This is not miscasting if the characters are a man in his 50’s and a woman in her 20’s. Miscasting is when the person isn’t right for the role in which they’ve been cast. Although it may creep you out to see, say 50-something Humphrey Bogart courting late 20-year-old Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, the movie calls for people of those ages, so the actors cast are perfectly reasonable.
What you’re complaining about is scripts that call for young women with much older men, a common occurrance in Hollywood films.
Why? Just because the literary character was obese doesn’t mean that the movie character had to be. A movie exists as a separate entity from the book/stories on which it is based, and so an actor’s fitness for a role should be judged on how fit they are for this particular movie role, not on whether they fit the physical description of a a character given in the book or story on which the movie was based. This goes for Tom Cruise as Lestat, and any other complaint based on the theory that “The actor (or any other element of a movie) looks/is different from the description in the book, therefore he/she was miscast”. Different from the source material, therefore bad is not a valid criticism.
Proof of Life. No surprise Meg Ryan’s character falls for Russel Crowe’s character in the mismatched marriage she was in.
Bruce Willis was terrible in Disney’s The Kid, as was the child who played him as a kid. Girlfriend was pretty weird too. It might have been a good movie if it had been cast better.
Helen Hunt was not my pick for either As Good as it Gets or for Pay it Forward.
I liked Keanu Reeves in The Devil’s Advocate and Sweet November. He was perfect in Little Buddha, though most people wouldn’t be able to identify him behind all the make-up. Agreed that The Matrix and Speed would have been better without him.
Keanu Reeves was not in any production of Twelfth Night that I or IMDB are aware of.
I realize people need to take their shots at Mr. Reeves, but surely it’s over the line to castigate him for movies he wasn’t even in?
I have not seen Breakfast At Tiffany’s, but I’m told Mickey Rooney played a Japanese man in it. A horrible, stereotyped, buck-toothed Japanese man. Surely Toshiro Mifune wasn’t too terribly busy that year?
Ron Livingston in Band of Brothers. And that guy from Friends.
I haven’t seen Speed, but Keanu was pretty well cast in The Matrix. His role was to be as confused as possible as much as possible, which we all know Reeves excells at.
Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. She was unable to project the intelligence necessary for the role; it was completely unbelieveable that she was smart enough to do what she did.
In addition to the above, I’d suggest Jackie Gleason asand Mac Davis and Olver Reed in The Sting II, trying to do the roles originated by Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Robert Shaw, respectively.
Robert Shaw as an Israeli agent in Black Sunday.
Sad to say, this seems to be an Urban Legend. I’d read it about The Black Shield of Falworth, too. But in a thread about two-three years ago, several Dopers who’d rented thisa film in the hopes of hearing the line couldn’t find it. I think Mr. Wrong was being funny, and probably knows about this line’s nonexistence. In Spartacus, by the way, notice that , except for Jean Simmons, all the slaves have American accents and all the Romans have British ones. It’s a neat touch, and Tony Curtis’ Brooklyn accent fits right in.
I’m sure that Sublight just made a small mental error. Keanu Reeves was in Much Ado About Nothing. I thought he was fine in that. He’s been worse.
As for horrible miscasting–Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls. As Frank himself thought, he would have been a fine Sky Masterson, but casting him as Nathan Detroit–please! And Brando should always stick to non-singing roles. He was okay, but mostly it was embarassing.
The other day I saw someone wearing clothes. In this day and age, unenlightened people still wear clothes! Can you believe it?
I laughed in his face because he was so dumb.–stypticus
According to The Golden Turkey Awards (IIRC), the notorious Tony Curtis line was “Yondah lies dah palace of my faddah, dah Caliph,” from Son of Ali Baba.
In Sofia Coppola’s defense, I would like to point out that she was literally a last-minute replacement for Wynona Ryder–no-one else was avaliable on such short notice. Besides, Sofia was at best adequate and at worst wooden. The worst performer in GF III (IMHO) was Eli Wallach, who overacted shamelessly and came across like a parody.
I’d just like to point out that when a bad actor gives a bad performance, that’s probably not miscasting. Most likely, they’re there for financial/box-office or political reasons. However, this does not excuse casting Melanie Griffiths as a secret agent in Shining Through, which is so dumb and inexplicable that those responsible should have committed suicide rather than make the movie.
On the other hand, casting Tony Curtis, an excellent actor when playing someone from New York, as a viking (in The Vikings) or a Roman (in Spartacus) is a classic example of bad casting.
My final nomination for the award for worst casting would be to everyone who cast Marlon Brando in anything after about 1973. It should have been obvious by then that he had turned into a self-loathing ham. And it should ahve been transparently obvious for anyone forced to sit through his performance in Arthur Penn’s Missouri Breaks (his simpering camp cowboy is possibly the most bizarre performance by any actor in the history of motion pictures). It should have been obvious before he was cast in Apocalypse Now, where he refused to read the script, mumbles throughout, and is utterly incoherent and really pointlessly bad. So why did people persistently say, “Hey, Marly, wanna job?”
(And fair enough, Kenneth Branagh is widely acclaimed in Shakespeare, though not really to my tastes, but his performances in movies taking place after 1450 AD have generally been awful and eerily unconvincing, and he seems to have some of Olivier’s gift for bad accents.)
But since, despite what it says here, it isn’t really in the “Memorable Quotes” section (there is no Memorable Quotes section for this movie), and the fact that this is the third movie I’ve heard claimed as the source of this quote, I won’t believe it until I see/hear it.
In 1961 (the year that Breakfast at Tiffany’s came out), Toshiro Mifune appeared in no less than five films:[ul][li]Osaka Castle Story (“Osaka jo monogatari”)[/li][li]Salary Man Chushingura, Part 2 (“Zoku sarariiman Chushingura”)[/li][li]Gen and Fudo-Myo (“Gen to Fudo-Myo”)[/li][li]Ánimas Trujano[/li]
and last, but definitely not least:
[li]Yojimbo[/ul]Not only was Mifune too busy to take a stereotyped, throwaway role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, he was too good an actor to even be considered for such a part, in my opinion.[/li]
Give the crap roles to crap actors. Mickey Rooney was well cast.