Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Kevin Costner Isn't Mexican

My idea for tonight’s post was shot down by my sometimes editor so I’m just going to write about a weird idea that is running through my brain. One of the most surprising things about Battlestar Galactica was that Edward James Olmos stuck around for the whole thing. He’s a serious artsy fartsy activist performer and the instant he starts thinking a show sucks he quits. He did it with Miami Vice. He refused to be in the movie even though they offered him roughly $600 trillion because he knew it was going to be a festering turd. He was the only one from the television show cast that was asked to reprise his role, which was kind of cruel, because I think he’s the only one that didn’t need the money. None of this has to do with my idea. Olmos made a movie about Mexican gangs in East Los Angeles (EasLos, odelay) and prison life called American Me. It was the rawest, grittiest, thing I had seen until The Wire came out. What stuck out to me most from the movie were the accents and the slang, and how messing them up would totally ruin its intensity. What I want to do is reshoot the movie, but I want to replace Olmos with Kevin Costner. If I shoot it sequentially we’ll be able to pinpoint when he quits trying to speak with an accent at all. His accent in Robin Hood fades in and out because it wasn’t shot in order, so we have no idea when he gave up and just stopped caring. Who wouldn’t pay $9 to hear Kevin Costner speak Spanglish, or just to hear him say “Ese”? The fact that Kevin Costner is a huge star shows that Hollywood is truly a meritocracy; one of the few in the world along with politics. Oh, man! I just remembered his accent in JFK. I wonder what the directors were thinking when Robin Hood and JFK were getting made. Oliver Stone probably didn’t care, if he noticed at all, as long as his conspiracy theory was rammed home over and over and over again. But what about the guy making Robin Hood or Costner himself? Everybody else on the set could do it, even Christian Slater. This seems to have turned into an anti-Kevin Costner post, and I’m really indifferent. I guess the problem is that I watched Tombstone before I watched the first five minutes of Wyatt Earp. Kurt Russell really nailed it. Kevin Costner can't act

1 comment:

JSG said...

This makes me wonder what the rejected topic might've been...