Richard Armitage tangentially related
Berlin Station:
- Here are some pretty daylight pictures of a neighborhood I referred to in my Berlin Station 2.3 recap.
Collateral attractions / degrees of separation:
- Lesley Manville (Mrs. Hale in North & South) on her role in Phantom Thread.
- David Hewson (author of the Shakespeare adaptation audiobooks Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet) on the state of the market for writers like him today.
- Rather bombastic profile of Jon Bernthal (Pilgrimage) in Esquire.
- Multiple award nominations for Richard Jenkins (Berlin Station) for his supporting role in “The Shape of Water.” Interview here.
Social media:
- The U.S. Library of Congress announces a change in its tweet collection policy. This whole thing’s been kind of a mess from the beginning — I’ve been told that it takes them something like 24 hours to run a complete search on some topics, and now it’s officially withdrawn from searching at all. This is the kind of thing that gives researchers fits. If they don’t collect the complete sample, then you can never know if a search is comprehensive — the same problem that Twitter now has, even in its “latest” searches.
Things we’ve discussed:
- On the message British accents send to American media consumers (short version: almost all villains in US animation have non-US accents).
- Here‘s a reason (among many) why Armitage’s prejudices about language in an adult venue should both rankle and disturb.
Me + Richard Armitage 
Quite interesting article from The Atlantic. I wonder if this occurs in American cartoons only. From the shows mentioned in the article I only know The Lion King (in German) and as far as I remember the German dubbed version did not use accents in that way.
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I don’t see a lot of cartoons in other languages that aren’t dubbed, and it’s been years since I’ve seen a German or a Spanish cartoon, so i can’t tell you, but there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence about the connection between an English accent and a villainous character even in live action film and television here.
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If a German actor acts in a Hollywood movie it wouldn´t surprise me that he plays the villain because it´s just normal. But is it the same with British actors, are they normally also only casted as villains?
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I wouldn’t say only, but there’s a strong tendency, e.g.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/7613704/Helen-Mirren-criticises-Hollywood-casting-of-Britons-as-villains.html
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Even though I didn’t like what Hewson did with “Romeo and Juliet”, his article on the business of writing today is really a good read. The accents used in cartoons is something I didn’t really notice in the movies I watched with my kids (“The Lion King”, “Aladdin”), but it makes sense that I wouldn’t notice, because it was also that way when I was a kid. It also goes along with following the crowd to write what tends to sell, as Hewson was mentioning. And, wow, there are still attempts to ban “Fahrenheit 451”? I loved Bradbury as a young teenager and I don’t think it warped my mind! My favourite of his was “Something Wicked This Way Comes”.
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Hewson: say what I like, he kept himself and his family afloat writing, so he must know something about how to do it.
re: Bradbury — I’m still astounded, too, but people are also still trying to get “Huckleberry Finn” banned, too. It’s not that I don’t think language is important (I do) or that we shouldn’t try to improve our language (we should), it’s just that I think it’s bizarre to claim that these big cultural realms have that much effect on it. The biggest influences on my actual patterns of speech as a child were not films or books, but my parents and to a lesser extent some of the adults in my life. These banning attempts, to me, speak of some weird insecurity that I don’t understand. I’m also astounded by people who think that if we just don’t talk about something, kids won’t be aware of it. Kids are smart and alert.
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I agree about speech patterns. I speak like my parents (similar vocabulary, sentence structure) and my kids speak more like me than like their peers. (They might have picked up a few of my bad habits, too! 😬) But to me, books are how you learn about other people who are not like you.
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Absolutely. And as we’ve seen, there’s a big fear of that among some segments of the US population at the moment. It’s preposterous to claim that if one’s daughter reads the word “bastard” she will stop being a “little girl.”
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I think at her daughter’s age of 13, her days as a “little girl” are few anyway.
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IKR? I was trying to remember when I read “Fahrenheit 451.” It was on the reading list my junior year of HS but I had already read it by then — it might have been fifth or sixth grade.
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Although I remember my parents at that age wouldn’t let me read The Godfather or The Exorcist. But, to be fair, they didn’t try to get them banned!
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I can’t remember my mother ever telling me not to read something. In fact I remember her telling the school librarian “let her check out whatever she wants, if there’s a problem I’ll deal with it” the first time I tried to check out Roots.
I think back then trying to get a book removed might have been someone’s only recourse. Nowadays, though, I’m pretty sure they’d just give the one kid an alternate assignment. So good point, this is probably not about that person’s kid alone, it’s some kind of crusade. Uch.
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