Let's try and get 1,000,000 replies to this post

Yeah, I saw Inglourious Basterds, and yes, it's true.

Not just for Germans, it was immediately jarring for me also, especially with the way the Nazi looks at him (though given our history with Germany that's hardly surprising).
 
I only saw the film in the cinema when it came out, which was too long ago for me to care to do the maths, but I seem to remember the German accents were all quite off. But I might be misremembering.
 
I only saw the film in the cinema when it came out, which was too long ago for me to care to do the maths, but I seem to remember the German accents were all quite off. But I might be misremembering.

It's complicated - the actors are all German(ish) and most of them are supposed to be German in-universe, including Diane Kruger's character, who's supposed to be their "in" contact, as a famous German celebrity (so whatever her accent, it's supposed to be known as authentically "hers").

The only guy who's intentionally supposed to be off is the guy who does the gesture - he's supposed to be American British (though played by the German-Irish Michael Fassbender) and with a weird accent, but he attempts to explain that by coming from an obscure, secluded Swiss village (at the foot of Piz Palü), which sounds weird, but plausible (though IMHO and IIRC, his accent didn't sound Swiss at all, but I may be misremembering it - haven't seen it for several years, much as I actually like the movie).

If the others also sound off to a native speaker, well, that's probably beyond any possibility to be amended, because, like I said, the actors come from various parts of Germany themselves and are supposed to indeed play actual German characters (though anti-Nazi undercover ones).
 
Last edited:
I'm aware of all this, I just seem to remember that the description given in the dialogue to the accents wasn't correct. As in, "You have a Munich accent" but it actually wasn't a Munich accent. But I might misremember, I haven't seen the film in over ten years.
 
I wonder if that's a case with lots of movie and tv stuff, but is less noticeable to us non Americans and English when they have the wrong American and English accents.
 
Interesting to hear that. I guess that's to be expected - much as the film tries to play on nationalities and languages and accents, well, I wouldn't be surprised if it got just as many things completely wrong as it did right.
 
I wonder if that's a case with lots of movie and tv stuff, but is less noticeable to us non Americans and English when they have the wrong American and English accents.

I can tell you that Daniel Brühl's Viennese accent in Rush was pretty much spot on, but since he was playing a public person with a lot of recordings that's to be expected. Something else I noticed however was that the directing and acting in the German-only scenes was generally of lesser quality than in the rest of the film. I noticed the same thing about a German-produced biopic about Hannah Arendt which had a number of scenes exclusively in English.
Bottom line: Directors seem to be taking a risk when they do bilingual films and this may only be noticeable to audiences fluent in both languages.
 
I don't watch a lot of Irish made drama etc. because it's mostly shite, but there was an ok gangster/drugdealer style show on a few years ago and I found it real distracting when some actors had genuine working class accents and others were posh guys putting on the accents. And their accents weren't even particularly bad. I remember thinking at the time do Americans spot things like e.g. a particular character on a show has a wildly different accent from people supposedly in his same family etc. that would be completely oblivious to me.
 

This is one of the weirdest and messiest things I've heard in a long time.
 
So if you're willing to drop 15 minutes into something entirely wholesome to make your day better, search for the "misha vs karpov". I'm really glad I went to search for the original after that meme.
 
Don’t know where else to post this. It just doesn’t get into my head, how some of the greatest musicians are members of Scientology, and pretty ‘normal’ people (compared to others in their field), yet I only read negative press about seemingly crazy Scientologists. Has anybody read Dianetics?
 
Don’t know where else to post this. It just doesn’t get into my head, how some of the greatest musicians are members of Scientology, and pretty ‘normal’ people (compared to others in their field), yet I only read negative press about seemingly crazy Scientologists. Has anybody read Dianetics?

It's because Scientology grooms and pampers celebrity spokespeople to make us believe it's a benevolent organisation for normal people so we give them our money.
 
Back
Top