The Great Recasting Blog-A-Thon - Avatar

It’s summer, and one of the things I can count on in the summer is that my fellow LAMBs get together for a Blog-A-Thon or two.  I consider it the way us movie geeks (most of whom don’t know each other outside of the LAMB) come together for a backyard BBQ or pool party.  The folks at Frankly My Dear and In the Mood have come together to host this one, which they’re calling The Great Recasting.  The point is to take a movie made AFTER 1965 and cast it with actors who were in their heyday before 1965.

Because I like to make my life difficult, I’ve chosen to work with Avatar.  The problems here are legion.  Sci-fi kind of wasn’t really there until the 60s, and it didn’t actually get feasible until the 70s.  There are folks out there who might disagree, but they can’t point out a single good science fiction movie made much before Star Wars in ’77, although I guess Logan's Run could count.  Also, Avatar had kind of a big cast, and I think I’m going to stick to some of the more principle players rather than go for a recast of everyone who had more than one spoken line.

So, here’s my original cast that I’ll be recasting:  Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoe Saldana (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Grace), Stephen Lang (Col. Quaritch), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Parker Selfridge) and, because I liked his character, Joel David Moore (Norm Spellman).

I’m going to start with the character that was easiest for me, although I’m not sure why it was so easy.

Bette Davis as Grace.  I suspect this was so simple because Bette Davis played a lot of quirky roles in her day, and it wouldn’t get much quirkier than this role.  I’m thinking of Bette Davis circa All About Eve, where she’s still young looking, but clearly has some years behind her… not unlike Sigourney Weaver.

Jimmy Stewart as Jake Sully.  This was harder for me to come up with an answer.  I spent a lot of time mulling over Humphrey Bogart before deciding on Jimmy Stewart.  He was younger, which helped, but he also seemed to take on a lot of roles which required him to be active, so I'm guessing he was in the kind of shape this role would need.  Also, I think portrayed a good many characters with Jake's ridiculously positive vibe, those characters that had to stand on the high moral ground, and that's Jake Sully in a nutshell.

Sophia Loren as Neytiri.  I've only ever seen her on screen once, and that was in Nine back in... 2010 or whenever, but I was struck even then by her beauty.  The woman's close to a century old and she's still graceful and exotic, two words I would use to describe Neytiri (and Zoe Saldana).  I also think her Italian accent would help her in the voice overs.

 

Jack Lemmon as Norm Spellman.  I’m thinking Jack Lemmon around Some Like It Hot, and I’m not thinking of him in a science type role, but he is hell on wheels as comic relief, and I think sarcasm would be an easy reach for him, which is what Norm was all about.  I also think he could pull off the sidekick role with some ease, since he’s done it so often.

George C. Scott as Colonel Quaritch.  The man was a phenomenon, and while I’ve never seen him in a role where he was an active antagonist, I was recently skimming through Dr. Strangelove again, and I think that his look (and role there) would make him a shoe-in to play the tough as nails Marine Colonel who put ethics to the side in order to ensure his mission would be a success.

Grace Kelley as Trudy Chacon.  I struggled with this choice.  There were few Latina actresses in the days of the classics, and fewer still who were allowed to be tough like Trudy was.  I toyed with Katharine Hepburn (a lot) and Ava Gardner (less), because I do think they played some tough ladies on the screen, but I was drawn to Grace Kelley’s performances in Hitchcock movies, particularly Rear Window, where we see her perform acts of extreme bravery, and survive events that should have sent women of her day running for the hills.

Fred MacMurray as Parker Selfridge.  I didn’t struggle with this choice even a little bit, but I did worry that Fred MacMurray being like two feet taller than Giovanni Ribisi would a problem.  Ribisi plays Selfridge as a little weasel, which MacMurray probably couldn’t do, but if you’ve seen The Apartment or Double Indemnity, you know he can play an unethical businessman well, and that’s really the heart of the character.




So, here it is.  Thoughts?  How would you have recast these roles with actors from classic movies if you'd had a hand in it