I think Michael C. Hall, an actor I like, ruined the Mini Series Safe with his atrocious accent in that show. Not that it was a great show anyway, but it’s all I remember.
I just read several reviews on IMDB and many folks seem to agree with me.
Some dipshit decided that Domino’s Pizza commercials in Canada needed to use someone who used Canadian vernacular in a Canadian accent.
First of all, the actor is not using Canadian vernacular.
Secondly, the accent that the actor uses is nothing known in Canada. It is completely fabricated.
Bob and Doug McKenzie are parodies. No Canadian speaks like they do. But Domino’s thinks that we do.
The Domino’s ads that air in Canada are insulting to Canadians. But Domino’s paid for the production of the ad, and they paid for the ad space, and now they air it with subtitles, so we real English-speaking Canadians understand what they’re selling.
'Nuff said.
Anyone who says there is no such thing as a bad movie accent has never seen Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Good one. It’s a real contrast seeing him alongside Gary Oldman, who’s one of a few Brits who seem to have no problem at all taking on an American accent (Commissioner Gordon, as I recall; haven’t seen that in a while, so fire away if anyone disagrees).
Southern US accents were mentioned upthread. I’ve noticed that more than a few California-based actors are really bad at that. It’s as if the only thought or effort they put into it is to remember a few episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies that they watched in their childhood. I’ve often thought that it’d bother me greatly to see that if I were from the South. Any Southerners feel that way?
Poor Sarah Holcomb (Animal House, Caddyshack), who apparently ended up getting wrecked by drugs and mental issues, is an unfortunate person to have to dump on. But sweet Jesus, her attempt at an Irish accent in Caddyshack handily disproves the thread’s thesis. It’s an uneven and choppy film to begin with and her performance was not a high point.
Due respect to Bostonians and the pain of hearing a bad accent, it drove me crazy that Angie Harmon, whose character was supposed to have been born and raised there on Rizzoli & Isles just blithely went about with her native Texas accent completely unaltered-- no attempt to even try a neutral accent of any kind, let alone to sound Bostonian.
All the other characters who were supposed to be Bostonian had at least some type of New England sound, and to make it worse, Harmon’s character’s parents were series regulars, so there was no “Oh, her [off-stage] parents are Texans.”
In fact, you can have a bad accent-- even if it’s the actor’s natural one.
Well, as was described up thread, there really isn’t one southern US accent. Heck, there isn’t one Texas accent. Some folks have a west Texas accent, folks from east Texas sound different than they do, and folks from different parts of east Texas can have discernible accents from each other. Of course, this is slowly starting to go away as people move around more.
So, unless it’s being exaggerated for some reason I normally just think “Well, that’s an odd accent.” and move on. Since there are so many different southern accents, just about anything in the neighborhood of a southern accent is plausible to me.
What I think happens more often in movies is that to a Hollywood casting director, who could have grown up in Michigan, gone to school in New York, and been living the last 15 years in California, is that a Southern accent is a Southern accent, so a family who is supposed to live in a tiny town in Mississippi consists of actors who are a native Georgian from Atlanta, a native Kentuckian from a rural area in the south, a southern Virginian, and a native Northern Hoosier who moved to Tennessee as a teen, but does a fair imitation of the neighbors.
They’re all just “Southern” as far as the casting director knows, but anyone who lives south of Mitchell, Indiana, and east of Arizona, has bleeding ears through the movie.
Thank you. I love Caddyshack, because it is overall hilarious, but two things take me out of the picture: one is, as you noted, Sarah Holcomb’s attempt at an Irish accent (seriously, why? it adds nothing); and the second is Danny’s 23 (or so) brothers and sisters seen at the beginning of the movie. They don’t figure into the picture at all, so why bother?
Andy Bernard concurs:
To me it has to be so bad it actually distracts from the plot, as you are concentrating on how bad the actor’s accent is, not on what the character is saying.
The most recent time this happened to me (and the only time someone doing an American accent bugged me) is Ed Skrein in Midway. He was I think meant to be doing a. Brooklyn accent, but that’s a guess as it was so bad. I mean the film itself was awful so it’s quite impressive that the thing that stands out as bad was his accent.
An honorable mention is Benoit Blanc’s “southern drawl” in the Knives Out films, but that comes across as a deliberate choice to fit with the slightly campy whodunnit style of the films, and doesn’t detract from the films.
The absolute classic example (surpassing the previous classic example of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins) is Don Cheadle’s “English” accent in Oceans 11.
Well, except me apparently. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve heard enough people from the same area who didn’t share an accent that my brain just goes “that’s an odd accent” and moves on.
Heck, I wasn’t fazed by Keanu’s accent in Dracula. His acting, on the other hand…wow that was bad.
Imagine that Jonathan Harker is really Ted Logan from Bill and Ted, who traveled to Victorian England in the phone booth but got stuck, picked a fake name, and is trying to fit in. The movie makes so much more sense.
I would do that, if I didn’t think he was to dumb to think of that.
Maybe it’s Keanu Reeves himself who stumbled on a time machine, etc., etc.
So, there is apparently a good reason for this which I found interesting. Well…there is a reason, maybe not good. The film isn’t exactly autobiographical, but it was very loosely based on the Murray brothers, primarily Brian-Doyle Murray (the caddyshack manager), but also Bill. They grew up poor kids in a family of nine, doing a variety of scratch jobs including caddying for peanuts at a country club full of rich jerks. Said country club also employed a bunch of young Irish girls on work visas to waitress and whatnot. All of the above were hard-partying and some of the Irish girls ended up pregnant as a result.
Originally the film was centered on the all these blue-collar kids, but the older comedians who were supposed to be bit players began to run away with the film, things were drastically re-written and the whole thing ended up a chaotic mess. First-time director Ramis had to stitch together these disparate elements into a Frankenstein-like film that was kinda far from the original concept. To the extent it works, it works because the old veterans carry it.
All that being said they should have just dropped the damn accent, because my God could she not handle it.
is American.
Maybe I misunderstood your sentence though.
He’s very good. When I watched the first couple of seasons of House, I would notice his accent on certain words, but generally it was very good.
He took it to a new level on Avenue 5 where he does a great fake English accent (as in, it sounds fake), then reverts to his character’s real American accent.
I’ve found that, for UK actors who do very good American accents, I will eventually notice either a particular word, or a drawling quality that will make me go look them up. But for the good ones, it’s not really distracting to overlook it.
Bad ones can be too distracting. I had to turn off a movie starring two very good UK actors who were trying and failing to do US Southern accents.
I think that in six seasons of Xena: Warrior Princess, Lucy Lawless reverts to an NZ accent MAYBE a handful of times, and I mean that literally-- fewer than once per season.
She is great not just at accents, though, but character voices. Her Xena voice isn’t just LL doing an American accent-- it’s in a lower range and huskier than her natural voice. She plays three Xena lookalikes over the course of the show (it’s that kind of show) and each one has a very different voice-- one even has a mid-Atlantic accent-- with a mild, and very realistic rhoticism (not a Barry Kripke exaggerated-for-humor one). At one point two of the lookalikes are imitating two others, and if she hadn’t done it so well as to create dramatic irony, the episode would not have worked.
Bear in mind, not one of them has a NZ accent-- mid-Atlantic is still American.
I remember that.
I don’t remember his reverting to an English accent accidentally, but I do remember him knowing the correct pronunciation of some things that Americans aren’t usually familiar with, like Ypres, a massively important city in WWI. Albeit, I suppose House, of all Americans, might know this.
There were a few others, but that one sticks out in my mind, because I remember when I looked it up because I was reading a WWI memoir when I was 14.
Out of curiosity, what was his “correct” pronunciation? I know of at least two.