I’m going to assume this is stated with a fair amount of regret.
Seriously, though, Southern accents in general (I believe) are more noticeable the more slowly people speak. It’s harder to accentuate flattened vowels and to sound really nasal if you speak rapidly.
Aside from that one generalization, I contend that due to the influx to the South’s major cities (and Nashville is surely one of those) of people from other regions of the US as well as foreign lands, and the affect people’s accents have on each others’, you’re liable to find as much variety in speech patterns and accents in Nashville as you will in Denver, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and anywhere else.
Ascribing an accent to an entire city is just mental laziness as best I can determine.
The accent clash was my second-least favorite thing in that movie. The sets were the worst. Producers, please listen: I know Japan is an expensive country to live in, so I presume it’s expensive to shoot films there too. But if you’re going to the expense of building a huuuuge indoor set reproducing parts of Kyoto (and you did, as you bragged in the pre-film publicity), why not just go over there and film existing locations that actually look right? If Kyoto won’t let you, try Hida Takayama or another town that still has plenty of old streets that could pass for Gion. Because everything, from the woodwork to the width of the alleys, felt fake to me. Or better yet, you could have saved yourself a lot of money and borrowed some existing sets from a samurai drama. There must be tons of those around and they would have only need minor updates for the fim. And don’t get me started on the “reinterpreted” costumes, or “interpretive” dance, or the damn fabric cherry blossoms…
I was watching a bit of The Maltese Falcon last night. I forgot how jarring that bit is when the Fat Man is chopping away at the bird with his pen knife and there’s a horrible bit of dubbing of someone saying “It’s a fake!”. It doesn’t sound like the Fat Man or Humphrey Bogart or anyone in the room said it - it’s an obvious after-the-fact dubbing, and extremely clumsily done. It just chops right through the carefully-constructed film noir atmosphere.
Tomorrow Never Dies, Pierce Brosnan and Michelle Yeoh (who was also the lead actor that people are complaining about from Memoirs of a Geisha.) If they wanted to do a series of movies about one of the Bond girls, they should have went with Yeoh rather than considering Halle Berry. The same helicopter stunt may have been used in one of the MI movies, but I have never seen them.
I don’t think anything is worse than a bad British or any European accent. I can’t imagine why a director would cast/begin filming anyone in a roll if their accent wasn’t completely perfect. I have almost never been convinced by an accent in a movie, except, ironically when someone is imitating American English. Weird that I can be fooled in my own language easier than a foreign one.
Letters on a computer screen appearing out letter one at a time with a typewriter or beeping sound at each letter.
Unrealistic war scenes kill it for me. I’ve yet to see ancient war depicted well except in the first or second episode of Rome on HBO. I’m disappointed that 300 is going to crowd out any attempt at a realistic portrayal of Thermopylae.
A real immersion killer for me is the fight scene with split second edits. Batman Begins took this to an absurd. I had to assume that Christian Bale couldn’t realistically look badass.
You just reminded me of another thing that bugs me in period movies - pierced earlobes on guys. In Brokeback Mountain, close-ups reveal that both Jake Gyllenhaal & Heath Ledger had multiple holes in their earlobes. Just what you’d expect on tough cowboys from the mid-60s to early-80s who are desperately trying to hide their homosexuality, right?
The only one I can think of that hasn’t been mentioned is in any movie where someone is using a computer in a dark room, you can see a mirror image of the text on the screen scrolling across the face of the person typing. Apparently the monitors in movie computers are actually film projectors.
Good one! It reminds me of another similar device that’s almost as ludicrous.
One of the early James Bond flics (maybe even Dr. No) has the situation where Bond is in the middle of swabbing this gal’s tonsils when some big evildoer is creeping up behind him. Just as the guy is ready to strike, James sees his reflection in the gal’s eye and wheels her around to catch whatever it was the bad guy was going to apply to James’s back.
Since then (and maybe even before that – Bond was my first exposure to it) the device pops up way too often.
Go check it out in the mirror: can you even make out your own face in your own eye?
It doesn’t bother me if the characters are speaking English instead of X. Subtitled films don’t do well in the States (though I like them) and for if the film’s set in ancient times or a fantasy world the whole film would be in either a dead or fictional langauge. However when you have English-speaking characters interact with people who are unlikely or can’t possibely know English and everyone speaks English :mad: . Stargate SG1/Atlantis are the biggest examples of this.
No, I could probably notice movement, which is the important thing. I’m not sure if it’s this film or another one, but I remember reading that they neglected to reverse the image before superimposing it onto the eyeball, so it is not actually a mirror image.
Thanks for the correction. I was remembering the scene as being part of the main story as opposed to the pre-credits part. Was it a toaster or curling iron or something else he tossed in the tub?
I’m originally from the near-Charlotte area and I’ve lived in the Great Eastern Wastelands for about ten years, so my accent is nowhere near “pure.” I can actually speak about five or six NC accents (plus South Jersey, a little bit of Long Island, and whatever else I’m exposed to for about a week), but trust me, NONE of them sound anything like the chick in that preview. That was pure-D Mississippi she was speaking.
Like Lok said, I think that’s Tomorrow Never Dies. What pulled me out of the movie about that scene wasn’t the whole lift/thrust problem, but the fact that the pilot was using the rotors to shred everything in the alleyway, including storefronts and vehicles. I didn’t know they made unobtanium light enough for use in helicopter rotors!
I always thought that scene was an intentional joke by the filmmakers. Like a reference to Monty Python’s The Holy Grail: “C’est un cadeau!” “Eh?” “A gift!” “Oh, un cadeau…”
That’s cool. Unless I’d seen the thing at least 20 times since 1956, I probably wouldn’t have remembered it either. I was startled, in fact, that he did drink out of the bottle, since that was a no-no in our house. Even in emulations of Dean (can you imagine how many guys in my school had the red windbreaker?) I didn’t get into the out-of-the-bottle habit – unless it was one of those individual sized fold-open cardboard cartons milk began coming in a few years later.
I had almost mentioned before, but it’s small enough not everybody would notice it or, if they did, would let it disrupt their immersion in the film, that when Jim reaches into the Merc to turn off the radio when the DJ plays the special selection “from Buzz” the hand that turns off the radio is obviously both not his, and couldn’t possibly be coming from outside the car. Also, next time you watch it, notice the time line of Judy’s compact.
