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

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!)

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

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

that flow chart is hilarious.

Ebert's take

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Looks like another 2009 Netflix weekend special.

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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.

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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.

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"nothing really came of it"

Thanks, Jason
'nuff said.