Surely he could do better?

This is totally unrelated to our usual focus but the joy of a blog is that you comment about anything annoying. So forgive the diversion.

The new Leonardo DiCaprio movie, Blood Diamond, is out. I have not seen it but have seen previews for it. I am not going to see it. I have no particular interest in DiCaprio and quite honestly find his presence in a film an additional reason not to see it. And that was before I knew he was engaged in environmental panic mongering. I just thought he was mostly a mediocre actor with an annoying personality.

And the previews certainly did nothing to persuade me to the contrary. In fact each time I hear his Afrikaans accent for the film I cringe. I cringe because I don't think it is very good. Unlike DiCaprio I lived in the midst of Afrikaners and heard the accent every day for years. I suspect that when the film is shown in South Africa the audience will be doubling over with laughter. Surely if he wanted some help he could have asked Charlize Theron. She so good at accents that she apparently lost her Afrikaans accent entirely right to the point of routinely mispronouncing her own name.