It took Smallville four seasons to get to Lois Lane. Anything would have been refreshing after watching Clark pine for three years over Lana, a coreless character who shifted to be whatever the writers needed for a storyline. In came Erica Durance. The first tease of her arrival in Smallville, looking for information on the "death" of her cousin Chloe, made all of the classic Superman fans jump for joy.
Durance, who was a tall, tough looking brunette and not a Hollywood twig, was a breath of fresh air. After three years of Lana, the viewers fully expected an angsty damsel in distress to ruin their hopes and dreams. Durance plays Lois strong and sassy with a clipped Cadence to her voice and a sharp attitude.
Durance also handles the on-camera violence well. We really believe that she knows what she's doing when she kicks a bad guy in the face.
Over the years Durance has proven herself as an actress. Episodes like #4.18, "Spirit" show her range when she gets to play other characters in Lois' body. She even succeeded in playing the wife of Zod and Chloe later on in the series and each performance was a success.
Talent isn't enough when casting iconic characters from a graphic medium. Erica Durance has the talent, but she also has the look (okay, so maybe she could drop a few blonde highlights).
9. Kelsey Grammar as Beast
It is important to clarify that this list is about the casting, not about the movie. There will be a few castings on this list that were great but existed within sub-par movies. X-Men and X2 were fantastic adaptations-- true to the spirit of the series, though they had already ruined a couple of characters. By the third X-Men movie, however, the producers' need to put in every character the fans wanted to see, completely ruined the series. Wolverine suffered from the same fatal flaw.
Still, Kelsey Grammar was that casting that, when announced, my brother and I slapped our foreheads and shouted "WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT?". Grammar had spent the better part of his career playing a scientist/doctor who was too smart to be really socially capable on Frasier. With blue fur and a suit, he should have been perfect. Too bad the movie wasn't.
8. Christian Bale as Batman
Bale plays the subtlety of man tortured by his past, balanced with the command of a billionare entrepreneur and the gritty, somewhat crazy presence of the iconic Batman. He changes his voice to explain why he is never recognized. He plays dramatic moments with the perfect level of performance.
Could someone else step in, bulk up and play Batman? Probably. Would we want to risk losing Bale? No. Batman is the best written DC character and if you want to argue with me I have a comments section. Batman is built on so many complex layers and the script is so perfectly written int he Nolan series to explain believably why a man with all of the money in the world would put on a high tech bat costume and fight crime. Bale may not be the only man for the job, but so far he has been the best Batman to don the suit on film and I don't care to see someone else try. I am completely satisfied with his performance.
7. Michael Clark Duncan as the Kingpin
I know what some of you are saying right now. "But Amy, isn't the Kingpin a big fat white guy?" Yes, yes he is. But then Nick Fury was also David Hasslehoff with an eye patch. It didn't stop him from turning into Samuel L. Jackson in the Ultimate Universe.
It needs to be considered in every film adaptation that we are not watching the main continuity (or Earth 616 in this case). The movie will not follow the major canon because it can't. Canon is spread out over sixty or more years for most popular comics and weird crap like rejuvination chambers and seventeen resurrections have taken place. Since the X-Men were in High School, fifty some-odd years have passed and still Cyclops is not yet 30.
I know that I said that the look of the character was required, but hear me out. In Kingpin's case the presence is more important. You can find six thousand sassy actresses to play Lois and just as many brunette pretty boys to play Batman. Kingpin needs to be large and in charge. He has to be silky, confident, powerful. Michael Clark Duncan is the only major, well-known actor I can think of who could even come close to the scale of what Kingpin needs to be. Maybe they should have brought in an unknown, but face it, we all like to see faces we know when they cast these films.
6. Ian McKellan as Magneto
I love Ian McKellen. I love his Richard III, I love his Gandalf. At first I wasn't too sure about his Magneto, namely because he is pretty frail and Magneto is always jacked. My brother, however, slapped some sense into me. I'm usually the one to point out that mainstream audiences will go "WTF" about comic canon. Sam pointed out that if you cut the rejuvination chamber and put Eric/Magnus/Max, whatever his name is these days in canon, in a modern setting and still keep his holocaust backstory, he has to be that old. You aren't going to find someone as old as Sir Ian McKellen who still looks like a superhero.
Ian McKellen is one of the most talented actors I will ever get the opportunity to see perform. It is more important to have someone capable of playing the part than just fitting the skin. Magneto is perhaps one of the best written supervillians of all time. He is complex. We don't, for one minute, believe that he believes he is truly evil. We always understand his motives and his good intentions. Magneto is an old man who fears a second Holocaust for his children and will do anything to prevent it. He does not believe that mutant kind and their human oppressors will ever coexist peacefully and he has seen first hand what can happen to a minority that trusts things to work out. Ian McKellan made that incredibly clear in the X-Men movies.
5. Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool
Close your eyes. Imagine Wolverine if the movie stopped before Wolverine's girlfriend "died." Wasn't Ryan Reynolds awesome as wise-cracking Wade Wilson? No, stop. Forget that abomination they called Deadpool in the latter half of the movie. Forget his no-face. Forget his no-speaking (WTF, Deadpool not cracking jokes. What is this?). Forget that the samurai swords in his arms would prevent any mobility when they were retracted because they would go up through his elbows.
Ryan Reynolds was great. The script was awful. Seriously. That movie should be burned.
4. JK Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson
Simmons not only looked the part once he was in the makeup, he played it brilliantly. Jameson is one of those parts that no actor should ever try to interpret seriously. Spider-Man needs more of his kind of comedy in it. When you remove the wise-cracks from Peter, he does seem a little out of place, but if the tone of Spider-Man is interpreted correctly, James should be exactly what Simmons made him: a cartoon.
I felt like JK Simmons fell out of a cartoon and that is a comic book nerd's dream when it comes to these bit parts.
3. Heath Ledger as the Joker
You knew I was going to get there. Heath Ledger as the joker still amazes me, because nobody believed it would be a good idea until they saw it. I believed it was a great idea because I try not to judge actors by the audience of their previous work. I remember the internet exploding with protests that a teen heart throb was going to play Joker. The wanna-be macho men that screamed the loudest only knew that he was in the gay cowboy movie and some teen films. They forgot The Patriot or that he wasn't just a teen actor.
I thought that Ledger would be great because I remembered how darkly mysterious his smile was in 10 Things I Hate About You. I was willing to give him a chance and I am glad I did. I've seen it argued that the impression of his performance was inflated by his premature death. I do believe, to some extent, that replacement would have been possible if he had quit instead of passed. Still, Heath Ledger's performance was brilliant. It wasn't just the script.
Now credit must be given to Christopher Nolan for being the first to bring us a truly twisted Joker-- a force of chaos more than a man. Ledger showed his true grit in his physicality (like his choice to lick his scars) and in the choice to play opposites. Katie Holmes could have learned a thing or two from Ledger. He took moments where a lesser actor would have been angry and played them gleeful. He took moments where Joker was putting on a grand show and made them oddly casual. Ledger's delivery of some of the best lines in the script took a route outside of the obvious and that is why we will remember him and his disappearing pencil trick.
2. Robert Downey Junior as Iron Man
RDJ looks the part. We've got that down. RDJ is also a recovering alcoholic, like Tony Stark. That's a fun (not really fun) fact, but it's not why he is great. Robert Downey Jr. is great because he plays a facade of arrogance and sharp wit with brilliant comedic timing and still leaves a subtle uncertainty underneath the surface of Tony Stark.
We laugh hysterically when he is being a wise-cracker, but we also feel his pain when he is struggling with the guilt of what his weapons have done or feeling his own mortality as he struggles against a villain.
He works so well with Gwenyth Paltrow, too. The chemistry is so intense that even when there is nothing in the script to suggest it, the sexual tension resonates between them.
RDJ is so good that he created a problem for Captain America casting. RDJ has so much presence that it was a struggle to find someone who could compete with him as a believable leader for the upcoming Avengers movie. Tony Stark is a big character and RDJ is the only man I can think of to fill his shoes.
1. Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier
X-Men was the first superhero movie to turn people back to the superhero genre. Batman and Robin had previously hammered the last nail in the coffin and then Brian Singer came in to bust the lid open and raise it from the dead.
No matter what cast of characters you put in the X-Men, Xavier is a constant. Yes he's died, gone off, resurrected, returned... but we always think of Xavier because he is the proverbial father of the X-Men. Charles Xavier is the glue that keeps them together and in an origin he is essential.
Casting Xavier and Magneto with such talented, powerful actors ensured that, no matter how strangely Rogue, Storm, etc were written, the message of the movies still came through. No matter what else was wrong, we still understood that these films, though supernatural, were about real people, real fears, and real issues that we can relate to. Mankind struggles with hatred and acceptance every day and casting someone has naturally wise and assuring as Patrick Stewart reminded us that this wasn't just Sci-Fi, it is an allegory for the struggle of humanity.
Plus, the casting director was already guaranteed that he looked good bald.
0 comments:
Post a Comment