Sorry for the multiple posts, my browser hung up a couple times.
Good thread, and some great nominations. May I submit two classics of the genre.
- The Stepford Wives. William Goldman, in his must-read book Adventures In The Screen Trade tells this story very well. I think most Dopers will be aware of the basic Stepford plot, but just in case I’ll use a spoiler box. The main secret is this
A bunch of guys kill their wives to replace them with very lifelike robots, each designed and programmed to be every man’s perfect dream wife
Given this premise, as Goldman points out, you’d expect each wife to be one stunning piece of hot looking honey, hotter than Hades and sweeter than sin. After all, that’s a large part of the motive. It’s also how the book is written. So who gets cast as one of the main Stepford Wives? Nanette Newman. A perfectly nice, likeable British lady, and a decent actress, but not really a strong contender for sex kitten of the year. Why’d she get the part? Because the movie was directed by Bryan Forbes, and Newman was his wife.
- Heaven’s Gate. Much has been written about the this, the movie which went so over budget, and made so little, that it bankrupted United Artists. The full, grisly story is told in the glorious and un-putdownable Final Cut by Steven Bach, the only person who was involved in the movie from start to finish. Director Michael Cimino made any number of ludicrous decisions while making this movie, but one of his earliest and strangest was to insist on casting Isabella Huppert as one of the female leads. It’s about settlers in Montana in the 1890s, and Huppert was/is a French actress. At the time, her grasp of English was moderately good but not exactly fluent, and even when she got the words right her accent made her lines almost impossible to understand. Why did Cimino insist on her? We’ll never really know. But he also held up filming an outdoor scene for one day because he wanted to wait until the clouds looked right.
{b}Evil captor and RikWriter, cut it out. We’re not going to be doing this here.**
My apologies, Euthychus.
Speaking of bad casting, Rosie O’Donnell in “9 1/2 Weeks.” The whole movie was horribly botched, so her bad casting didn’t stand out so much. I think she just did it so she could wear a leather boustier and wrestle with Naomi Campbell.
Not that I blames her.
In Dr. No, Zena Marshall plays Miss Taro, one of No’s Chinese henchwomen. The producers had no problem finding competent, attractive Chinese women to play No’s servants, but heaven forbid an Asian woman be cast in an important role.
I have no problem with the casting of any of the X-Men. Sure, Jackman is much taller than the comic Wolverine, and Berry is much smaller than the comic Storm, but height isn’t really an important characteristic for these characters as they appear in the movie.
Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is truly horrific, but I’ve got to go with the Duke as Ghengis Khan as the worst ever.
chukhung:
All I meant to imply was that perhaps if a Japanese actor had been cast in the role, it might’ve been more true-to-life and less insulting.
I’ve not seen the movie nor read the book, so I don’t know if it’s possible the character could have been made any better with better casting.
You don’t know what miscast means.
Miscast means Laurence Olivier playing an aging Jewish cantor in the turkey called The Jazz Singer. And he didn’t help things by mixing his Yiddish and Irish accents, either.
I’ll second that. Arnold was a terrible choice. Mr. Freeze is supposed to be a sympathetic character; he’s lost his wife, lost his job, and he has to spend the rest of his life walking around in what is essentially a mobile meat locker. Arnold Scwartzenegger isn’t a good enough character actor to play somone like that.
You know who I think would have been a better choice? Richard Moll. He’s big and tough-looking, and anyone who was a fan of Night Court knows that he can hit the emotional notes that Arnie missed.
When I heard that Mr. Freeze was going to be in a Batman movie, Patrick Stewart immediately came to mind.
Keeeee-rap. You’re right. I was thinking of Much Ado About Nothing, in which he played Don John alongside Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, and Denzel Washington.
Thank Dao for Preview, since I caught myself mis-writing the title again as “As You Like It”. Man, I am hopeless at getting my Shakespeare straight. I’m just glad I don’t have this much trouble with my Longfellow.
Heston wasn’t such a bad choice, it’s just that they decided to layer him under a couple of shades of tanning makeup and give him a pencil-thin mustache and slicked-down black hair – y’know, just in case we might miss the idea that he’s supposed to be Mexican.
Even worse was Marlene Dietrich. Why does a Mexican fortune teller sound German? I think if she wiped her face, she’d leave traces in the tanning makeup.
In a similar vein: I tried to watch the movie version of Steinbeck’s “Tortilla Flats” the other night and just couldn’t get through it. It has Spencer Tracy and John Garfield playing stereotyped Mexicans. They’d start scenes with just a trace of a broad accent, then when they started talking fast they sound like they’re in Brooklyn.
Plus Garfield looks like Chico Marx.
Say what?
Rosie O’Donnell was in neither 9 1/2 Weeks nor its sequels, Another 9 1/2 Weeks (a.k.a. Love in Paris) or The First 9 1/2 Weeks.
I suspect you’re talking about Exit to Eden, but Naomi Campbell wasn’t in that.
Sublight:
I’ll thank you to leave your Longfellow out of this thread.
I’m trying to imagine Rosie O’Donnell in 9 1/2 Weeks, and I have to say it’s tough. BUT I think it would probably be much more entertaining that way, but as a comedy.
Grace Jones is past 50, Iman is almost 50. Might’ve been a problem, even though it’s true that Halle Berry isn’t very imposing. I guess they decided to go a different direction for the character.
I don’t get people’s complaints about Hugh Jackman. There’s no REAL Wolverine, you have to find someone who plays the character instead of just looking like him. 
Tom Cruise is apparently in a movie called The Last Samurai this fall. That sounds like a potentially large mis-casting job. And I’d second Hayden Christensen - the writing was terrible, but so was his whining.
Because somehow, it worked. Or so I think, but I despise the books anyway.
Michael Keaton as Batman is one I’ll happily agree with. But the worst ever is the one that almost happened: Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator… as Kyle Reese.
The horror.
The entire cast of Batman & Robin. As well as every prop, set, and costume designed for that piece of dreck film.
Leonardo di Caprio in Man in the Iron Mask. How did a snotty American kid get to be king of France?
Gillian Anderson as the voice of the wolf-goddess in Princess Mononoke, as well as Billy Bob Thornton as the monk. C’mon!!
Scott Bakula as Captain Cheesy on Enterprise.
Oh, yeah. I just got movies that have adapted bondage-themed novels badly confused. And it was Iman, not Campbell. Still, nothing quite seemed to jell in that movie. It was like a $20 hooker that doesn’t know her anatomy, so she keeps sucking and licking your kneecap instead of … other stuff.
Making Exit to Eden a comedy was their first mistake, Dan Ackroyd and Rosie O’ weren’t to blame for the chaos that ensued.
Even my pals who hadn’t read the book were left wondering if there were supposed to be two different movies going on, it was just that jarring of a juxtaposition. They were so afraid of the SMDB context that somehow throwing some recognizable names in to be keystone cop comic relief was supposed to make the audience miss the kinky stuff?
Who knew Dana Delaney could cat it up like that, though? Wowza!
(emphasis mine)
Whoa…we play nice here, Queen Tonya 
Whoa…I need to wake up. My brain twisted around a couple of letters and I read that as “SDMB.”
Obviously, I spend too much time here. I must go far, far away from my computer.