this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Something I dislike in movies is when a movie is set in a non-English-speaking country, but all the characters are speaking English. I would rather have the characters speak the proper language for the country, with English subtitles. But I guess the movie execs have calculated that subtitles will make the movie less profitable.
Even worse in my opinion is when they use a generic British accent as a stand-in for literally any time and place in history. Ancient Rome? British accent. Ancient Greece? Also British accent. Ancient Persia? British accent again! Ancient Egypt? You guessed it! British accent! Even when the actors aren't even British, the accent is. It makes no sense. It's lazy and arrogant.
If I had a billion dollars, I'd make the most painstakingly realistic movie about Samurai in feudal Japan, and have all Japanese actors using a SoCal Chicano accent. Or maybe a hyper realistic Viking epic with a full Nordic cast, but they all talk like surfer bros.
The audience needs to be forced to see how insulting that shit is.
Jarl! My dude! We totally viking'd the shit out of that Irish monastery! It was fucking rad!
"Duuuuude… King Ælla’s a total boner. We gotta roll up on Northumbria and fully hack these posers to bits, brah. Then maybe, y’know, hit the mead hall and get wasted with some totally rad shield maidens."
I swear to Odin, I would make this movie and only release a few short trailers with no dialog in them. Just brilliant cinematic shots of action, scenery, all the super authentic costumes and customs, and get some historians to endorse it (I know a few who would love the joke and the chaos). Then BAM, hit the audience with the most ridiculous shit ever.
Yeah! You gotta lull them into suspension of disbelief.
I'd invest some money into this. Someone has to be brave enough to write the script.
I would partner with a historian friend of mine to write it. I'm good with dialog, and he could keep it authentic. Write a rough draft like a normal script, then go back and fine tune all the dialog to surfer bro without changing anything else.
All the Nordic women would speak in Valley Girl.
I would pay to see both of those.
No joke I'd watch that Viking epic for the lolz
Now I just need to secure about a hundred million dollars.
Yeah I can understand speaking English and avoiding subtitles, but there are basically three options for accent:
The English accent is often used for evil empires too, eg Star Wars.
Also lots of evil mastermind types in spy movies and whatnot. They also like to eat while being evil, which I have a whole theory about.
There are a lot of interesting discussions around the use of food in movies. Even ones that aren't directly about food.
Regular food intake is critical for our survival so it makes sense that it takes a large social role.
As a general rule, making and sharing food is considered "good".
Taking and consuming food is "bad".
The exception is when food is offered. In that case, graciously accepting the food is also good.
Or just vaguely Eastern European. Basically, do your hammiest Bela Lugosi impression, and you'll have a bright future as Human Trafficker #1 in all the best shaky-cam action schlock Hollywood has to offer.
I don't mind this. I also don't mind watching a movie in a non-English language so long as there are subtitles (Pan's Labyrinth was awesome).
What I dislike are movies/series that decide to include a conversation in a different language without providing subtitles.
I hate this. Spending the next 5-10 minutes searching the internet to find a complete script of a show just so I have a complete understanding of what's going on is annoying, not fun.
I think it is OK if the foreign language is just spoken for a few seconds and the protagonists are not supposed to understand the language.
oh man youd hate the star wars holiday special. wookiee is spoken for a good chunk of the film and there are no subtitles
Yeah. What's the point of this exactly?
"Hang on, lemme exclude you from this bit of the story real quick..."
?!
It doesn't fit a lot of movies, but some movies start in the foreign language and then switch to English
I liked the solution used in Inglorious Bastards, all the Germans and the French spoke English because all the Americans were so bad at speaking German and French.
This was great to watch in The 13th Warrior.
They're made for an American audience, who are generally afraid of non-English languages
Also generally terrified of reading
It's true. I'm terrified of reading this thread right now.
The movie execs know about poor literacy rates :(
Or even worse, having to dub a movie, and the lip flaps are not matching up with the mouths. CinemaSins will give an infinite amount of dings for that.
Is CinemaSins even part of the conversation anymore? They had 1-2 good critiques and then been shoveling garbage for years.
I disagree. I think that sometimes it is good to have a language that is correct to the setting of the movie but also it does make it harder to follow if you don't speak that language and it does reduce from the visual aspect if you have to focus your eyes on the subtitles so it's not always the best option.
I would say that for slow-paced movies or documentaries it makes sense use the correct local language
When I was a kid I saw The Longest Day and loved that all the Germans spoke German.
German in US movies has a wild array of quality levels.
The best ones are all from native German speaking actors. Movie actors don't need native proficiency since the script is written out for them. The accents are really hard to nail down though and native speakers often have some regional dialect that second language learners almost never pick up.
Mac Steinmeir nails it in Saving Private Ryan and he's Bavarian. Christopher Walz speaks flawless German. His French and Italian sound perfect to me but native speakers consider him "pretty good for a foreigner". He's Austrian.
Christian Slater has a very clear accent in Heathers but he's not supposed to be a native German speaker.