I recently saw a trailer for a small British movie that is due out this June called Miss Conception. This film has all the makings of your typical British comedy: There's driving on the wrong side of the road, people drinking tea … Mia Kirshner and Heather Graham. Crikey! Mia and Heather are British? Well, no. But if I didn't have it on good authority (via a quick trip to Google) that Ms. Graham was born in Wisconsin and Ms. Kirshner was born in Canada, I could see how an unsuspecting person would think that they were in fact from across the pond just by watching the trailer.

A millisecond into the preview, we hear both Mia and Heather sporting fairly impressive faux-English accents. It is obvious to those of us in the entertainment know (or those who have access to Google) that these women are faking it and are actually from North America, but that knowledge aside — do you find their accents believable?

Judging their entire performance based on this 60-second trailer, I can make the dubious claim that they both did a pretty good job. I couldn't pinpoint what region of England they're pretending to be from, but then again I'm not a linguist and never wished to be one, so I'll leave those little details to the experts.

The shock of hearing Jenny Schecter speak with an accent got me thinking: Who else in the movie biz has mastered the art of British speak? If blindfolded and left only to depend on sound, which actors would dupe me into thinking I was talking to a gal from jolly olde England? … continue reading

I'm not going to pretend to understand the legalities here. I suspect that like most of us educated in the U.S., my knowledge of Canadian politics and history is sorely lacking, but I have that nostalgic liberal (and that's not a four-letter word, Fox News!) American tendency to view Canada as a little more sane than the land of my birth. You know, health care, gun control, laws that occasionally recognize LGBT citizens as human beings.

But it looks like more than my delusions of utopia could be at risk. Working its way through the Canadian government right now is a bill that would give the Canadian Heritage minister the right to ax promised funding for any film project it deems “offensive.” This apparently includes “gratuitous violence, significant sexual content that lacks an educational purpose, or denigration of an identifiable group.” That would seem to include films like these:

When Night Is Falling

Exotica

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