sevysgrl wrote:
Something else is the use of correct languages--- I watched Valkyrie a couple weeks ago and I was so pissed, Hitler spoke english, ENGLISH!! In the whole movie I dont think there were any german speaking people(but I slept through most of it after Hitler spoke english). Tom Cruise playes German army officer Claus von Stauffenberg, he spoke plain english and didnt even bother producing a german accent. All of the German resistance spoke english, I doubt that in the 1940s the german army and politicians spoke casual english to each other, they would be speaking their native language. At least in Schindlers List they had some german speaking people in the movie and the english actors tried to have an accent. IMHO, they should have been spoken in german and had english subtitles.
I haven't seen Valkyrie yet, but want to. I was obsessed with Hitler and Nazi Germany for a while; I'm always interested in seeing movies that make an attempt to portray him as a person rather than a caricature.
I don't necessarily have a problem with English language/accents used in movies set in other countries or eras. Although in a movie set in Germany, we clearly realize that the language would have been German, we accept that it's as if the movie were dubbed or put through a Star Trek-style translator, and even though we're hearing English, the characters are actually speaking in German. What the movie MUST be, though, is consistent. Another Hitler movie, John Cusack's 'Max', I found very difficult to listen to despite enjoying it, because the accents are all over the place: English, German, American, even Scots at one point. The director said that he wanted to get the idea over that such a story could have happened anywhere, that it wasn't something just peculiar to Germany, but I found it confusing. Until I realized that the accents were purely random, I kept wondering if they were trying to create the illusion of different languages being spoken.
01 Jul 2009, 7:55 am
