Posted on 10/27/2011 9:24:22 PM PDT by traumer
Speaking at the BFI London Film Festival awards in Old Street, London, the actor said that modern language "is being eroded" and blamed "a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter."
"Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us," he said. Fiennes, full name Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, said that students at drama schools were especially suffering thanks to social networking sites.
"I hear it, too, from people at drama schools, who say the younger intake find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, (students) a few generations ago maybe wouldn't have."
The actor's directorial debut, Shakespeare's Coriolanus, premiered at the London Film Festival this week. Fiennes questioned whether the playwright was even relevant in a time of dumbed-down English language.
He said: "I think we're living in a time when our ears are attuned to a flattened and truncated sense of our English langyuage, so this always begs the question, is Shakespeare relevant? But I love this language we have and what it can do, and aside from that I think the themese in his plays are always relevant."
Fiennes, who does not use Twitter, is not alone in his theory. JP Davidson, the author of Planet Word and a linguistic expert, talked this week about longer words dying out in favour of shortened text message-style terms. He said: “You only have to look on Twitter to see evidence of the fact that a lot of English words that are used say in Shakespeare’s plays or PG Wodehouse novels — both of them avid inventors of new words
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I drive people crazy. I take my time typing text messages. I insist in proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, etc.
I will not lower my standards.
*sigh* LOL
Careful with that LOL! Voldie might scold you...then again that might be kind of fun...he may be a pompous stuffy English actor but he is way hot! HA
And you’ve hung out with the guy who used to change his diapers. ;-)
Don’t forget “lose” and “loose”...that’s one of my biggest pet peeves because it just indicates laziness, stupidity or both...
Using second-hand ideas swiped from Philip K. Dick and `Brainstorm` glued on to a laughable crime story [the evil police commissioner turns out to be shocked,shocked at corruption, and will clean up all that stuff!] and ridiculous character? No respect for you, Bigelow! :)
The tone of the thing didn’t pander to the usual market for films like that. The main problem with it was that it had more ideas than it knew what to do with.
I didn't need one to pronounce Ralph Fiennes, either. ;-)
You should have heard him. What a jerk. He got all snippy because someone called him “ralf,” and made a big narcissistic fuss about people pronouncing it properly. I had my usual movie-star crush on him until that little incident. It was on the extras on one of his movies, I forget which one, and that was the end of that for me.
You know who’s practically a saint? Oded Fehr. ;-)
I heard Barbra Streisand going on about the pronunciation of her name once - around the time she was gushing about Clinton's first victory. She went on and on in her typical narcissistic fashion while most people were thinking things along the lines of,
"Who cares, Barbra? Just shup up, will ya?"
It was a derivative mess cobbled together by Bigelow`s slick commercial style, a film of stale ideas assembled by people whose only interest was in chase scenes that were `kinetic` but couldn`t hide the fact that the characters were uninteresting. The cliches were piled high in this one—eviol white cops, rapper who speaks truth to power-cum-civil rights leader, second-hand Blade Runner `Dark!` visuals, junkie heroes. It was pure torture to sit through. But then I think Cameron and Bigelow are hugely overrated, empty-headed filmmakers.
Yes, Oded is quite a dish!
He’s quite a dish and quite a nice man as well. He does charity work in his spare time as well as being the hottest guy in the Mummy movies. With apologies to Brendan Frasier, who also comes in after Arnold Vosloo.
Cameron can direct good action scenes, but so can a lot of other people. Terminator is still his best. Aliens is a collection of cliches without Ridley Scott’s artistry to make it anything more, and the ending shows Cameron’s method of operation—just keep banging away. There isn’t an ounce of the raw emotion of the great action directors (Peckinpah, Kurosawa) in any of his movies. With The Abyss he found what he REALLY wanted to be—a director of romances, with action scenes.
He is a great action director if one wants action scenes for the smashing and exploding stuff. But his films haven’t an ounce of the real human feeling that comes from a life lived outside the movie theater that the great action scenes have. Example: The car/train chase in The French Connection is great not only because of the outstanding technical work, but because the script and acting has set up an emotional situation the viewer car respond to on a level deeper than Cameron’s silly scifi and romance crap—we, like Gene Hackman, want to GET that guy, and also, the character is REVEALED through his response.
In Cameron’s movies we watch cartoon people being cartoons. Fine if you only want such a base level of entertainment, but movies can be so much more, even action movies, which I love. Cameron is a child, and his movies are childish.
I like his films for pure cinematic value. It’s not just action scenes, he has the framing eye of a great comic book artist. I insist to this day that Titanic is a great film - an homage to silent melodramas by D.W. Griffith. You can take out all the dialogue and still know what was going on. It’s primal film making. And I much prefer Aliens to the dull Ridley Scott original. What characters in that latter film were there? They were just bodies waiting to be slaughtered with no significant relationship to one another. The motivations are much more clear in Aliens and the competing motherhood theme is better elucidated. Of course he’s not as great as Peckinpah or K. So what...
It's basic, bland filmmaking. He uses the same basic shots he learned in Beginning Directing--how is that a sign of good moviemaking? The great directors innovate. If you can take out all the dialogue and know what's going on, all that says is that you're capable of associating one image with the next. The question is, if you do this, what have you lost? In great filmmaking, you lose a lot. With Cameron, it shows his awful dialogue adds nothing to the movie.
And I much prefer Aliens to the dull Ridley Scott original. What characters in that latter film were there?
Seeing how he copied the character of Ripley in The Terminator, Cameron would disagree. Seeing how he copied the charater of Ash in his script for Aliens, Cameron would disagree. The simple brilliance of Yaphet Kotto's Parker is that he's a bitching and moaning 'truck driver in space,' a character who's never appeared in a science fiction movie with that degree of authenticity, right up to the moment when he dies trying to save someone, when before he seemed completely selfish. Scott and O'Bannon and Hill thought up the whole idea of transplanting non-SF movie characters into a SF movie; Cameron just copied them.
They were just bodies waiting to be slaughtered with no significant relationship to one another.
Not true.
The motivations are much more clear in Aliens and the competing motherhood theme is better elucidated.
The "motherhood" thing was a joke, taking the first film's gritty realism and turning what was supposed to be a 'badass' action film into warm and cuddly territory. Scott wasn't afraid to have a tough woman, but Cameron had to show she had...a heart! Awwwww!
The motivations weren't clear in Alien? 'There's a monster loose and we have to kill it'--what was unclear about that? It was the simple, clear drive of the story that made the first one a masterpiece. The second is caught up in silly 'badass' yammering, while the first one had people who talked like people, not comic book characters. (The first encounter with aliens, who might have wiped out a colony, and you send...a completely untested commanding officer, instead of the toughest guy you've got? The ethnically-diverse crew that went out in bad WW2 movies? THIS is Cameron's brilliance?)
Of course he’s not as great as Peckinpah or K. So what...
It was a simple comparison made in response to your estimation of him. He's a B-movie cliche-generator. They were artists.
Not all great directors innovate. And besides Cameron’s visual style is easily identifiable. Like Spielberg or John Carpenter, he’s a natural filmmaker. Do you like silent cinema? You don’t always need dialogue to be the primary narrative force.
In Aliens they weren’t truck drivers they were military. Cameron set out NOT to copy the original (a Gothic horror film) and make a combat film with parallels to Vietnam. Apart from the “truck drivers in space” conceit there was nothing to those characters in the original film. They embodied nothing but a survival instinct - Ripley was a complete cipher. And yes apart from a monster killing people there was nothing to Alien at all, with staring at the Art Direction the only thing left to do during the lulls. Ridley Scott isn’t really a film director - he’s a designer and photographer with minimal narrative sense. In Blade Runner, his style just happened to enhance the subject matter...it was virtually a coincidence.
Not true. Every great director innovates.
And besides Cameron’s visual style is easily identifiable. Like Spielberg or John Carpenter, he’s a natural filmmaker.
That's the common label for a boring, by-the-numbers filmmaker. All three of them make trite films using textbook-dull visual ideas. Their films excite only at the most basic level, as bland as the popcorn munched by audiences. I LOVE popcorn films but those with style, verve, originality. Cameron's are just hyped-up and empty.
Do you like silent cinema? You don’t always need dialogue to be the primary narrative force.
That's completely beside the point because Cameron doesn't work in silent film. It's like saying "Do you like music? You don't always need visuals to be the primary narrative force." And who said dialogue was the primary narrative force?
In Aliens they weren’t truck drivers they were military.
Obviously.
Cameron set out NOT to copy the original (a Gothic horror film) and make a combat film with parallels to Vietnam.
Scott used real-life types in a science fiction context, a true innovation. Cameron used MOVIE cliches that have nothing to do with real-life military. The tough guy who turns out to be a wimp, the women who are tougher than all the men. What combat unit in a battle would put a civilian dock worker in charge after encountering an overwhelming alien force? Cameron's conception of character is a PC joke.
Apart from the “truck drivers in space” conceit there was nothing to those characters in the original film. They embodied nothing but a survival instinct - Ripley was a complete cipher.
The writing and direction of Alien were about basic, simply-motivated characters. First you claimed there was unclear motivation, now you complain they were nothing BUT motivation--which is it?
In Aliens the motivation was survival and...motherhood! Cameron took an action idea and made it, again, PC with daytime-TV-level characterization. If the mommy angle were removed, the movie would have been so much tougher and more effective and believable. Instead, it's a family soap in the middle of a boringly-photographed acitoner.
And yes apart from a monster killing people there was nothing to Alien at all, with staring at the Art Direction the only thing left to do during the lulls.
You're determined to claim that in order to prop up[ Cameron's film, but it is demonstrably false. In fact it is one of the most influential SF/horror films of all time, particularly on Cameron. Whole books and miles of critical material have been written on the issues of its working-class milieu, the feminist angle, the psycho-sexual impact of the alien and the chestburster, and Scott's direction and the plot have resulted in countless copies. The musical score is innovative and original (as opposed to Aliens's, which has direct ripoffs of this and classical pieces), the art direction is monumental, it made a star of Sigourney Weaver, and brought Ian Holm, John Hurt and Tom Skerrit (who'd disappeared after MASH) to the attention of mainstream audiences. You can like the follow-up, but to denigrate the original as no more than what you say is ludicrous.
Ridley Scott isn’t really a film director - he’s a designer and photographer with minimal narrative sense.
To the folks who think John Carpenter is anything but a hack, sure. But it simply isn't so. In Alien Scott used the visual world to create an environment for the story to have real impact. For minimal narrative sense I would direct you to the man who made The Abyss and True Lies.
In Blade Runner, his style just happened to enhance the subject matter...it was virtually a coincidence.
LOL! Come on, man. You just like arguing. If you really think after years of production his direction 'coincidentally' happened to enhance the script, you're not worth talking to, and I've never thought that until now.
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