comment #1

Dave says ...

SPOILER WARNING!!!

Hitler lives.

comment #2

MarkVH says ...

Yeah, agreed on this. I always feel like actors using a faux accent of the nationality they're supposed to be playing is even less authentic than just speaking in their normal American one. What would his German accent tell me? That the character is German but speaking English? Why? I'm for all or nothing at all. Either speak the actual language or don't bother.

Or you could just be like Russel Crowe in Gladiator - an Australian playing a Spaniard speaking with a British accent. Oof, movie accents are goofy.

comment #3

malibugigolo says ...

This is the first BIG anti-socialist movie from Hollywood in a very long time.

comment #4

Dave says ...

In all seriousness, this looks really well put together. Unfortunately, it looks as if Tom Cruise is the weakest link here-- the rest of the cast fits perfetly in the genre, but Cruise? I don't have the visceral, dismissive hatred some folks have for him, but even I feel this is as big a stretch for him as he's ever made.

As for the story, there's definitely a story there, but unfortunately, it's nowhere near as grand or consequential as Singer's film (or at least the trailer) makes it out to be. Not only did the conspirators obviously not kill Hitler, but their overall plan was laughably inept, and would have led to chaos in the Third Reich. Of course, that's not necessarily a bad thing for the good guys, but these guys, regardless of their intention, really weren't in a position to make this work.

That said, the plot likely ended the war sooner anyway, as following its failure, Hitler grew EVEN MORE paranoid of his general staff, and proceeded to ignore any and all advice delivered by "professional" soldiers of the von Brauchitsch, von Kluge and Rommell schools of thought. The resulting operational incompetence as Hitler's micromanagement reached ever more insane proportions probably resulted in Allied victory in 1945 vs. 1946, or even later, at far greater cost.

comment #5

le corbeau says ...

Jesus, don't the studios realize how amazingly shitty their expensive movies look on sites like this? I wouldn't be willing to put my trailer up somewhere where it looks like you're watching it through a goldfish bowl and have glaucoma at the same time. I'll wait a few days till it's on Quicktime or something.

comment #6

Jack Price says ...

Accents are a very tricky issue in films like this, and more likely the less obtrusive it is, the better. Particularly if it conflicts with a well known actor's persona to the point where it's not casting against type effectively(see: K-19: The Widowmaker).

I remember in Enemy at the Gates how the only actor who really tried to convey a Russian accent was Bob Hoskins, whereas Ed Harris and Jude Law just used their natural accents. I actually ended up enjoying the film quite a bit, a solid three star film with some great cat-and-mouse scenes between Law and Harris.

Can anyone else think of films which either omitted accents altogether or amped them up, effectively or ineffectively?

comment #7

OddDuck says ...

Mgmax, it's out in HD already here:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809913399/video/4928963/

Just make sure to look below the video that automatically loads, under "other options" and you'll see 480p 720p and 1080p.

comment #8

Ben C says ...

The disappointment of Summer '08.

Maybe not a flop, but this ain't gonna be no blockbuster. By the time it rolls out, it'll have been 10 years since WW2 film made a serious bang. World War II, Nazi's... they're over. Teens now, it's not even their parent's war, its the grandparents'. The draw is just not there.

comment #9

Rich S. says ...

Cruise looks terrible in this. Sadly, it's the smug, self-satisfied Tom Cruise, rather than the one that can actually act. I don't expect the entire movie to be dour, but I wouldn't think that a man plotting the assassination of Hitler would be smirking and popping off one-liners while doing his plotting.

Everyone else looks good, though, especially Branagh. And it will be great to see the stunning Carice van Houten presented to a wider audience.

comment #10

rocco says ...

Why not auf deutsch with English subtitles? ...but if he was stretching himself and speaking german, I'd be intrigued enough that I might actually plunk down the 12 bucks to see this in the theater.

Tom Cruise sticks out like a sore thumb...hey it's Tom Cruise pretending to be a Nazi..and look over there, it's Tom Cruise pretending to be a senator...

...more directly to Jeff's post, I'm definitely in favor of no accent versus a bad one or the ubiquitous British accent as a substitute for anything not American, but I think it hurts the mood of the film overall. And what does it say about Cruise's acting chops?

comment #11

Jason says ...

Mgmax,

I think we're actually looking at the HD version of the trailer after Jeff, God help him, photographed it from the LCD screen on his laptop.

The 1080p trailers yield an extraordinary amount of frame detail that can be easily captured. Nobody around seems to be leveraging this in their trailer reviews.

Just recently Jeff was complaining about the lack of decent stills from "There Will Be Blood" while the mother lode was in plain view at Apple's website.

comment #12

malibugigolo says ...

Mads Mikkelsen should have played the Cruise role.

Cruise with that sort-of curly hair looks like the guy on Fox News that like looks 'Beaver' Cleaver, Brett Byman/ Baumer (?) or something or other.

comment #13

nemo says ...

The little-seen but excellent Citizen X (made for HBO a number of years ago) featured English-speaking actors playing Russians with slight Russian accents. No one embarrassed himself. Of course, the lead actors would not have meshed with each one speaking his native accent in English -- Stephen Rea is Irish, Donald Sutherland is Canadian, and Josh Ackland is South African. They needed some common accent.

K-19 was a pretty good film, but Harrison Ford's Russian accent was a pretty bad distraction. Everyone else in the film did OK. There is a certain kind of big movie star -- Harrison Ford in K-19, Sean Connery in Hunt for Red October, Kevin Costner in Robin Hood, Robert Redford in Out of Africa -- who needs to admit to himself that he's not Meryl Streep, and give up on the accent. Connery didn't even try for a Russian accent, and Redford sure didn't try very hard for a British accent.

British and Australian actors certainly seem a lot better at accents than Americans. Probably because the Brits grow up playing such a wide variety of accents even at home in their snug little island, and because both Brits and Australians have to master American accents to enjoy a career in the huge American movie market.

I heard an interview with Russell Crowe where he said that for a while he tried a Spanish accent in Gladiator, since the character was Spanish, but it just wasn't working. "So then we settled on a three sheets to the wind Royal Shakespeare Company accent traditionally used for ancient Romans."

Even for an American playing an American character, I recall that George Clooney debated about whether to try for a Boston-area accent to match Mark Wahlberg's native accent in A Perfect Storm. Clooney said he decided against it in part because he said he'd become a moderately famous guy from his television work, and he thought the accent would sound like a distracting stunt to the audience. He probably didn't want to risk embarrassing himself either.

comment #14

MilkMan says ...

I'd like to bring some levity to this discussion.

Carice van Houten has the BEST. BOOBS. EVER.

I am not exaggerating. If there is anyone else here who has seen Black Book, please back me up on this. I mean, they're breathtaking. So is she. Now that I know she's in Valkyrie I will rent it for sure. Although I doubt she'll show anything. Which would be the only reason to see this waste of celluloid. Brian Singer is one of the most overrated directors of the last twenty years. Chris McQuarrie is the genius behind Usual Suspects, and to be honest with you, and I can't believe I'm going to say this, but Ratner's X-Men was far superior to the X-mens directed by Singer.

And Tom Cruise is the most important American movie star since Jack Nicholson. Tom Cruise IS America. One day someone is going to write a serious academic book on the allure of Tom Cruise and it's going to explain everything you need to know about this country. Fuck presidents and fuck politicians; you can judge a country on the movie stars they choose to represent their dream life, and no one has ever had a run like Tom Cruise. He is symbolic of something. What I don't know.

comment #15

CMAC says ...

A word on accents. When people are speaking in their native language whether it's French, German, Greek, English or whatever, they are speaking in their own language so therefore, they don't HAVE accents per se.
So for example, why would an English speaking actor who is doing a film that takes place (in it's entirety) in Germany and the director has chosen to use the English language throughout the film in lieu of subtitles, speak with a German accent? It makes no sense. The convention of the film has been established. In that conceit, we GET that they are ALL speaking German.

I have to say and I don't care who knows it, it makes my teeth grind when actors out arrogance or sheer stupidity insist on using a dialect in the above mentioned type scenario to prove..?..what? That they can do an accent?...oh yeah, uh huh, AND ps cry really excellent too? (Ok I digress /get sorely crabbed), but the fact is, very often it takes people right out of the story because they're critiquing the accent! And then..? Everything's wrecked.

I have always been of the mind that there should be a professional "acting smacker" at all rehearsals and on all sets. The purpose of their job is to: whenever any actor male or female comes up with stupid stupid ideas during the process, the "acting smacker" simply takes the actor aside, SMACKS them, just smacks them, then sits them down, gives them a ham and cheese sandwich and says "Alright now now, smarten up! Away you go, back to work."

I'm thinking it'd save a lot of grief down the stretch for all concerned...
oh yeah and Kenneth Branaugh is actually Irish...just saying..

comment #16

Daniel Tayag says ...

I gotta agree with Milkman's post about Van Houten's breasts......they look real and they're spectacular.

comment #17

le corbeau says ...

Thanks, OddDuck et al., though it still raises the question of why the studios/filmmakers don't object to the default choice looking so unbelievably crappy.

comment #18

thorsen1nk says ...

I three the sandbox. There are two reasons to watch black book and they're both attached to van houten. Movie was such a disappointment--go back and watch Soldier of Orange to see Verhoeven do a _REAL_ WWII flick.

Tom Cruise is a dead ringer for von stauffenberg, and the cinematography plays up the likeness. But I agree a lesser-know actor would've given this much more credibility a la Good Night and Good Luck. Thomas Krestchmann is a fine German actor (he has a supporting role in this) and would've been perfect as showing Stauffenberg as a conflicting, vulnerable, but determined tragic hero.

Cruise is so smug and brings so much baggage--all I can think of now is Stauffenberg jumping up and down on a couch in Jackboots now and telling der Furher to bolster his defenses before the Lord Xenu attacks the Reich with his fleet of DC-10s.

comment #19

bents75 says ...

"...I can't believe I'm going to say this, but Ratner's X-Men was far superior to the X-mens directed by Singer."

Milkman : I can't believe you said that either. Please tell me you have some reasoning behind this statement? I wouldn't say Ratner's X-Men was superior to the cartoon Fox ran 10 or so years ago. And I'm not simply hating Ratner here. It was a horrendous screenplay, and a disgrace to the X-Men history. His direction did nothing to compensate for that.

I still feel embarrased for all of the actors who were involved.

comment #20

malibugigolo says ...

While nice. the best breasts on cinema were
Bambou's in Claire Denis' The Intruder. It is easy to have nice one's below 35. She's past forty.

comment #21

Armin Tamzarian says ...

David Hasselhoff IS Nick Fury.

comment #22

Mark B says ...

Don't forget that Tom Cruise has done accents before. Remember FAR AND AWAY? (Whether or not it was a good accent is obviously up for debate.)

comment #23

lipranzer says ...

Forget the accent - he just LOOKS ridiculous. All the other actors in the trailer look credible, but the hair and eyepatch made me think Cruise showed up thinking he was there to audition for the next POTC movie (I didn't think of Nick Fury - that's a good one, Armin. Hee!). And the irony is, I saw this trailer right before LIONS FOR LAMBS, and he gave a credible performance in that movie, so it looks like he's going from strength to weakness right away.

comment #24

D.Z. says ...

This basically looks like a low-budget Mission Impossible.

comment #25

malibugigolo says ...

When is Wells going to ban DZ?

Has anyone ever gained from anything he has ever said?

comment #26

D.Z. says ...

No, really. He's basically channeling his Ethan Hunt character.

comment #27

le corbeau says ...

It actually makes more sense that way-- Cruise is an American secret agent posing as a German colonel (with the obviously made up name of "von Stauffenberg"), to get this "Hitler" guy to come over to our side.

comment #28

adorian says ...

(flipping on the sarcasm button)

I'll never forget how disappointed I was in the 1963 "Cleopatra." Rex Harrison and Richard Burton did not speak Latin. They didn't even speak with Roman accents. And Liz Taylor didn't speak Macedonian or Ancient Egyptian or whatever she was supposed to be speaking. She just had that grating Liz Taylor fishwife accent.

Are we supposed to get upset that actors don't use Danish accents in "Hamlet"? Italian accents in "Romeo and Juliet"?

comment #29

PerfectTommy says ...

I think Tom Cruise in that first picture looks a lot like Angelica Jolie in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

comment #30

BurmaShave says ...

So what are you all going to do when he gets the Best Actor trophy for this? Haters!