Movie accents: the good, the bad, and the mystifying

Dialect coach and voice actor Erik Singer released a video this week that analyses 32 film actors’ accents, pointing out what they do well and what not so well. There’s a fair range of performances and genres, with some notoriously bad accents and a few surprises.

It’s a highly entertaining video that lasts a little over a quarter of an hour.

Lip-sync surrealism in Soupy Norman and Couched

Few people outside Ireland are likely to have seen Soupy Norman, a cult comedy that aired in 2007 on our national station RTÉ. Essentially, Soupy uses footage from a Polish soap opera and turns it into an Irish family drama by redubbing the audio track with a surreal Hiberno-English script.

The fun lies in the lip-synching and voiceover, which are done partly to match speakers’ mouths, partly to fit the characters’ actions and interactions, and partly to serve the imaginary and often ridiculous plot. Non sequiturs pile up in disjointed rhythms to wonderfully silly effect.

Below is the first of eight episodes (9½ min. long), from where you can follow links to the rest, including a Christmas special. Your mileage may vary, but if it appeals to your sense of humour, watch the lot; every episode has its own inspired lunacies and running jokes (and, for the dialectally minded, Irish accents, expressions, and slang).

NB: Occasional strong language.