I have had a very odd couple of days, which I will blog about when a couple of issues have been resolved. What I really want to talk about today is accents in television and film. This will be a bit of a rant, you have been warned.
I will say from the off that I can’t do accents at all. So fair play to people that do them for the public to see. But people don’t think the use of accents through. I will sight to examples in my argument.
The New Adventures Of Madeline.
This is (surprise, surprise!) a cartoon on the channel Tiny Pop. It’s based around the Madeline books, which are set in a Parisian orphanage. As they are in Paris they speak English with a French accent but – and this is the bit that really gets me – they occasionally use French words. They aren’t anything major, ‘Oui’ and ‘Non’; stuff like that, but it really ruins the show for me.
Pick a language and stick with it!
The equivalent would be a French show with an actor speaking French with a posh accent occasionally saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. And that would be stupid.
Phantom Of The Opera.
A few months when my older brother was working the Big Finish version of Phantom Of The Opera a friend lent him the DVD of the film version of the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical of Phantom Of The Opera, and again the accents ruined it for me.
The film is set in an Opera House in Paris (Paris again) and features so truly brilliant acting and some awful accents. Miranda Richardson is the only person in the whole thing that seems to remember that the film is set in France. Everyone else plays their parts with upper-class English accents, except one guy who tries his hardest to cover his American accent, but fails.
My problem with this is that they should either all be speaking in French accents or they should all be speaking in an English accent, not a mash. I think that this is really down to the director. Why didn’t he say anything? Why did he let this amazingly obvious flaw get on the final cut? How did any of it get onto film? I just don’t get it.
Well done if you’ve got this far. When I started this blog I promised myself that it wouldn’t be a continuation of my old MySpace blog, where pretty much every post was a rant. One occasionally needs to let off steam.
“There’s nothing better than a physical release.”
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3 comments:
You'd be amazed at the things directors get away with, TBH its more likely the job of the continuity lady and they are fearsome women...nearly as scary as PA's in TV..they can count bars, shout camera numbers, scream at the sound dept, all at once! Women : We can multitask you know...
Is the continuity person always a lady? I think that you don't need to be a continuity person, or even wide awake, to see that using loads of accents when they're all meant to be French is stupid.
And - how many times? - NO ONE can multitask, not even women. Computers can't even multitask.
About the accents - maybe it was written in the script that way. Let's blame the writer, he/she probably isn't on the set anyway.
Computers can multi-task. Your iMac does - it has two processors working at once and another simpler processor to choose what each one does.
That said, where people are concerned I think the fastest way to do things is to work at a job until it is finished and then start on the next one.
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