I'm amazed at the contrast with British actors trying to do American accents, which never fool me; is it easier to do it with gibberish, or is he just unusually good at mimicking American sounds?
I must add that sounds in languages are a very strange thing. When my american friends who don't speak italian try to say something in fake-italian, sometimes the accent is so strange that I tend to assume they were speaking in english and I just didn't hear well. Then, only after they make it very explicit that they are trying to speak or sound italian, I change my mental setup and can guess what they are saying. Otherwise to me it sounds like something indecipherable. It is kind of accessing different areas of the brain based on which language I'm listening to. Which doesn't happen with actual americans or italians since in that case the accent itself is obvious and makes me switch immediately.
Now though I can really appreciate how close his accent is to the american accent.
But in general, I would say that this is a good occasion to look him up on youtube or any online (or not) music store, his music and his lyrics are great. He also made an album with Mina, who is recognized pretty much unanimously as the best italian female singer, ever.
I noticed this again when watching Iron Sky, a movie with both English and German text (I am Dutch, and can understand both--though English is easier for me). For some reason the cinema showed a version with German subtitles for the English parts instead of the other way around. It was very hard to understand, especially because some scenes were English with German accent or vice versa. I'd hear the start of a scene, and--subtitles or not--I needed a few seconds to determine the language before I could comprehend what they were saying. So I missed the first few seconds of many scenes, because at the same time there was a lot going on on the screen, making it very hard to keep up.
(I did watch the movie again with English subtitles, and caught much more of the jokes--such as a Brazilian resembling the Führer's moustache. Great movie)
http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-surely-youre-joking-mr-fe...
Really never, or do you just never notice?
There was a great YouTube video here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-cAnFbEXY0) - but it seems to have been removed by the user. Not sure if there's any way to find it now. It was Americans speaking gibberish, and it sounded pretty convincingly like language.
Indeed. Folks seem unbelievably harsh on accents they know not to be the native one, which is every time a famous actor does an accent, but all those no-names doing even not very good ones fly straight under their radar, making me highly skeptical it's not just confirmation bias.
Christian Bale often keeps his American accents for interviews and press. There might be something in that...
Either Hugh Laurie isn't famous, or you don't have any idea he's British. ;)
Every time he plays House, he's doing a fake American accent. He just does it really, amazingly well.
Here's Hugh Laurie as the Prince of Wales (the total idiot) in a short segment from the series "Blackadder the Third":
It's almost impossible to imagine, but if Hugh Laurie had been popular in America, and his natural voice widely known, then the reception to that series could have been very different, purely from unfounded criticism of the accent. And if this is starting to sound a little far-fetched, let's not forget it all began with someone saying "British actors trying to do American accents, which never fool me".
This is dependent on how much physics is going on in the scene, and how good the person's intuitive sense of physics is. I think a lot of that's been damaged by seeing bad CGI in films. One disturbing thing I've noticed is that before widespread CGI, animator's sense of physics seemed to be getting better as animation technique developed. Now, it seems to be getting worse.
This hoax was supposed to be "good" CG: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B61_4NCebWc
But besides the various problems, the physics of the bird is just flat-out wrong. When birds of prey snatch something off the ground, they are relying on having enough momentum, such that after the snatch, they still have forward motion to maintain airspeed. The portrayed bird in the video doesn't have any forward motion just after the snatch. No forward motion means no lift. There's nothing holding it up. The flapping wings are horizontally oriented and flapping vertically, so they're primarily thrusting forwards. (Birds with little to no forward motion can flap their wings to thrust away from the ground, but then their wings are oriented vertically, and the flapping is horizontal.) I can only assume the animators think "levitation rays" come off the bottom of the wings.
That's egregious, but it's what passes for "good" CG nowadays. Then you have the totally execrable stuff in Hollywood blockbusters. (Star Wars ep. 1-3)
And before CGI, hoaxes were still terrible, yet people bought into them. I mean, look at the Cottingley Fairies from the early 20th century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies. The bar for fooling laymen just isn't that high, and never has been.
As for Hollywood blockbusters, it really varies a lot from movie to movie. Also, the Star Wars prequels are nearly 8-14 years old, so they're not the greatest examples of modern CGI.
>released 40 years ago this weekend.