I wondered about Dick Van Dyke -- given that his name seems to be synonymous with a bad faux-Cockney accent.

Spike is the one people may have heard of - bear in mind that Angel was never shown properly on terrestrial TV here.

Spike is the one people may have heard of - bear in mind that Angel was never shown properly on terrestrial TV here.

Might that also explain Dick Van Dyke's reputation?

Brando and Reeves have both done quite a few films, and I'm sure they're known in the UK for work other than the bad accents.

OTOH, Dick Van Dyke is mainly known (even in the U.S.) for the TV show and MP. If the show didn't make the crossing, he doesn't have much else to be known for.

Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

OK, two movies where he played English characters. And IIRC, he didn't exactly have a good accent in CCBB, either.

Hot Fuss isn't doing well?

I guess that's not the point. It's arguable that Reeves's accent in Dracula isn't recognizable as human speech, but I haven't seen Mary Poppins in a while.

I saw both Sin City and Upside of Anger during the weekend. I enjoyed Sin City, although I was perhaps not as transported by it as other people have. The sheer pulpiness of it all got to be a bit too much after a while, and the Bruce Willis segment had me going "eww! She was friggin' 11 years-old when you last saw her, you perv!". I didn't find the gore that bothersome because it was so stylized--much less than the extent I was bothered by Kill Bill anyway. What I liked the best were the flashes of ultra-morbid humor, which was why I liked the Marv segment and the whole give-and-take between Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro's characters.

Upside of Anger had some terrific performances, but it kind of fell apart at the end due to its dubious conceit. NYT review had said that the main "romance", such as it is, was like Crash Davis from Bull Durham (gone to seed) and Joan Allen's character from Ice Storm got together, which I thought was very apt.

To put it in perspective, while Reeves' hypothetical British accent was pretty bad, it got lost amidst Anthony Hopkins' fits of maniacal laughter, Gary Oldman's facial transformations, and Sadie Frost sailing about trailing yards of cloth like one of the martial artists in Hero.

Whereas in a move that had flying merry-go-round horses, kids jumping into chalk paintings, and Julie Andrews smacking down her nanny competition with a wind tunnel, people would overlook all the fantastical scenes to wince and say "Wow, is that accent BAD!"

I watched A Tale of Two Sisters last night. It's a Korean horror/psychological thriller. It was intriguing (is that right?). I liked it much better than Ringu or Ju-On (then again, I didn't really care for either of those). I thought this one was better because there was an actual story, and an interesting one at that.