Carolyn Creative

I have not gotten sucked into the current Vampire craze yet.  I tried Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it didn’t work out.  I have neither read nor rented Twilight, despite my adoration for other Tween genres.  However, during a housesitting stint this week, I started watching “True Blood” and I’m a little hooked.  It’s very original with a little dose of dark humor.  Sometimes, the vampires move really quickly, which is both scary and awesome.  Plus, I learned that a vampire can’t come into your house unless you invite him, which makes me feel a lot better, especially since it is very difficult for a human or vampire to get into our condo complex.  Seriously, it’s like Fort Knox.

My beef with True Blood?  The accents!  Bad.  Set in a fictional small town in Louisiana, the characters seem to be attempting a combination of a drawl and redneck twang.  Now, I am sympathetic to the actors; I realize that several of them are international, so they are dropping their native accents and adapting foreign ones.  That seems like quite a challenge.  My frustration lies with Hollywood.  Producers fail to realize that there are thousands of different accents in the South.  Someone from Hickory, North Carolina, will sound a lot different than someone from Oxford, Mississippi.  Just as there are an estimated 2000 different dialects in India, there are oodles of nuances in the Southern accent.  Hollywood producers seem to only recognize the sharp twang a la My Name is Earl (and kudos to Jaime Pressley for hers) and the Steel Magnolias drawl.  Frankly, it’s distracting.  And aren’t some vampires 1000 years old?  That is plenty of time to work on your accent.

Not to end on a negative note, I’d now like to salute some accents done well on both the small screen and big one.  Here’s to you, Dixie Carter as Julia Sugarbaker, Amy Adams in “Junebug” and Matthew McConnaughey as the legendary Wooderson in “Dazed and Confused.”  Well done.