’ve seen on this board that the family of Daphne on “Frasier” seems to be from all over England, as if they’d never actually lived together. Do the English Dopers here concur?
I too remember Monty Python trying to be American. It took several sentences before I realized that was the intent, because they got it so wrong.
No one’s mentioned G. Paltrow in “Shakespeare in Love.” How did she do in that?
Richard Gere in The Jackal. Irish my arse.
Huh? I hear that accent all the time among the “old Atlanta” set.
That is a standard Southern, country club accent.
Oh, and Intaglio: you think that Russell Crowe sounded anything like the real-life John Nash? And that Kevin Spacey turned in a good Southern accent in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil?
Ummmm…Where you from, friend? 
Thank you for missing and illustrating my point simultaneously. In the Star Wars universe there is no “New Zealand, Earth.”
While Jango is siding with the enemy, for now at least his clones are fighting alongside the noble Jedi. And Boba is neither hero nor villian yet–he’s just a kid who’s close to his father. You may find this article interesting.
Don’t forget “Ever After” where EVERYONE IN FRANCE HAS A BRITISH ACCENT. Apparently. I mean, I’ve never been to France… so…
To give answer to Spoke
I have lived all over the U.S and the World.
I stand by my opinion
That Russell Crowe was correct in his playing, and speaking like John Nash, I took an interview/lecture that Dr. Nash did in Philadelphia, and he replicated Nash perfectly in the film.
As for Kevin Spacey, even though Jim Williams was dead when the film Midnight in the garden of Good and Evil was made, Kevin Spacey did alot of research to get the speaking and mannerisms of Jim Williams correct. I have lived in Fla/Ga and he replicated the Jim Williams perfectly in the film.
Maybe I missed mention of it, but how did we get this far without singling out Nicolas Cage’s horrid Southern “accent” in Con Air?
RE: Tim Burton’s version of Sleepy Hollow–Johnny Depp and the other cast members did decent accents (colonists who hadn’t yet shed all of the British accent), but Christina Ricci’s was slipping most of the time. She just couldn’t seem to “hold on” to it.
Heck, her boyfriend Clive seemed to be from all over England. Worst English accent I’ve ever heard (and that includes Kevin Costner’s) – it tended to careen from Eton to the East End via Liverpool and Newcastle in the same sentence. Bad, bad, bad.
I just assumed that they were being deliberately obnoxious to be funny. Let’s not forget that they had a resident American [Gilliam], who also did the exaggerated accent.
Another really bad English accent comes from Mary Steenbergen in Ted Danson’s version of Gulliver’s Travels. Ted doesn’t seem to have bothered with the accent at all, whereas Mary shouldn’t have.
As for a good fake accent, I have to mention British actor Adrian Lester’s turn in Primary Colors. Emma Thompson didn’t quite manage the American accent, but Lester had me completely fooled.
Gwyneth Paltrow always seems to have a fairly convincing generic southern English accent in the clips I’ve seen.
Nicholas Cage in Captain Correlli’s Mandolin… An “Eye-talian” accent that turned a dramatic romance into a comedy. Really, painful atrocious, to the point of being quite funny- when the DVD froze 15 minutes from the end, I took it back and got a new movie in exchange, although they offered me another copy of Capt. Correlli, I just couldn’t take it anymore. It’s almost worth seeing for the unbelievable badness that is his attempt at sounding Italian.
Oh, and here’s another vote for Ewan in Blackhawk Down- much as I love him, he’s no Yankee and never will be, at least not vocally. Hands-down one of the most distractingly off accents in a major movie in years.