personally I thought the movie was horribly boring. It took the man three minutes to light his wifes cigarrete! Come on! But it was still an interesting story. My biggest problem was that no one bothered to sound German. Whats with a German officer sounding Scottish or another who sounds as though he's from nothern England. PLEASE! Well I am going to get off my soap box now and go to sleep.
share[deleted]
You forget, when it comes to film, if a character is Roman, German, or Russian, they get a Brit to play them
shareaccents carry meaning. in the english-speaking world, scottish and northern-english accents carry connotations of economic disadvantage and/or low social status and, if i recall correctly, those characters were communists.
could be coincidence but, as has been pointed out on another thread, hitler and his anti-semitic army mentor were the only characters with obvious 'german accents'. there was a leftist intellectual-type who i thought sounded french, too. all a bit too obvious, i would think.
this was an ambitious movie with some good ideas but, as you say, the execution did not fulfil its ambitions.
hasn't anyone seen architech of doom?
this is the same idea.
it's an interesting one, but did they really do it justice?
the art was great – got to give them credit for that. most movies don't have such great art.
but what did it really say about art? not much, i think.
Gotta agree with everybody. This movie had the potential to be something totally different yet it falls short of one's expectations. The accents were frustrating to get over. Cusack sounds american, his wife and in-laws english :-S
Mucho confusion.
However, Noah Taylor was chilling in this movie. He manages to look extremely small and timid and frustrated without over doing it!
Its a great idea, had it been executed better, I'd wager it would have made the top 250 movies
Just watched it myself on DVD and I agree with y'all. I had the feeling I just watched part one of a TV series. Max takes its time (which incidentally I don't mind) to build up to a climax which never really happens. That's were I do mind.
Being a Dutchie myself I'm willing to cut Meyjes some slack on his directional debut and hope he makes a more focused effort next time. The fact the accents were off didn't really bother me all that much.
[deleted]
I totally agree. It's too bad that this is the film they came out with because this idea could've been done so much better the it was. Don't get me wrong, I like some of the things about the film but some of the direction and acting(and casting) choices did not hit their marks.
shareI found it interesting but I have the weirdest attention span ever.
Shannon
I am wondering about something that everyone who watches movies and critcizes the accents seems to be forgetting. Would not all the characters in the movie be speaking German in reality? I mean they are German, they live in Germany, why would they be speaking English? The matter of the fact is that they would not. So, considering this, what we are seeing is, well for lack of a better word, a dubbed version of the "actual" conversations taking place (I am treating the movie as real life for the sake of argument, with the camera reporting real events). And keeping that in mind why would anyone have any accent? It is not the actual words spoken by the characters we are hearing but a translation better suited to our understanding. Personally, I find it more ridiculous to give a German character a German accent as though we cannot figure out his nationality from the content of the movie.
shareWhy would they need German accents? We're listening in English. This has always puzzled me about movies and television.
Why do all of the old movies set in ROME have actors sounding English?
Why does Capt Picard (supposedly French) sound English?
What was with the accents in Jakob the Liar? Those were terrible.
If the movie is set in Germany and we heard it in German, we'd expect different accents -> spoken in German ,- just as we have different American accents (NY, TX, MidWest, CA) in our American films. I find it distracting in movies when we have someone trying to sound a particular way and they can't quite do it. I'm also impressed when it works the other way around such as
Michael Caine in Second Hand Lions - sounded enough like my fellow Texans most of the time.
I was not convinced with Matthew McConaughey or some of his movie family trying to sound NY in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. He still sounds Texan - sorry, Matthew.
What about Sean Connery's accent in The Hunt for Red October? How many Scottish sounding Russian sub commanders do you think there are out there - or Sam Neill?
Edward G. Robinson sounded like a gangster to me in The Ten Commandments.
Does anyone think Rhys Ifans (Spike) sounds English in Notting Hill? Was he supposed to?
Sorry, this post is getting too long.