Next week, Vin Diesel returns (along with Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordanna Brewster) to the Fast and the Furious franchise, which he’d abandoned after the first movie (he did have a cameo in part 3). When news first hit that he’d be reprising the role of Dominic Toretto for the fourth installment, simply titled Fast & Furious, most of us saw the actor as returning under a veil of shame. Because he initially departed the series with an inflated ego — and with it unrealistic salary demands — it does seem obvious that Diesel is now only desperately crawling back because his career failed to take off the way he’d hoped it would.
This is quite sad considering not even Steve Guttenberg ever crawled back to the Police Academy movies, nor did Burt Reynolds ever get dragged back for a fourth Smokey and the Bandit. But there have been other shameful returns by stars to franchises they’d previously sat out of (whether the hiatus was of their own choosing or not). Only one of these may have been as desperate as Diesel now appears, but it’s worth looking at four additional actors and actresses who should be very embarrassed of their delayed reprisals.
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We at SpoutBlog love Jon Hamm tremendously, but we don’t get to write about him much because we’re primarily a film blog and don’t feature much discussion of either Mad Men or 30 Rock (we’ve slipped praise into posts here and there, of course). Fortunately for us, Hamm has made a new video for FunnyorDie.com, in which he references movies. Specifically, he portrays Lex Luthor and alludes to plot points from Superman: The Movie, Superman Returns and even Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.
And as if this video (watch it after the jump) weren’t funny enough, we can now hopefully look forward to Hamm appearing in more Judd Apatow-related comedies — at least if the guys at Vulture have any influence. Or, maybe Hamm could actually be cast in a future Superman movie (was this video a response to requests for Warner Bros. to make him the new Man of Steel?), as either hero or villain — or both!?!?
Again, check out the clip and what other bloggers (some TV bloggers, but whatever) are saying about it after the jump:
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We’re less than a week away from the release of Tropic Thunder, and as the reviews and puff pieces make their way onto the web, there’s one thing clearly uniting the media’s coverage: talk of Tom Cruise’s appearance in a small role as a Hollywood studio boss. Everyone seems to agree that he steals the show and that his performance — or the joke surrounding it — is one of the comedy’s major highlights, if not the actual best part.
Of course, we can expect a good cameo from Cruise every now and then. He showed up for a bit part in Young Guns and played himself as playing “Austin Powers” in Austin Powers in Goldmember. But from what it sounds like, his role in Tropic Thunder is featured for longer than might qualify as a cameo. Some are regardless referring to the performance as an “extended cameo”, and in theory it certainly fits in with the huge crop of so-called “ironic cameos” that have become popular in movies and TV in the last ten years.
Still, despite my not having yet seen the movie, I’m thinking that Tom Cruise’s involvement in Tropic Thunder is more like the following list, which consists of merely small roles filled by big stars. You might consider some of them to be technically cameos, especially the ones that aren’t integral to the plot and/or call attention to themselves. But with each of the roles I’ve included, I consider them to be either the best part of their respective movies or at least a major highlight, which is how Cruise’s appearance is being touted. Anyway, forgive me for trying to come up with something different than simply a best cameo list, even if the focus here seems less than clear.
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