"Cruise distractingly bad in 'Valkyrie'"- Page 2

[javero]

Posted: 12/23/08 at 2:20pm

Plum--how do you feel about actors picking up regional accents for stories set in the US?

At times the regional accents in feature film and TV programming border on cliche too much for my taste.

They also sometimes reinforce stereotypes both good ones and bad.

This is slightly off topic but I've watched my share of Spanish-language movies and TV programming from Mexico. It bugs the heck out of me that the Mexican film/TV industry insists that Spanish speakers from other parts of the world bend their accents to the northern Mexican variety while in character. It's been a hot topic on the talk show circuit.

Conversely, when Pedro Almodovar cast Gael Garcia Bernal in one of his movies, he sent Gael to work with a Castillian Spanish diction instructor before the cameras started to roll.

So, I write all this to say that folks do take this accent stuff seriously.

[danmag]

Posted: 12/23/08 at 2:29pm

I do not know one person who expressed any interest in seeing this movie. I agree that a Nazi movie just isn't something people are going to be dying to see right now (I'd rather see Marley and Me than Valkyrie!)

[javero]

Posted: 12/23/08 at 2:55pm

"I do not know one person who expressed any interest in seeing this movie."

Neither do I. Honestly, the Nazi theme is a turn off for me. It doesn't help that I recently saw The Good German on cable.

[nexttoelectric]

Posted: 12/23/08 at 2:55pm

Umm, Tom Cruise is distractingly bad in EVERYTHING, why is it a shock is the same way in this movie?

[broadwayjim42]

Posted: 12/23/08 at 3:12pm

LOL Next to Electric

Despite the Oscar nominations, I've never taken Cruise seriously as an actor capable of handling heavy dramatic lifting, with "Born on the Fourth of July" the worst of it. You see all the gears turning--he shouldn't have to be trying that hard if the skill is already there. He coasts on personality and charm most of the time and he's been lucky that a lot of his projects have been lightweight enough to capitalize on that.

[Plum]

Posted: 12/23/08 at 3:31pm

I guess I'm not suffering from so much Nazi burnout because I haven't watched any of the freaking deluge of WWII-themed movies this year. (Has anyone seen NY Magazine's hilarious flow chart? I'm sticking a link to it at the bottom of this post.)

Anyway, for me this was about Singer and the awesome British cast members from the start, subject matter aside. Eddie Izzard, y'all! Bill Nighy! Tom Wilkinson! Hell yes I'm interested - Cruise is the real fly in the ointment.

Javero, I think it at least makes a bit more intellectual sense for U.S. movies featuring Americans from different regions to have accents, but yeah, they're often used to reinforce stereotypes of some kind, aren't they? It's not often you hear a character who has a Southern accent just because, rather than in order to show that (s)he's...you know, an old-fashioned racist or somebody's pie-making grandmother or something.

I will credit the British with doing a bit better in this area - because, of the way accents were so tightly tied to notions of class and associated stereotypes there, they've been more conscious of getting some accent diversity into their TV and movies in the past couple of decades. So you'll have a fully Geordie-speaking cast in a great mini-series like Our Friends in the North, or Mancunian Christopher Eccleston playing the Doctor. It's true that the "flat" stereotypical London-to-RP accent continuum is still where most speaking roles in Britain sit, and actors do still have to change their accents for dubious reasons (why can't the Doctor be Scottish again?), but I think that thanks to writers like Paul Abbott and his ilk not all roles played by actors with regional accents end up being about stereotypes of that region. John Simm and Kelly Macdonald in State of Play, for example.

NY Magazine Updated On: 12/23/08 at 03:31 PM

[Jane2]

Posted: 12/23/08 at 4:01pm

I think it's funny that this film opens on Christmas day, when all the Jews are at the movies!

[nexttoelectric]

Posted: 12/23/08 at 5:07pm

that flow chart is hilarious.

[eatlasagna]

Posted: 12/24/08 at 12:07pm

My problem with Tom Cruise in movies is that I feel like I'm always watching Tom Cruise acting in a role in a movie, and not the character that he's playing. It's very distracting. I think he's become too big of a personality in real life that I can't imagine him as an actor, but rather a personality. Even in Tropic Thunder, which I thought he was good in, I still picture Tom Cruise acting as this producer in a fat suit.

[MrMidwest]

Posted: 12/25/08 at 3:42pm

Ebert's take

[Jane2]

Posted: 12/25/08 at 4:43pm

lasagna, very good point, I totally agree. I have the same problem with Madonna even though she can't act, I"ll never believe her as another character. I feel that way about a few more actors who's public personas are so big.

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 12/25/08 at 5:47pm

Looks like another 2009 Netflix weekend special.

[TheatreDiva90016]

Posted: 12/25/08 at 6:09pm

[Auggie27]

Posted: 12/26/08 at 3:25pm

Like SHREK becoming a Broadway musical, this one of those "how good could it be?" projects. I never quite understand why such a project has been greenlit. An HBO movie, perhaps; but a big budget feature with A-list talent, and a holiday release -- huh? I'm so not there.

[nmartin]

Posted: 12/26/08 at 6:39pm

Being a WWII buff, I am interested in the story but not with Tom Cruise.

Personal Beef: Being a Southerner I have NEVER heard a non-Southern actor do a convincing job of a Southern accent. I love Gone with the Wind but...

[jasonf]

Posted: 12/26/08 at 7:17pm

Just got back from seeing it actually. The acting was fine across the board, and the lack of German accents is actually handled pretty deftly at the start of the movie -- credits being in German then are translated. Cruise starts talking in German with subtitles and almost mid-sentence shifts to English which it stays with the whole movie.

I thought the movie was well done, but the story itself is such a letdown because in the end, as history shows, nothing really came of it. The movie would never have been dreamed up by Hollywood because there's no real conclusion, but as a document of what happened (more or less) it was a solid film.

[TheQuibbler]

Posted: 12/28/08 at 12:02am

Surprisingly, Valkyrie was sold out at my local theater in Nowhere, PA.

[tommyboy]

Posted: 12/28/08 at 9:06am

"nothing really came of it"

Thanks, Jason
'nuff said.

[alterego]

Posted: 12/28/08 at 8:02pm

Has anyone else noticed how sick and gaunt he has been looking while doing the talk show rounds to promote this film? Sorry, but I don't believe Tom Cruise can act, he always looks like a kid playing dress-ups to me.