They’re pretty damn British.
You’ll understand the accents just fine, do not worry about it. There are some non-British characters that have stronger accents but really the movie was made for wide release with “recognizable”, clearly intoned accents. It’s no Mona Lisa .
—PolarisDiB
Gosh, Mona Lisa (+ The Long Good Friday) was hard. And no subtitles/captions on the Criterion discs!
It’s fine, don’t worry. Generally people have trouble with cocnkey-type accents, midlands accents etc. With the exception of a few characters, the accents are pretty “posh” in general. If you can understand Michael Caine in movies like The Italian Job, you’ll get by with flying colours.
Thanks!
Do British people ever have a hard time understanding Americans?
nope
Yes, but very rarely. Most American accents are easy to understand but every once in a while I’ll get caught out and struggle a bit. Some Southern accents can do this to me.
@Grey Daisies:
The story of DiB watching TWO of Neil Jordan’s films, Mona Lisa and Butcher Boy :
“Hmmm…”
“Dialog going… really fast.”
“I can’t understand what they’re saying.”
“Doo dee doo, there we go, subtitles” (neither was Criterion disc)
“…. Hmmmm….”
“Subtitles going… really fast.”
“I can’t understand what they’re saying.”
—PolarisDiB
The worst accents I’ve encountered are in Mike Leigh’s films. The great Ewen Bremner’s Scots accent in NAKED is so incredibly thick that it took multiple viewings before I realized he was speaking English at all.
An effect made quite humourous in Ritchie’s Snatch indeed. Another good example is Michael Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss .
I am ambivalent about it. Cultures should speak their own language, but it’s hard when “their own language” is English, but not English that predominant native speakers can understand. Do you watch with subtitles? Do you go without? I pretty much just take it as I would as if I were watching something in Old English, and watch it with subtitles, but usually subtitles are “closed captioning” which means the text is cut into by the movie explaining to you bells and car doors and music playing and shit. Thus, I think all movies should have native-language subtitles (this could really help in terms of, for instance, learning other languages as well) as well as the other ones included.
—PolarisDiB
Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance threw me off the track a few times with the accents. I continued to watch, unable to decipher the dialouge at certain points in the film.
“Do British people ever have a hard time understanding Americans?”
I find it difficult to follow American talk sometimes, I mostly watch American films with subtitles if I can.
ah, ditto cat, i thought it just meant i was a deaf idiot. i really struggled with wiseman’s juvenile court and if anyone has seen soi cowboy, i had no idea what the thai girl was saying at any point at all in the film…same-language subtitles should be mandatory, and just different enough from the speech to keep us on our toes, or better yet, some ‘navajo’ subs…
^ That is fascinating Cat. I’ll have to look into things like this more often.
It also depends on how lines are spoken in a film. I don’t have problems with most British films as most of the time the lines are spoken clearly.
That being said there are Americans who speak English so poorly it can be very difficult to understand them even though they are Native.
Post a clip with your accent. Josh Brolin nails mine:
my mothers family accent (geordie)
my father is a Dubliner
Isn’t he half-Texan anyway?
Mine’s a mish-mash of East Coast Southern and Chicagoan. Can’t think of any movie equivalent, but trust me it’s music to the ear.
I remember Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen as being pretty authentic working-class Scot, but’s it’s been a long time.
Mine is like this only deeper.
edit
^ I’ve noticed that with several accents. It’s only in certain cases were I can’t understand them. Sometimes it requires more attention but it isn’t impossible.
For a Yank like me, the Scottish accents in Trainspotting were pretty difficult. And I agree with Roscoe about the accents in Mike Leigh’s films, though I love his work. As for Cecil Will Kolohe Burchett’’s comment about southern accents, let it be known that even we Americans find some of those difficult. Ditto with fast New York accents. Cat mentions watching American films with subtitles. I have gotten in the habit of watching all films that I can with subtitles because I have discovered that they often pick up dialogue that is so lost in the mix as to be inaudible. The caveat of course is that subtitles (with foreign films as well) sometimes do not precisely capture what the characters are actually saying.
It is hard to follow the dialect in Jia Zhangke’s films…
Spot on Grey Daisies. That young gent was hilariously good.
“I pretty much just take it as I would as if I were watching something in Old English”
I did a course in Old English, and it’s really not at all the same language. It’s practically un-understandable to a normal person unless you pronounce words perfectly and very slowly. Of course, a lot of Old English words have also been dropped from the modern lexicon.
I’m pretty sure you mean Middle English, or even Elizabethan English however.
Just remember: Old English= Beowulf, Middle English= Canterbury Tales, Early Modern English= Shakespeare, Modern English= Dickens, Present Day English= ….
@Liam Allen: My uncle is a Dubliner. He’s learned to speak a normal American accent, otherwise people tend to have trouble understanding him.
Drunken Father Figure of Old
How British are the accents in this movie? I’m watching it for a class tonight and I need to know if I should ask my professor for subtitles in advance. I have a very hard time understanding even moderate British accents.
Maybe we can talk about regional dialects in mubis if we want…