Dan rad's american accent?

Yeah - I cringe anytime anyone tries to do a Boston accent in a movie - they can never nail it. We've learned to ignore it. Of course - Mark Wahlberg, Ben Afflek and Matt Damon can do it - but they lived it. (actually - Christian Bale did a pretty good job, but there's alot about the English accent and the Boston accent that's similar. The English just sound better when they talk - not as nasaly)

MWallace77: The reason that there's typically a lack of agreement as to whether, in a given film, a certain actor has a believable accent or not is that many or most people just don't have sharp ears for accents (at least after childhood); so such disagreements generally involve, on the one hand, a minority of people whose judgment of the accent's accuracy or inaccuracy is more or less correct, and on the other hand, a majority who make all kinds of scattershot erroneous judgments about it.

Based on your claim that "almost always accents are fine", I have to conclude--without meaning to be unpleasant about it--that you're one of those non-sharp-eared people. In fact, frequently accents in movies are not fine, and those of us who are sensitive to accents and care about them are legitimately bothered by that. Someone's accent can tell you a lot about that person: what place and what social milieu they came from, how they related to their family and their peers while growing up, how influenced they were by other locations they've lived in, and what kind of impression they wish to make on other people, to name a few. When I see a character on screen with an accent that's clearly wrong, I'm just not feeling that character in the way I would if the accent were right.

For example, if it had in reality been the case that Allen Ginsberg was speaking with a fully Midwestern accent at age 17 even though he'd been brought up in northeastern New Jersey by parents who (I assume) spoke with accents of that region, about the only conclusion you could have come to would have been that he felt deeply alienated from his parents, his peers, and just about everybody else who surrounded him during his childhood, and he wished to distance himself from them, rebel against them, and in a sense construct a false regional and social identity for himself by imitating Midwestern speech he'd heard on the radio, in movies, and perhaps from a small number of individuals he knew personally. The fact that Ginsberg did speak with the accent of his native region suggests that he couldn't have been too uncomfortable with his familial, social, and regional origins. On the other hand, if it were to be discovered (and I'm just speaking hypothetically here) that the recordings we have of his voice--which are mostly or exclusively from the fifties onwards, of course--represent a muting of an originally stronger New Jersey/New York accent in favor of a more Midwestern sound, that would suggest one of more of the following: (1) a desire on Ginsberg's part to be well appreciated by American and Canadian society as a whole, rather than limiting his appeal by presenting himself strongly as a Northeasterner; (2) a desire to give off a certain air of cultural and intellectual respectability in an era when the prestige of Midwestern accents was increasing and that of New York-metro-area accents was declining; and/or (3) a desire to fit in better with that majority of Beat Generation writers and hangers-on who came from Midwestern or Western upbringings.