Morlocks and Crappy Accents

After Thursday’s lecture I was thinking about realism and how I understand the word.  I came to the conclusion that realism to me is more about being believable and authentic than “realistic” – I’m not sure how much sense that makes but I’ll try to explain what I mean…

Looking back at old films such as The Time Machine or One Million years BC; in their day they were pretty impressive, as they were looking at unexplored ideas.  The Morlocks in the Time Machine, like the aliens from the old Dr Who episodes, were genuinely quite frightening to some people because they were so believable, and so this was 1960s realism.  Of course when I watched the same film, the same Morlocks were hilarious in my eyes.  I suppose this is because my generation has been so spoilt – film, effects and ideas have developed so much over the last few decades that we’ve become hyper critical, but I think this is a good thing, it just means that we demand much higher levels of so called realism.

For example, a modern day film that really pissed me off was The Prince of Persia, mainly because everybody was white and English, or white and American with a false English accent.  Is this the real Persia?? There were also more explosions (which fail to impress me now as I’ve seen so many bloody explosions in films) than substance in the movie.  Although accents and physical appearance of characters could be considered a small detail, I think they are extremely important ones in live action films, as if they look and sound as they should it gives the films much greater authenticity.  Another good example of this is the recent Robin Hood film, where Russel Crowe decided a mixture of every kind of British accent he’d ever heard was better than a good Nottingham one.

What I’m labelling authentic films are ones such as Amelie – due to its being entirely in French the viewer gets a true view of the character, and the environment and culture in which she lives.  At the same time, the viewer loses themselves so much in the film that the fact that they’re having to read subtitles is unnoticeable almost straight away.