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Parts of Mermaids were filmed in Ipswich, Needham, Rockport, Lincoln, Boston, and North Easton.
Add Weston to that list. The scene with the red barn when they first arrived in Massachusetts is in Weston. Obviously there's some artistic license there. Not only were they shown entering MA in a scene filmed in Weston, which is nowhere near a state line, but the "Entering (or Welcome to?) Massachusetts" sign had the design of the signs indicating that you're entering a town.
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Originally Posted by Know Nonsense
Good will hunting and The Perfect Storm are okay too. But FYI, Nothing is truly "accurate" in any movies.
It occurs to me that it's very difficult to accurately capture a region's feel in a movie. Go too far with distinctive regional features, and you seem to be exaggerating and portraying a stereotype as in a number of those Boston-based crime movies (I'll add The Town to movies of that ilk already mentioned). Provide too little regionalism and the setting could be anyplace.
Boston and New England are not alone in being overdone to the point of severe stereotyping on film. Think of some movies set in the South, either prison flicks or films about superficial gentility masking dark secrets. Then there are Westerns set in or close to the present. Many of those scenes of hard-bitten cowboys inside plain-looking diners beside dusty desert highways, casting a wary eye at any stranger who enters the place, seem more like spoofs of Westerns than skillfully subtle portrayals of regional idiosyncracy.
The difficulty comes in trying to achieve that kind of subtlety while still capturing the feel of a place, because of they way the setting may seem like Anytown if you include too little local or regional color. Little Children comes to mind as an example of a movie set in the Boston area that could be pretty much anywhere. Except for the few brief views of commuter trains that hint that the story may take place somewhere in the Northeast Corridor, Little Children's depiction of the sordid underside of suburbia could just as easily have been set in an unnamed suburb of Denver, Atlanta, or Kansas City as in the Boston area.
It's a tricky balance to get enough detail to make a region's personality work effectively as part of the story, without piling on the regionalisms to the point of stereotyping.
Jaws springs to mind since that was a pretty good depiction of Summer life on Marthas Vineyard and Cape Cod in the late 70's early 80's.
Good one. Jaws shows realistic interaction between various New England social classes in a way that hints at a regional feel, without beating the audience over the head with it.
It reminds me of a move that's older than most that have been mentioned so far, a comedy from the mid 1960's called The Russians Are Coming. The Russians Are Coming. This one was similar to Jaws in its portrayal of summer people--in this case one upper-middle-class family--and local working folks in a coastal resort town, and the interaction between them. Like Jaws, this one also captured some regional feel in a way that enhanced the story without overdoing the regionalisms.
"The Town" wins hands down. If nothing else it's the only movie whose actors got the accent right every single time. "Gone Baby Gone" gets an honorable mention. Both used lots of Mass natives.
"Mystic River" is a superb movie but there are a dozen incorrect accents in it. Tim Robbins should have been over-dubbed from start to finish.
I just watched Jaws and I don't recall a single attempt at a New England accent. Come to think of it, besides Cliff Clavin, I don't think anyone on Cheers attempted one either.
Speaking of accents I read an essay recently by someone lamenting the decline of the Delaware Valley/Philadelphia regional accent, saying that it never appears in any movies, not even in Rocky. Yet the NY-NJ strain you hear all the time-- even bugs bunny sounded like he's from Brooklyn. Boston too, mostly absent-- not completely, but the attempts to render it usually fail. Is NY-northern NJ easier to imitate or is it just that actors from that region enjoy some kind of hiring preference?
"The Town" wins hands down. If nothing else it's the only movie whose actors got the accent right every single time. "Gone Baby Gone" gets an honorable mention. Both used lots of Mass natives.
Agreed. For GBG I read that Ben Affleck wanted a lot of Mass extras - apparently he was bound by SAG rules to use a certain number of union actors and said that it was fine, he'd put them on the payroll but the people he wanted in the shots were regular MA people.
Casey Affleck probably has the best Boston accent in Hollywood.
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Originally Posted by Ashley83
"Mystic River" is a superb movie but there are a dozen incorrect accents in it. Tim Robbins should have been over-dubbed from start to finish.
Yes yes yes. It's better to just not try at all than get it wrong.
The other thing movies often get wrong is that not everyone in Boston has an accent, or has a thick accent, or has accents all the time regardless of who one is with, or has the same accent. (Like in The Departed, the Vera Farmiga character probably shouldn't have had one at all). My favorite line in The Departed is delivered by Mark Wahlberg to the Leo DiCaprio character: "You switch accents, don't you?"
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Originally Posted by Ashley83
I just watched Jaws and I don't recall a single attempt at a New England accent. Come to think of it, besides Cliff Clavin, I don't think anyone on Cheers attempted one either.
"In Amity you say YAHD"
"They're in the YAHD not to FAH from the CAH. How does that sound?"
"Like you're from Noo Yawk!"
(Actually the fictional Amity island is supposed to be off of Long Island or something rather than in New England, hence lack of New England accents despite MV location)
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This wasn't a movie movie but in the late 80s / early 90s there was a TV movie based upon "Common Ground" that captured things really well. Jane Curtin (a Boston native - I believe Cambridge or Brighton) totally nailed it as a mom from Charlestown.
Next Stop Wonderland is a good call. Fever Pitch is sometimes hit sometimes miss but on the DVD's deleted scenes section there is an extended sequence of him at Fenway as a kid that does a fantastic job capturing the Fenway experience in the 70s/80s.
Agreed. For GBG I read that Ben Affleck wanted a lot of Mass extras - apparently he was bound by SAG rules to use a certain number of union actors and said that it was fine, he'd put them on the payroll but the people he wanted in the shots were regular MA people.
Casey Affleck probably has the best Boston accent in Hollywood.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ashley83
"Mystic River" is a superb movie but there are a dozen incorrect accents in it. Tim Robbins should have been over-dubbed from start to finish.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tribechamy
Yes yes yes. It's better to just not try at all than get it wrong.
The other thing movies often get wrong is that not everyone in Boston has an accent, or has a thick accent, or has accents all the time regardless of who one is with, or has the same accent. (Like in The Departed, the Vera Farmiga character probably shouldn't have had one at all). My favorite line in The Departed is delivered by Mark Wahlberg to the Leo DiCaprio character: "You switch accents, don't you?"
I've often thought that variations on the Boston accent must be especially difficult to get right, judging by how infrequently actors do in fact nail it. However, it occurs to me that maybe there are other accents that are very difficult to portray with all the correct nuances. Maybe I'm just more aware of errors in the Boston accent because that's one I'm especially familiar with. In any case, very few actors seem to get Boston accents right.
For that reason, I agree that usually they're better off not even trying to speak with the accent. And I wouldn't necessarily say that a movie set in Boston fails to capture the feel of Boston without the accent. There are plenty of other details that they need to get right to really make you feel like, yeah, they've got it; that's Boston.
By the way, I think that one of the worst Boston accents ever by an actor was the one by Kevin Costner in Thirteen Days. Laughably bad, which maybe is not so surprising from an actor who grew up in California and somehow seems kind of Midwestern. Even though Thirteen Days was not about Boston or New England, I think they actually did give you a glimpse of upper crust New England with the portrayal of the Kennedys and their cronies, as well as some hints at Boston's, er, colorful, politics with bits of dialogue about the Kennedy crowd's early days in politics.
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Originally Posted by Ashley83
I just watched Jaws and I don't recall a single attempt at a New England accent. Come to think of it, besides Cliff Clavin, I don't think anyone on Cheers attempted one either.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tribechamy
"In Amity you say YAHD"
"They're in the YAHD not to FAH from the CAH. How does that sound?"
"Like you're from Noo Yawk!"
In that scene the characters were spoofing the accent of the Amity locals, rather than actually displaying the accent in their own speech. I can think of one actor who appeared to attempt a rural New England accent. In the scene where the fishermen were in a total frenzy as they tried to get out of the harbor ahead of each other so they could get out to sea to hunt the shark for the reward, there was a big, hefty man who said something to Richard Dreyfuss like, "I hope y'aw nahwt goin' out theyuh with them nuts, young fella."
Later, in the chaotic scene where they were out at sea, all hunting the shark in the same spot, having one near-collision after another with their boats, I'm pretty sure it was the same guy who said something like, "They'll wish theyuh fahthuhs had nevuh met theyuh muthuhs if the wind up on the rahwks!" I'm unfamiliar with the native accent down on those islands, so I don't know whether this actor nailed it, but that was at least one example of an attempt at a New England accent.
The young guy who was passed out on the beach while the girl got chomped in the opening scene really seemed to nail his portrayal of an upper-crust sort from the Northeast, including showing a hint of an old-money kind of accent, but that was more like something you might see anywhere in the Northeast corridor, not just New England, even though the character said he was from Connecticut.
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Originally Posted by tribechamy
(Actually the fictional Amity island is supposed to be off of Long Island or something rather than in New England, hence lack of New England accents despite MV location)
It's been years since I read the novel, but I'm pretty sure the original Amity was a town along the coast of LI, not an island just off the coast. I've looked for Mass. license plates in the movie, but have never been able to get a good enough view to spot any. Maybe if you went through with stop-action and closely analyzed any scenes with cars in them, you could spot a few. I'm sure there must have been Mass. plates on cars in scenes they shot around town.
There is one clue, though, that Amity in the movie is in MA. During the scene at the waterfront when the fishermen bring in the tiger shark, and everyone except Richard Dreyfuss believes for the moment that they've caught THE shark, among the people on shore there's a news man who is heard instructing his assistant on how to get out the story that the shark has been caught. He tells her something about contacting the AP and UPI, etc., then adds something like, "Call Boston, and see if you can get it out on the state wire services."
Quote:
Originally Posted by tribechamy
Fever Pitch is sometimes hit sometimes miss but on the DVD's deleted scenes section there is an extended sequence of him at Fenway as a kid that does a fantastic job capturing the Fenway experience in the 70s/80s.
I'd love to see those deleted scenes. Even without them, there was at least one moment when they captured the Fenway atmosphere, but more recently than the '70's or '80's. I'm thinking of the Sweet Caroline scene. To me that scene really exuded a feel of fun and excitement about being at the ball game, watchin' those Sahwx, especially when the crowd sang the line, "So good! So good!"
One of my favorite scenes was a poignant moment that took a humorous look at the passion for the Sox in this region, while still showing the serious angst people felt over the years of heartbreaking near misses before The Curse was finally busted. That was the scene about the guy's first game when he was a kid. The one where the narrator says (roughly), "That afternoon he saw Dwight Evans park one into the screen in left to give the team a win, and by the end of that day, he had become one of the most pathetic creatures on God's earth: a Red Sox fan." Then the moment when the kid's uncle, who had taken him to the game, pulls his car up in front of the kid's house, looks over and sees the dreamy look in the eyes of his young nephew, and says sadly, "Be careful, kid. They'll break yah haht."
I watched The Departed the other day and I was wondering if it is an accurate portrayal of low class New England life? Any other movies?
Delores Claiborne
Peyton Place
Last edited by 8635angelvalley; 05-07-2014 at 01:31 PM..
Reason: add
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