christian bale might not be acting

Last weekend, when I was in Pittsburgh, Vrabel and I got to talking about movies.  That's no surprise; we always do.  One of the films that came up was Rescue Dawn, the Werner Herzog picture about Dieter Dengler - a German-born Navy pilot who escaped from a Laotian POW camp.  The story obviously resonates with Herzog, as this was the second movie he has directed about Dieter.  Little Dieter Needs to Fly was a documentary; Rescue Dawn was the dramatization of the same story.  Christian Bale was cast as little Dieter in the not-quite remake.

Now, Rescue Dawn had been on my rental short-list for a while.  I remember hearing about the movie when it was filming (one of the scenes in which the stars eat bowls of worms was apparently not faked) and it was fairly well reviewed.  The Video Vault tagged it as one of their best of 2007.  So I was a little surprised when Vrabel remarked that he could barely finish watching - that he figured it must be a spoof.  (These opinions were later verified and echoed by Vanna.)  Without going into too much irrelevant detail, it was determined that I must watch the movie as soon as possible, because public opinion was both divided and emphatic, to the point that we wondered semi-seriously if there were two different versions of the movie out there.  My email to Vrabel after last Monday's screening said simply: "Why did Christian Bale choose to play the part as if Dieter was retarded?"

So Bale's appearance this morning on the Today Show might shed some light on the subject.  To wit: maybe it isn't Dieter who is retarded.  If anybody can offer an explanation as to what the fuck is going on with this accent, I'd like to hear it.