French Accent

I think spelling and grammar are beyond you.

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he resides in france and he's practicly a native speaker of the language

Um... no. He is not. Believe me when I say that when he attempts to speak French (and he attempts it way too often), no one can understand a single word.

John Malkovich is a hopelessly vain snob. He suffers from what could be called a "provincial complex". You know, it's that complex of people who grow up in the provinces, and feel awkward and uneducated when they are placed in an urban context. Well same thing, but on an international scale. With America being the backward, uneducated, history-less province, and Europe being the sophisticated, cultured reference with its overly rich history where the arts are concerned (among other things).

Here's this American guy, from Illinois, arguably an able actor, who can't handle being "just" a Hollywood star. A Hollywood star... eww.... How crass, how common. No, he had to have that Old World varnish to further establish himself as a world-class elite artistE/bohemian, and forever leave behind any hint of white trash, wasp, uncultured, uneducated americana that could possibly tarnish his image.

I guess one day he just woke up and decided: Hey, I wanna be cool and multilingual, a citizen of the world, I wanna design my own line of clothes, I wanna be a fashionista, I want people back home to gush and marvel at my cosmopolitan lifestyle, and be in awe of me when I'll give interviews in fluent French, being very, very cool, sitting on the patio of my Burgundian Chateau. Or something.

In effect, he has spent the last 20 years galavanting around in Europe, signing up even to the most improbable projects, provided the director was a household name. You see, he had to work with AUTEURS. Not mere directors, how common would that be? Way too common. Yikes.

So out he goes working with every "art" film director he can find. The Convent, by Manoel de Oliveira, about 87 yrs old at the time he made this film. Crap? possibly, but it was Manoel de Oliveira. The name. The name is everything. And Bertolucci, and Schlondorff, you name it.....

In the meantime he hooks up with an Italian producer and moves in with her, and they settle down in France somewhere. He names his daughter Amandine. Oh how chic and cosmopolitan. Filming in Portugal, marrying an Italian woman, living in France.... and all this time, he is utterly incapable of grasping even a basic notion of the language. He wants to bad enough. Would be a nice finishing touch to that image of his he's been working so hard on.

But here's the thing: poor Johnny M. has no linguistic skills whatsoever. He can live in a country for over 20 years, have the best private language coaches, nothing doing, he can't learn it. He can't speak it. Let alone pronounce any of the words. It's a disaster. So he insists on giving interviews in French to French TV, and politely the TV crew obliges him, but they dub him when it's broadcast. Cause otherwise, no-one would understand a single word.

He gets the part of Javert in the French TV production of "Les Misérables". Major role. He voices the part in French but when they release the film on TV he is dubbed. Cause his French is too bad. Inarticulate syllables, one after the other, none of them producing any meaning when put together.

Still, he insists on this "French" thing. In "Secretariat". He plays a francophone Canadian, and insists on sprinkling French words here and there, to establish his character as french-speaking. Again a pathetic attempt, nobody understands a single word he says. And finally, in Johnny English, which I just saw, his accent is just pathetic. A lame caricature of the French accent at best. Don't tell me this was intentional, cause I can see it was not. Malkovich obviously gave it his best. And it's still just not good enough.

I just wish he'd own up to the fact that he's an American actor. Not a French couturier, not a Portuguese linguist, not an Italian painter, no. An American actor. And a good one at that, at least he was in Dangerous Liaisons, he really was. I wish he'd stop being a poseur, I wish he'd give us all a break with his lame attempts at speaking French. John: You suck at it, let go already! You can't speak French, live with it and move on!!!!

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Frogs sound ridiculous when they try to speak english. John Malkovich spoke like those frogs really speak.

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they told malkovich to speak like that, of course john *beep* malkovich can do aproper french accent

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