Sometimes Will Smith Just Isn’t Right For The Part

Back in the late 90s, I was a reporter working at a newspaper in northern Ontario. I got a call one day from a friend who worked at the city’s science museum, a distinctive spot with a unique look and several key features. This friend gave me a scoop: film producers were in the city scouting the museum for a new movie.

“What movie?” I asked.

“It’s called X-Men,” she said. Well. My geek rockets fired and I had to put on a ruby quartz visor to contain my powers. As a lifelong X-Men fan, finding out that the film — which had been announced and was set up to shoot in Toronto — was coming to my city was like winning the spandex lotto.

I hustled the muscle all day, finally digging up enough of a story. Strangely, my editors didn’t see its value, but I pushed, and it made front page. But as I was talking to “unnamed film studio employees,” someone let a tidbit slip: Will Smith was in talks for the lead. This led me to a bit of a pause: Who, really, could Will Smith play in the X-Men movie? Was he going to be Wolverine? Cyclops?

It didn’t come to pass, as we all know. In fact, the movie wasn’t shot in the city at all; producers merely copied the look for Magneto’s cave and a few other sequences. I was thinking about this today, though, when I read that McG wants Will Smith to play Captain Nemo in his upcoming 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea movie.

Uh, no.

Comic writer Alan Moore got Captain Nemo right in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and this was carried over to the sucktastic movie version). Jules Verne wrote Nemo as an Indian prince, something subsequent filmmakers ignored. No, generations of kids saw an onscreen Nemo who looked like a typical sea captain: an old white man with a beard. Moore brought the real Nemo back, and did it well.

Will Smith can’t be Nemo. It would be epic turdity … but then, this is McG we’re talking about here.

Meanwhile, Jackie Chan is rumoured to be playing Mr. Miyagi in a remake of Karate Kid. This makes me want to watch the original again. Which I will soon do.

RIP Ricardo Montalban

Another sad loss today: Ricardo Montalban is gone.

The smooth-voiced Mexican actor is best remembered for two roles: Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island, and Khan Noonien Singh on Star Trek and the best science fiction film of all time, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Man, I loved this guy. He was everywhere when I was a kid, doing commercials, popping up on TV shows. I could listen to that voice all day. And if you know anything about me, you probably understand the effect a show like Fantasy Island had on a Trek-loving daydreaming kid who longed for adventure. Then Ricardo showed up that Planet of the Apes movie and my young nerdometer spun ’round the dial.

See? I told you it was his real chest.

When he returned as Khan in Wrath, I was beyond stoked. The eugenically-enhanced superhuman conqueror was one of my favourite Star Trek villains from the series, and seeing early promo photos of him all wild-haired and savage really helped pique my thirst for the film.

I’ll bet you I’ve seen it more than 500 times since then. You may have, too. That movie is perfect Trek, and a lot of that has to do with the excellence of Montalban and his fantastic chemistry with Shatner’s Kirk … despite the fact that the two men filmed their scenes separately and didn’t meet until filming was over.

So I’m saying farewell to a man who was a huge part of my entertainment life, a guy who became one of my heroes by playing a splendid villain.

More of his life story can be found here.

Note: In marginally related news, I once theorized that the island on Lost is actually the long-defunct and abandoned Fantasy Island, and that Mr. Rourke was the founder of the Dharma Initiative. It would explain so much … but I’m probably wrong.

Today’s Morons: Randy and Melissa Marie Pratt

Ah, those pesky decimal points …

Today’s morons are an American couple who were surprised to find a $1,772.50 cheque deposited in their account had turned into $177,250. Rather than call the bank to report the error, Randy and Melissa Marie Pratt took the money and left frosty Pennsylvania, headed to Florida. Because, you know, the cops can’t find you in remote, isolated places like Florida.

The two were arraigned this week on theft and other charges and jailed in lieu of $100,000 bail. I should note that they have not been convicted of a crime, so this is all “alleged.”

But Melissa Marie (I love that name) reportedly admits taking the money; she says her husband’s roofing business frequently received large cheques.

Here’s the kicker: the cheque was cashed last summer, and the Pratts were just caught. So they’ve been living large in the sunny south all this time. I wonder how much of the cash is left?

I can’t get my head around the Pratts’ reasoning here. Really, did they think nobody would notice? I remember once, geez, this is going back to around 1983: my McDonald’s paycheque was deposited in my account twice. I had an angry bank asshole calling before I even knew it had happened, warning me not to spend the money. And that was about forty bucks.

Well, the Pratts were caught, and now their stupidity is news. I feel bad for them. I feel bad for the poor bank, too. I hate seeing huge faceless corporations wounded like that. I’m sure the CEO is upset … but then again, he could make up that missing 177 grand by forfeiting a day’s pay.

Lost: Daniel Faraday

(Indulge me. As we near the Season 5 premiere of Lost, I’m going to run through the current crop of main characters. There are spoilers.)

One of the stranger new characters on Lost last season was this guy, a physicist and mathematician who might have been the inventor of time travel. Or maybe he got the idea from Desmond. We’re still in the dark about all that.

When we first see Faraday, he’s sobbing while watching the discovery of the faux 815 on the TV news. Then he’s parachuting onto the island, armed and clearly not telling the truth. After hovering around the beach for a bit — always in his blue shirt and skinny tie — Faraday and Lewis got up to some no-goodness involving poison gas or something, but that was never really fleshed out.

Jeremy Davies, always a watchable actor, wears Faraday like an old corduroy coat. Like the other newcomers, Faraday’s role on the show suffered from Writers’ Strikitis. But he’s a regular this coming season, so that’s cool.

One odd tidbit: there was some talk that he might be the “Dan” mentioned in Season 2, the ex-boyfriend of Ana Lucia and father of her lost child. Seriously. Some lost fans thought Faraday and Ana Lucia were a couple. Try to picture that for a moment.

Highlights:

• He’s older than he appears, if he was a professor at Oxford a decade prior.
• What did he write in his notebook? If anything goes wrong, Desmond is his constant? Crazy. It would appear Faraday is also unlocked in time the way Desmond is.
• He has two distinct personalities. Sometimes he’s weak, wimpy and confused, while at other times he’s cool, chilling and commanding. “I can’t really say that rescuing you people is our … primary objective.”
• Faraday knows way, way more than he lets on. For instance, in the finale, he knew what Keamy’s secondary protocol meant.
• But his memory is more swiss-cheesed than Sam Beckett’s; he often has no clue what’s happening, and seems to even forget his own name.

Problems:

• Lack of screen time, but that’s understandable.
• It was never made clear why the castaways accepted him so quickly.
• If the freighter is 80 km off the island, there’s no way Faraday was zipping back and forth in that little zodiac so easily. However, it appears later in the finale that the freighter indeed moved closer, but that’s never mentioned.

Captain Kirk 2.0

So, I went to Morphthing and mixed William Shatner and Chris Pine together to create the ultimate Captain Kirk. It’s very strange. At first, I thought the remixed Kirk looked like Robert Pine, Chris Pine’s papa, who played the commander on CHiPS. But then weirdly, I realized it came out looking just like a guy I actually know. So after thinking about that for a while, I morphed Shatner with an Olson twin, and then I had to turn off the lights, pull myself into the fetal position and weep.

Am I thinking about Star Trek too much? New movie: 113 days.

RIP Patrick McGoohan

Number Six is dead. Patrick McGoohan, creator and star of The Prisoner, left us yesterday at age 80.

If you’ve never seen The Prisoner, you should seek it out. Trust me on this one: it’s the strangest bit of television ever made. Weirder than Twin Peaks, more mindwarping than Lost, creepier than the X-Files. It was the story of a British secret agent who resigns abruptly, then finds himself transported to a bizarre place called The Village, a hidden colony with a role and presence that was never really explained. Trapped in a neo-Edwardian society, interrogated by the mysterious Number 2, chased by a giant floating ball, the unnamed hero tried like hell to get away, but was stymied every time.

The first VCR I ever saw was in the back room of the small public libary in the little town where I grew up. It was the sort of town where you were considered weird if you read for fun, so I tended to have the library to myself most of the time. One day, the librarian asked me if I would like to watch “videotapes” in the back — I had no idea the service even existed.

The library’s video collection — these were those huge old video tapes, before Beta, before VHS — consisted largely of BBC dramas, National Geographic specials … and The Prisoner. So I was able to watch the entire series, over and over again, before I was 12 years old.

I’ve seen it many times since. It’s always stayed with me, and I consider it to be one of the foundations of my love of geekery (in there with Star Trek, Planet of the Apes and my comic books). McGoohan was brilliant in it; this was apparent to me even as a kid. I read later that he had starred in Danger Man (also called Secret Agent), a previous series about espionage, and The Prisoner was considered an unofficial sequel.

So, another icon of my childhood is gone. It’s a sad day. However, I’m just reading here in a separate tab that a remake is in the works, a new TV version with Jim Caviezel in the right role. See how good Patrick McGoohan was? He had to be replaced with the guy whose last big role was Jesus.

I look forward to the remake, if only to see how the story handles espionage, secrecy, paranoia and conspiracies in a world that has changed since the 1960s.