I was using Iannucci solely as an example of someone who didn't want his cast to have uniformly bad accents (as in Americans do phony-English accents or Brits mangling American).
That said, though (and speaking of disappointing series), WTF was up with "Avenue 5?" I watched every episode and still have no idea of what it was about. other than its crummy plot. --Dave Sikula On Monday, June 15, 2020 at 7:51:34 AM UTC-7, Tom Wolper wrote: > > On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 12:32 AM 'Dave Sikula' via TVorNotTV < > [email protected] <javascript:>> wrote: > >> I have no objection to revisionism like that; I loved McNamara's "The >> Favorite," one of my favorite plays of recent years is Lucas Hnath's "A >> Doll's House, Part 2," and Shakespeare is nothing if not taking old stories >> and repurposing them for contemporary audiences. There was just something >> about the British smugness of this one that hit all the wrong notes for me. >> >> What was especially puzzling was, since Catherine is an outsider anyway, >> why make her speak in that British accent? Let her be German via America. >> It worked for Armando Iannucci in "The Death of Stalin" (another >> revisionist take that I enjoyed, by the way). >> > > I agree about the accent. One of the innovations of Peter the Great was > making French the language of the court. So young Catherine can show up > without knowing a word of Russian and not have any trouble conversing with > anybody at court. But once she leaves court to engage with the real Russia > she should be lost. The series makes no effort to make a distinction in the > languages. > > Lanthimos gave the script of The Favourite to McNamara because he thought > it needed to be lightened up. However much McNamara contributed, he did not > structure the story or define the characters. And Iannucci is going to come > up with a product, period. I didn't have expectations of watching something > at his level when I watched the series. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/5df2d55f-d5fe-46ba-acdd-6f21ad133e83o%40googlegroups.com.
