Sandra Bullock looks to be great in Infamous.

[unsavedtrash]

She was just on Leno and showed a clip. She has the Alabama accent down. I hate watching an actor who can't get a regional accent right.

[Floogeldy]

1. Thank you, Mr. Ebert!

;)

[idgiehkt]

2. me too.

She's from Texas, so it's not that far a stretch. I completely loathe actors that fuck up southern accents. I will never watch 'Cold Mountain' even though it's my favorite book just because they hired ocker bimbo Nicole Kidman to play Ava.

[yvr girl]

3. She actually grew up in DC and Germany

But her dad is from Alabama.

[idgiehkt]

4. why did I think Texas?

oh, she has homes in Texas and Wyoming.

[wildhorses]

5. I thought Nicole did a good job as Ava. I like Nicole.

At first I thought Renee Z. overplyed her role but, the second time I watched it I was ok with her too. Jude Law was good, too. I liked the movie almost as good as the book. :shrug:

[idgiehkt]

9. I wanted Ashely Judd or no one.

I was stunned when I saw the trailer at how accurate Zellweger's accent was. That is a real hill accent and attitude she was doing, god-freaking-bless her for having the nerve and respect for the author's work to play a real redneck. I'm from that area and I knew it would kill me to hear Kidman pull that Scarlet O'Hara crap. Plus I didn't read Ava's character as even carrying herself like Kidman. And just the way she was doing the shape-note singing in the trailer (I think I saw a 'the making of Cold Mountain' special on PBS or something), just oh-so-much better than everyone around her, for one :puke: , for two, I swear to God I don't even remember shape note singing being mentioned in the book but I could be wrong, Frazier covered alot and did a staggering amount of research. I inhaled all the stuff about Ruby's life because that is how my grandmother lived and I found it fascinating, her being 30-45 miles from the actual Cold Mountain itself. There is acutally a 'Cold Mountain' sign at an overlook on the parkway now whereas there wasn't before. I loved Kidman in "To Die For" but nothing else. Plus the trailer they ran on that movie was a travesty, I actually saw one scene where the narrator goes "They tried to take his town..." advertising it like a fucking action movie or something. I felt like throwing my tv out of the window. Inman was a deserter and says in the book at one point that the troops might as well have committed suicide for all the good their fighting did. The thrust of the book is how disconnected Inman and that whole area were from the war because the mountains didn't have the crops and issues that the flatlands did. Even Ava being from Charleston I can't imagine her being as prissy as Nicole Kidman is. I just couldn't do it to myself, I knew it would ruin the work for me and that book is precious to me and it would put stuff in there I didn't want to think about when I re-read it which I do at least once a year. I'd love to see Zellweger's scenes being that she is from Texas but an Australian and what is jude law? Brit/Aussie whatever, playing the two southern leads (in freaking Romania, anyhow) just a damn disappointment all around. I don't think it did that well at the box office, did it?

[Shakespeare]

11. Some of those Brits can handle a pretty good southern accent.

Emily Lloyd's Arkansas accent in the movie In Country blew me away. It's not where the actor's from, it's just a matter of how talented the actor is when it comes to taking on a regional accent. Julia Roberts grew up in Atlanta and can't do a southern accent to save her sorry, overrated life.

[idgiehkt]

13. I tend to disagree on the point of it being the talent of the actor.

I have seen very few actors do a southern accent well, because they have a mythology about what one is based on Gone With the Wind and other films like that. Especially the mountainous regions are done very poorly, because that accent is very clipped and not especially appealing to the ear. I have a friend from Korea who immigrated here at 12 and told me that when she heard a Tennessee (Smokies) accent for the first time she thought it was the stupidest sounding thing she had ever heard, and this was with her knowing very few words in English. There are so many different accents depending on the state and region and yet most of the time when I hear actors doing this accent it's always the same and it's invariably some variation of Vivien Leigh's Scarlet.

And I can't imagine an actor trying to do an accent for the region my mother is from, eastern NC. It is completely different in every way from western NC, so much so that I used to say I was the product of a mixed marriage between hillbilly and flatlander families. I think you'd have to stuff your mouth full of mashed potatoes or peanut butter to get that right. Karen Black almost nailed that accent in a movie called "Red Dirt"; even though I think that was set in the deep south (Mississippi?) it made me so homesick just listening to her lines in that role...basically it sounds like she washed down 3 or 4 quaaludes with a bottle of Nyquil.
And don't even get me started on them using y'all when speaking to one person, that drives me up the wall. I'm prejudiced, lol. That's why what I saw of what Renee Zellweger in the Cold Mountain trailer impressed me so much. Because it can be pretty ugly and scary to listen to, like the rednecks in Deliverance and most actors soften it up a bit, especially female actors because they apparently don't want to come off that way. I have to say it has gotten a whole lot better than it used to be, probably because so many popular actors today are from the south and know what they are doing. I really like to hear Jaime Pressley let loose with a hick accent because she can do it perfectly, but then she's from North Carolina.

I have seen Julia do a little southern drawl here and there...but you are right, her 'accent' or whatever in Steel Magnolias sucked, but then so did everyone else's. I get the feeling from her bio Julia grew up in more of an urban setting and that accent isn't that detectable and alot of girls learn to drop it in high school. Quite a few girls I knew in college were from Smyrna, Decatur, etc and they didn't have much of an accent at all. I droppped mine almost completely by high school but when I started working in factories in SC I had to pick it back up because people accused me of talking 'proper' and it was offputting to them.

[Shakespeare]

14. Just so you know, I'm from the south, too.

And I know exactly what you mean about the different regions being so radically different. My aunts on my dad's side of the family have the soft, genteel accent of central (non-Smokies) Tennessee. My mother's family has a completely different, much more "redneck" sounding accent of northwestern Louisiana. I grew up in middle Georgia, north Texas and Tacoma, Washington, so (what's left of) my accent is a strange combination of those three, with the dry Texas drawl being most prominent in my speech.

That said, I still maintain it's the individual actor (and, presumably, the abilities of the dialect coach with whom they're paired--and that, more than anything, may be the key here). I've seen Brit actors who do dead-on southern accents, and American actors who sound ridiculous when they attempt to do the same thing. There are not enough consistently good American actors (even American actors from the south) who pull off the accents to say that they have some kind of inborn--or at least experientially obtained--edge over non-American actors.

I also think male actors from the south are more comfortable retaining (or at least using) their native accents on a regular basis; I can't think of a female corollary to a Sam Elliott or Fred Thompson (ick) or Tommy Lee Jones.

p.s. Totally agree on the y'all thing. That's the first unmistakable giveaway you're dealing with someone who doesn't have a fucking clue about the south and the way we speak.

[Shakespeare]

8. not from there, just lives there now. n/t

[ComerPerro]

6. I really enjoyed The Lakehouse, btw

[wildhorses]

7. didn't she have to do a southern accent in Hope Floats?

:shrug:

[idgiehkt]

10. yeah, that was so sweet.

I just love her. She is so subtle as an actress but I like her in just about everything I've seen. I thought "Murder by Numbers" was just a little weird and misogynistic, but other than that she has a really good instinct for parts. I love that movie 'The Net', I love to watch it when it's on tv every year.

edit: she really sounded kind of like a Georgia girl in that movie to me.

[Oeditpus Rex]

12. Sandra Bullock would be great reading the phone book

Sigh... :loveya: :loveya: :loveya: