MovieChat Forums > The Untold History of the United States (2012) Discussion > Stone is the worst narrator ever. What ...

Stone is the worst narrator ever. What is wrong with his voice?

posted 12 years ago by Dispositioner
10 replies | jump to latest

This post is not supposed to be about the content of this series, but I will say that Stone is of course an imbecile for trying to defend the Soviets. Why didn't he defend the Nazis and sympathize with them also? The Nazis actually killed less people than the Soviets, so Stone should have gone soft on the Nazis as well. The fact that the Nazis are portrayed as the ultimate boogeymen while simultaneously trying to make us feel sorry for the Soviets, kind of discredits the entire point of this series, that being the "untold" history of the U.S. Being pro Communist is nothing new, and is not untold. Get it, Stone? If he had gone as easy on the Nazis as he does the Soviets, that would have actually made this an "untold" history. As it stands, it's recycled Marxist BS.

What this post is really about though, is to inquire about what is wrong with Stone's voice. His main problem is the way he pronounces the letter "s", which is not so much an "s" as it is a "sssssssssssssssssssssssss" when he utters it. What is wrong with him exactly? A good example is the opening monologue of the first part, where he says "we were the good guysssssssssssssssssssssssss". What the hell was that? Is he serious? Does he have a speech impediment or what? His lisp or whatever the hell it is that he's doing while mangling words, was actually distracting while I watched the first 2 parts. I don't think he's going to win any awards for narration, that's for sure.

[–] 12 years ago

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[–] ActualSighs 12 years ago

I suspect the reason he had to narrate it himself was that the commentary was more incendiary than most professional narrators would want to tackle themselves. By narrating it himself, Stone takes ownership of the words.

[–] barkbarkwoof 12 years ago

I've read a lot of books along the line of "untold" or little known facts about our history. Like most of us seen TV shows about WW II that made it much more interesting than I remember from school. Now I remember why I hated history so much.

Listening to that monotone puts me to sleep. I find the content very interesting but it's so dry listening to OS. Wasn't Morgan Freeman available?

[–] xenodrone 12 years ago

Oliver Stone's got a great voice, Ive always enjoyed listening to his commentries tracks to his movies. What's exactly wrong with his voice? And he does criticise Stalin and the Soviets.

[–] barkbarkwoof 12 years ago

Monotone

[–] bruce-129 12 years ago

Not really sure why you would say that, I like his voice, he does fine as far as I'm concerned.

[–] OnlyRocknRoll 12 years ago

Taking the point of your second paragraph seriously, Speech Therapists refer to this as a "whistling S". S seems to be a problem for a lot of English speakers. When it isn't whistling, it is what I call 'shwooshing'. Some speech defects are the result of physical defects of the tongue and teeth; others are idiosyncratic problems or regional dialects. Personally, people who insert sounds or letters that aren't there, or leave out sounds or letters that ARE there are extremely annoying. But, what can be done about it? Is it a learning problem, a reading problem, or what? For example, I have heard many people pronounce the word 'shrimp' as srimp. I used to cringe in elementary school during read aloud time because so many kids butchered their paragraphs. When I got to high school I had to listen to the tone deaf, monotone reading of French. Any baby can be brought up to speak any language with the proper accent, but apparently by age 14-15 they can no longer hear so they can't pronounce another language correctly. My French and Italian teachers used to record us on reel to reel and then play it back and these students still couldn't hear their incorrect pronunciation. In college there were so many regional accents and dialects it was amazing. We taped a lot of them and they still couldn't HEAR that they had an accent. People used to try to guess where I was from. They never got it right because I learned what is known as Standard American English. And, thank goodness, there are no oral defects that affect my speech.

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[–] 12 years ago

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[–] Koji_Kabuto 12 years ago

hilarious!! I also kept wondering and mimicking his "ssssss" while watching it...

"thissss issss the untold... hissstory... of... the... united.... statesssssss"

"What if there is no tomorrow? there wasn't one today...!"

[–] the_departed94 12 years ago

I like it...Reminds me of your grandpa sitting down and telling you stories.