MovieChat Forums > América (2005) Discussion > What gets on my nerves

What gets on my nerves

posted 19 years ago by saopaulo1
6 replies | jump to latest

Ms. May is an American teacher who happens to speak Portuguese without a flaw. How likely is that? I wish they would've had her fake an American accent.

[–] andropov_br 19 years ago

hehe... this Soap Opera is completely a mess... Sol doesn't speak Spanish, but she is able to talk to Mexicans :/

But there are others problems with this production. A total garbage.

One is always considered mad when one perfects something that others cannot grasp.
Ed Wood

[–] eduardo_r2001 18 years ago

first of all i would like to inform you that brazilian and spanish languages have many similarities. yes some things were hard to grasp but she tried her best. i was on the set and i got to talk to her a bit and i could understand her quite well.

[–] andropov_br 18 years ago

ok, it's a minor problem, but it's hard to accept that a brazilian can talk to mexicans with 100% of accuracy all the time.

By the way, the novel is very bad, even if brazilians and mexicans can talk normally :P

One is always considered mad when one perfects something that others cannot grasp.
Ed Wood

[–] housediary 18 years ago

There is no brazilian language. It is PORTUGUESE.

[–] hicktown_ba 18 years ago

Well, I guess I took América with a grain of salt. I mean. All the actors (almost all) are Brazilian, so in scenes where they have to speak English, it's not surprising they have an accent. For me, it's normal that the novela (novela is not "novel" in English as another poster put, rather soap opera, but even that translation is weak in my opinion because the genres are so different) would show the opinion that Spanish and Portuguese are mutually intelligible (you can understand eachother with no problem). I think that it mirrors a misconception in Brazilian culture that Spainish is just a "funny" form of Portuguese. As a language teacher in Brazil, I see that a lot.

Take the judge who married Sol. He had a Brazilian accent, as did the guards at the South Florida immigration hold. It wasn't the "I am very goojee" inrollation accent that I'm used to, but he definitely wasn't a native speaker.

IMO, I thought that the novela was ok. In the states I occasionally watched Telemundo and Univision, which means I had some knowledge of what Brazilian novelas are like (dubbed in Spanish of course) like o Clone and Terra Nostra. If anything, I liked America because I was able to see my home town Miami everyonce in a while...even if the story was cheesy.

"Mmmm...I can almost taste that bulgogi now."

[–] AquaBoris 18 years ago

America was ok but not a masterpiece...I have seen worse novelas and even more unrealistic in portraying life in the US, take for example Inocente de Ti, there was a seen in IDT where women were washing their clothes on rocks in MIami. Way out of reality.

For Brazilian standards, America was not a masterpiece but when you compare it to novelas like Inocente de Ti, Amarte Asi, Pasion de Gavilanes, Alma Herida, or Prisionera, America is a masterpiece in comparison.

Besides America has one thing going for it and that is the famous scene of Sol in a Box.