Foreign Accents in English Movies
Posted by Grumpy
 
|
What I’m talking about here are those “foreign” accents affected by english-speaking actors playing a non-english speaker in a film, usually set in a non-english speaking country, where everyone is speaking english. Why do they do that? If everything we, the audience, hear has been translated into english for our benefit, we wouldn’t hear a stupid frickin accent, now would we? We would only hear an accent if all those nazi/russian/chinesey/etc. peeps were speaking english amongst each other. Are we really that arrogant to think that people in Germany use english to discuss the weather in their private moments?
Do they, the powers that be, think this practice heightens our suspension of disbelief? I can see where it might… if you don’t think about it and accept it as convention because you’re an unthinking meatbag sheep who deserves to be first against the wall. The clothing, locales, and particulars of the story should be sufficient to tell us we are in the deepest bad places on Earth, like, oh, a German cathouse. Using these factors, AKA “good storytelling”, would be sufficient everywhere Bad People(tm) in movies live (except for Utah. They speak psuedo-english there, so you’d have to have a sign that said “Utah” or something). Yeah, I’m talking to you Harrison “K-19″ Ford.
I blame it all on Sergeant Schultz.
