Author:
Simulacrum
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Date:
10/1/2020 5:56:14 AM
Subject:
RE: pls recommend
I like The Illusionist and The Prestige equally. I have no opinions about Hugh Jackman or Edward Norton. Both are solid professional actors who do well with the right parts.
If all you care about is period English being spoken fairly accurately by different classes, you could do worse than Downton Abbey and Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady) for the Edwardian/WWI era. The Elephant Man is generally on target for Victorian speech.
Hollywood made a whole bunch of unusual period movies in the 1930s and 1940s, although they had a bad habit of casting American actors in English parts. The examples are too many to list, but
The Woman in White
is typical. Nowadays, Americans are still given English parts, but not as often as Brits play Americans. I'm not sure why this trend persists. Maybe it's because the silly accent obsession started by Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice has never died down. It should stop for two reasons: (1) There are plenty of actors of the appropriate nationality who aren't getting work because some inappropriate person wants to do an accent. (2) Not everyone is as good with accents as people like Renée Zellweger and Emily Blunt -- see Bridget Jones' Diary and
Wind Chill
. In the latter, Emily uses a perfect Delaware accent, but you could argue that Emily does everything perfectly just as easily as you could argue that no one knows what a Delaware accent sounds like, or whether anyone is still alive in Delaware. Rumors say that they all died off in the 1950s and that the state was overrun by raccoons. I think this is unlikely. Raccoons like to live around humans. A human-free Delaware wouldn't generate enough trash for your average raccoon foraging party.
