been on vacation the past 2 wks (& posting waaay too much) & got a couple monty python movies, ‘the holy grail’ & ‘life of brian’. had never seen them before, but i had watched & enjoyed ‘a fish called wanda’ & ‘brazil’ (one of my all-time favorites).
well, i couldn’t understand bunches of what they said. beside the brit idioms, they seemed to lay on the accent so heavy that i know i lost a lot of what was supposed to be funny. was it just me? maybe i have a bad ear for accents?
(& yeah, yeah, how come i’m first now getting around to seeing this monty python stuff. some of us take our time, look for longevity.)
The purpose of life is to matter, to count, to have it make a difference you lived at all.
Don’t worry, special – you’ll probably watch these movies more than once. Stuff you thought you missed the first time will become more clear on subsequent viewings.
Either that, or maybe you can adjust the audio tone on your VCR or TV?
I’m so envious – I’ve lent all those out and none of them have come back.
Special, hon, the only way alla us old folks learned how to unnerstand a Brit accent is through those very same flicks. Perseverence! You’re on the right track.
If you can get ahold of a several volume set of Monty Python (TV) Episodes, and set down for about 10 hours, you’ll be fine. Or bloody screwed for life! HeeHee!
guess i just gotta rent 'em again! enjoyed what i did understand.
my brother’s first wife, maria, was a brit. absolutely lovely woman. they have such a wicked, weird sense of humor. hated seeing her go.
anyway, her family all followed her to the states & would get together for the holidays. i was w/ them all one easter & it took only about 10 minutes before i realized i couldn’t understand a damn thing anyone, including maria, was saying. besides the thick london accent there were a bunch of words that mean different stuff in english & american. i was lost. my eyes rolled back in my head & i just sat there dazed. they might as well have been speaking chinese.
& my brother said the same thing happened to him when they all got together! then it sometimes took nearly 2 days after a holiday for maria to drop the cockney.
really did hate seeing her go . . .
The purpose of life is to matter, to count, to have it make a difference you lived at all.
During the heyday of the 60’s, when flower power vied with gritty Brit groups, English movies etc. were cutting-edge to die for. English movie? English accent? English reference?
It was fun, vital and totally bewildering. (And an excellent, smack in the face with a flouder reality check. Us 'merkins made music and bad movies and couldn’t understand the bitching about “cultural imperialism”.)
Then movies came out with accents that were so thick (in English!) that subtitles were needed. Mutual bewilderment followed. Corn and or/ethnic fed kids in America discovered the wonderful world of accent-laden horizons.
Brits couldn’t ape 'merkin accents and patter worth a damn and we couldn’t tell cockney/midlands/Scots or anything else without footnotes.
you know, veb, i wondered as i watched the flics whether they might have been made expecting only a brit audience to see them & expecting they would get all the references. then at some point they went to an overseas audience, us.
as i said, i had no trouble understanding ‘a fish called wanda’ or ‘brazil’, but i do recall seeing a documentary recently about a coal-mining area in northern england where they did have to use subtitles. there was no telling what those people said.
The purpose of life is to matter, to count, to have it make a difference you lived at all.
We do it deliberately to annoy you. Most British people naturally sound like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. We just put on a funny accent when we’re likely to be overheard by Americans.
Heaven forfend that a group of British film makers should make a film without tailoring it to an American audience. I’ve heard rumours that in France they only make films in French.
You know Tom, I thought that might be it…I once knew a guy from the working class section of Glasgow, and while he seemed to understand me fine, my side of the conversations generally consisted of “what? I’m sorry…what? Nope, still didn’t get it…what???”
We English secretly greatly admire the Scots for their ability to adopt a curious accent which, while easily comprehensible to us and them, completely baffles Americans. Of course, they don’t really talk like that. The average Scotsman actually speaks with something resembling a New York accent. In the British release of Braveheart they all sound like Fran Drescher. Go figure, as they say in Somerset.
Someone with a sig line like THAT has to be a Limey alright
And TomH seems to be an addition to this board… I just can’t get the mental image of Mel Gibson sounding like Fran Drescher out of my mind…
Not that HE’S a Jock himself…
Reminds me of the reggae movie, “The Harder They Fall.” The movie is in English, but the actors have such thick Jamaican accents that the copy I saw had subtitles!
i’ve heard several times that a u.s. southern accent is really a minor corruption of an old brit accent. might have explained why i couldn’t understand anything native texans said either. but now i see from tom h that the brits do it on purpose! damn. so, do the texans also?
One of my favorite recent movies is Trainspotting (technically Scottish). While I have no problem with most of the dialogue, Robert Carlisle (also the lead in The Full Monty) plays a wacko named Begbie, who spews out so many rants with such a thick accent, (rife with a certain c-word which evidently is the curse of choice in that part of the world) that I still have no idea what he is saying in about half of his lines. Even after watching this thing about eight or nine times!!!
