Other Crap

Kevin Costner as Robin Hood. Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist. Casting cock-ups. Here's my tip for the day: if you are going to write a web site about movies, you should at least have seen a few. Frankly, although those were all bad casting choices, they don't compare to the worst of all time. They missed the greatest and most obvious casting blunders of all-time, that I can remember: (3) Marlon Brando as an Okinawan in Teahouse of the August Moon (2) John Wayne as Genghis Khan (1) Mickey Rourke as Frances of Assisi. And while I admit that Tom Cruise's Irish-American accent was pretty silly in Far and Away, it was a helluva lot better than Olivier's feckless American accent in The Betsy - and Lord Larry was supposed to be the great Olivier, master thespian! Olivier was supposed to be playing a powerful Captain of Industry, ala Henry Ford, and he played the part with a near-perfect impersonation of Gabby Hayes, by gum, by cracky! Do you remember Hugh Grant trying to sound like he was a member of the New York mob in Mickey Blue Eyes? Well, he was trying to screw up, and still came closer to the right sounds than Olivier did! And while we all know that Dick van Dyke didn't sound like a cockney, neither did Michael Caine sound like he came from Maine in The Cider House Rules. Some great actors are marvelous with accents (Branagh and Streep come to mind), but others are not (Olivier and Brando).