Just as Nikki Finke “TOLDJA” almost four months ago, Oscar-nominee Natalie Portman has been tapped for Marvel’s Thor, in which she’ll play love interest to the Norse god-turned-superhero. No stranger to comic book adaptations nor to reworkings of Scandinavian properties, the actress will play “Jane Foster,” a nurse who becomes Thor’s love interest when the “powerful but arrogant warrior” is banished to Earth by his fellow Asgardians. So far, Portman remains the sole household name cast in the movie, which stars Chris Hemsworth as the title hero, Tom Hiddleston as the villainous Loki and Brian Blessed as Thor’s father, Odin. Fellow Oscar-nominee Kenneth Branagh is directing.
The former child actress follows in the tradition of well-known but questionably talented starlets playing uninteresting love interests in comic book adaptations: Kim Basinger in Batman; Katie Holmes in Batman Begins; Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight; Kirsten Dunst in the Spider-Manmovies; and Gwyneth Paltrow in Iron Man. To me, Portman seems like a cross between the last two actresses. She’s done the “manic pixie dream girl” thing like Dunst, but she’s a little more high class, a la Paltrow. Marvel claims they’re updating the Foster character for the film, which is good considering few comic enthusiasts even know or care much about her, but it still seems likely Portman may actually have less to do in this movie than she did in The Darjeeling Limited(not including the Hotel Chevalierprologue).
Personally, I think Branagh should have hired Maia Brewtonfor the role, especially now that people are re-watching Parker Lewis Can’t Lose on DVD. Sure, she hasn’t been around in awhile, and it would be stunt casting, but I always prefer stunt casting to bad casting.
Check out some other film blog responses to the casting after the jump:
A new Zooey Deschanel movie came out last weekend. But is it the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Paul Dano or the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt? It’s the former, and it’s called Gigantic, which is also not to be confused with this coming week’s new DVD release, Yes Man, in which she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Jim Carrey.
Sure, Deschanel has range and talent (see this fan-made montage of some of her more varied performances), but she also has a certain repetitive nature to her characters. And this “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” nature became all the more confusing recently when trailers for Gigantic and (500) Days of Summer (the Gordon-Levitt one, which is actually her second romantic pairing with the actor) appeared online around the same time. Maybe instead of worrying about people confusing her for Katy Perry, the actress should worry more about people confusing her characters and films for each other.
Or, maybe not. Plenty of us can’t get enough of Deschanel’s quirky, free-spirited performances. In his Yes Man review, Roger Ebert noted that two critics proposed marriage to the character at the end of the film. We wouldn’t go that far, but we have crushed on the actress since All the Real Girls and haven’t yet gotten sick of her or her similar, typecast roles. In fact, to us, the problem is not that indie films too often employ the MPDG character; it’s that they don’t cast Deschanel for every such part. So, instead of wishing she’d broaden her career to include other types of characters (it didn’t work well for her with The Happening, after all), we’ve selected ten MPDG characters that she should have additionally played. …Read more
Today’s Extremely Improbable Rumor Sourced From The British Tabloids: NOW Magazine is reporting that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are “looking at remaking Last Tango In Paris.” It’s apparently part of a gambit to shore up the public perception of both halves of Hollywood’s most routinely questioned couple by having them appear together in “a movie that has a mainstream plot, but also some intense sex stuff.”
At the Guardian, Xan Brooks not only buys the rumor, but is all about it. Well, maybe not the Last Tango part, but the Cruise-on-Holmes on screen action in general. “The thrill is gone and they need it back. They need to have sex on screen, to prove their love,” he writes.
Because the couple who makes a movie sold on the idea that its stars Really Do It stays together, right? Just look at Eyes Wide Shut! (OMG, they should remake that. And then Far and Away. And then Days of Thunder.)
Forget about Don Cheadle replacing Terence Howard as James Rhodes / War Machine in Iron Man II, which smells a lot like the “we’ll threaten to replace Tobey Maguire with Jake Gyllenhaal” tactic that Sony used for Spider-Man II –– Hollywood has been doing this for years. It was bad enough back in the days of television with Dick Sargent replacing Dick York in Bewitched, but now it’s becoming pretty commonplace for producers to replace actors in iconic roles. Although now it’s more common due to monetary concerns, which seems to be what has taken Howard out of the War Machine suit, it’s also common to see an actor ankle a role because they don’t like the source material, or the direction the character is taking. We’ve put together several different re-castings, which all happened for a variety of reasons: money, dissatisfaction with the script, test audience reactions, and actors just growing tired of playing the same character. Check them out after the break.
Cruise’s lawyer and close confidante Bert Fields gave a rare interview to The Mail on Sunday to pour scorn on Morton’s book, titled Tom Cruise: An Unauthorised Biography.
He criticised a passage in which Morton claims some “fanatical” Scientologists believed Suri Cruise was actually the result of a sperm donation by Scientology’s dead founder, L. Ron Hubbard.
Morton writes that Ms Holmes may feel she was in “the horror movie Rosemary’s Baby, in which an unsuspecting young woman is impregnated with the Devil’s child”.
Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that this actually happened: Tom Cruise actually had Katie Holmes impregnated, without her knowledge or consent, with L. Ron Hubbard’s sperm. Is Morton a bit fuzzy on the plot of Rosemary’s Baby, or did L. Ron actually come back from the dead and handle the job himself? Or both? I can’t find the actual conception scene from the film online, but maybe the original trailer will help us puzzle it out.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Today’s Extremely Improbable Rumor Sourced From The British Tabloids: 
