Hollywood Tone Deaf / Live-Action Films

• Minnie Driver's character in GoldenEye.
  James Bond: Who's strangling the cat?
  Zukovsky: [shoots Bond's chair] That is Irina, my mistress!
  Bond: Very talented girl.
• Cameron Diaz has done this multiple times in her films, and to her credit usually does a good job averting the pitfalls of this trope:
  • In My Best Friend's Wedding, Cameron Diaz's karaoke actually sounds realistically off.
  • Amanda in The Holiday, also portrayed by Cameron Diaz. She's singing along with the radio. Badly. And inordinately loudly [though the reason she's doing it is a plot point].
  • In Gambit, Cameron Diaz, as Puznowski, again delivers a slightly off-key and off-tempo performance in karaoke.
• Anna Faris' character in Lost in Translation...who is said to be a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Cameron Diaz.
• Faris does it again in the second Scary Movie. She butchers Vitamin C's "Graduation" so badly that the track on the radio stops and tells her to "shut the fuck up and let me sing.''
• Summer, the band manager from School of Rock. The DVD commentaries tell us (and prove to us) that Miranda Cosgrove, her actress, actually sings really well, and she had to be taught how to sing badly.
• Averted in Steven Spielberg's The War of the Worlds when Tom Cruise's character sings to his daughter. It toes the line between off-key and too-good-for-an-average-Joe nicely.
• American Beauty: Kevin Spacey sings along to "American Woman." Terribly.
• Hammer in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, who sings a very poor rendition of "Grazing in the Grass" as it plays on his car radio. It's funny to begin with, but he's played by singer Isaac Hayes, which takes it into Casting Gag territory.
• The singing girls in Dick Tracy were coached to sing worse than they normally would so that they could have the nasal, squeaking sound that invokes recordings from the 1930s.
• Bridget Jones: Bridget suspects that Daniel does not fantasise about her, after her dreadful and tuneless singing karaoke at the office Christmas party. The director points out in the commentary that Renee Zellweger really can sing like that.
• Cacofonix in the live-action film Asterix and Obelix vs. Caesar (based on the popular French comic series) is portrayed by Pierre Palmade; the character is supposed to be a really awful singer, but Pierre Palmade had to practice singing badly.
• Clarke and Rogers (Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty) in Ishtar.
• The nuns of Sister Act are all hilariously off-key and screechy. A few pointers from Whoopi Goldberg's character, however, has them singing like a proper choir. All of the actresses playing the nuns are genuinely good singers—except for the novice, the nun who ended up with most of the solos; her voice was dubbed over for those parts.
  • She essentially assigned each nun a part within her vocal range, and made sure the sopranos, altos, and so on were standing in clusters rather than scattered around the risers. That alone really can make a good difference.
• Cleverly averted in Citizen Kane. In order to put across the idea that Kane's mistress, Susan Alexander, is out of her depth in the opera, they overdubbed the actress with a professional opera singer, but hired an alto and had her try seriously to sing a soprano part. As a result, her singing voice sounds realistically strained.
• Older Than Television: One of Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer's trademark shticks in The Little Rascals was his (deliberately, at least later on in life) off-key singing, which Alfalfa was oblivious to. Subverted in that Switzer was allegedly a gifted singer in real life.
• Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth fumbles his off-key way through a simple church hymn. Subverted in that he was portrayed by David freakin' Bowie
  • Bowie played a bad singer again in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, in which his character Jack Celliers sings noticeably off-key with the other prisoners when the group sing hymns. Celliers even lampshades this later in the film.
• A number of the students auditioning for the Winter Musicale in High School Musical displayed this trope (in addition to other bad singing tropes...)
• In the film version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid the drama teacher has auditioning students do a group sing of Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler. Most of the auditioners sound pretty much like what you'd expect from a bunch of middle schoolers, but one of the kids sings extremely nasally, and so off-key that it doesn't sound like singing at all. He also has a heavy foreign accent.
• Averted by Denise Richards's off-key, whispered performance of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" (tastelessly addressed to Jesus) in Drop Dead Gorgeous. She may be actually tone deaf, at least if the video of her singing at the 7th Inning Stretch of a Cubs game is any indication.
• Randy Watson (Eddie Murphy) in Coming to America, who performs Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All" with his band Sexual Chocolate. In real life, Murphy is a very talented singer and even recorded a music album titled "How Could It Be?" which included the Top 10 hit, "Party All The Time."
• Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun. Made worse by the fact that he was impersonating a famous opera singer, Enrico Pallazzo, while the said singer was tied up and forced to watch.
• In the film The Losers, Jensen sings a painfully screechy rendition of "Don't Stop Believing" while infiltrating the computer security company in order to convince bystanders that they don't want to join him in the elevator.
• In Ted, John tries to win back Lori by singing "All Time High", the theme song of Octopussy, their favorite movie. Unfortunately, John's singing is so bad that the crowd boos and an angry man tries to assault him. In real life, Mark Wahlberg is a talented singer.
• Earlier on, Wahlberg also did some bad singing in Boogie Nights, mangling "The Touch" in a scene in which Dirk Diggler attempts a singing career.
• David Spade and Chris Farley have a scene in Tommy Boy that ends with them singing along to "Superstar" by the Carpenters at the top of their lungs. They're realistically bad (i.e., not great, but not terrible either).
• In the beginning of The Three Stooges' short Brideless Groom, music student Dee Green is rehearsing an ear-wrenching rendition of "The Voice of Spring" in front of her teacher, Shemp. Actually, Green was a classically trained soprano who taught music after retiring from the movies.
• Played straight in the film Florence Foster Jenkins, a biopic of the famously Giftedly Bad opera singer mentioned below. Meryl Streep (who is of course a trained and experienced singer, as seen in some of her other film roles) does a spectacularly bad job at screeching and warbling entirely out of key and tempo, reducing several characters to helpless giggles. However, the trope is averted a bit as far as the "Hollywood" aspect goes— although it sounds completely over the top, the real Florence really did sing that badly, and Streep is doing a dead-ringer imitation of her recordings.
• In The Comedy of Terrors, Amaryllis has dreams of becoming an opera singer, but she has no real talent for it. While Trumbull is repulsed by it, Gillie is too smitten with her to notice.
• In Shredder Orpheus, the EBN's Fiberglass Ensemble is a four-person group who only sing in "las", with no rhythm or melody to make it bearable. Hades loves how dull they are.
• In The Rock, Mason is singing badly in the shower at the Fairmont Hotel, so the guards don't hear him calling Room Service to distract them.
• In Tár, we witness Cate Blanchett strangling both the cat and an accordion to insult her neighbors (mind you, her character is a highly accomplished composer\conductor, only one going through a massive Sanity Slippage).

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