When, when, when will Hollywood learn? Better yet, when will Steve Martin begin to care about his career again? Martin, the comedic genius who starred in The Jerk and The Father of the Bride, has inexplicably decided his legacy would better be completed by making yet another crappy comedy.
After last year’s HORRID Cheaper by the Dozen, you would think that Martin would run screaming from any project helmed by Shaun Levy. Oh no… Martin signed on to work in Levy’s next project, The Pink Panther. Oh please tell me they aren’t really going to try and remake Peter Sellers classic role. When asked about reprising the role of Inspector Clouseau, Martin seemed a little apprehensive when he responded “They have different James Bonds.” Steve, yeah they do, but do you really want to be the George Lazenby to Sellers’s Sean Connery?
How much further will Steve Martin fall? He was a legend to many 10 years ago. I just can’t believe he needs money enough to either replicate a classic role or star in more drivel like Bringing Down the House. Isn’t it sad to see your heroes make more and more bad decisions?
Also cast in the soon-to-flop Pink Panther movie is Beyonce Knowles. Knowles will make a stretch and play a “pop star” and the love interest of Clouseau. Damn, who decided she could act? It sure wasn’t audiences that saw Austin Powers 3. On the plus side is Kevin Kline cast as Clouseau’s boss and Jean Reno will play a police assistant. Now alarms are going off in my head when Reno’s character has been described as taking “on aspects of the sidekick role of Cato”. Jeez, we don’t even have an Asian Cato? I’m staging a sit-in to encourage more racial insensitivity. I WANT CATO!
Forgetting that the cast has some talent (think Martin, Kline, and Reno) and some no talent (think Knowles), we know without a doubt that Director Shaun Levy has yet to show any creativity behind the camera. I can pretty much guarantee this will be bad. Levy brought a horrible script adaptation to the screen in Cheaper and I expect similar results in Pink Panther. Am I being too hard? Tough. So far I’ve heard that the classic Pink Panther theme, created by Henry Mancini, will be in the movie BUT with “a new interpretation,” Also he talks about modernizing the movie to today’s technology. While that’s possibly the right thing to do, I have no doubts that Levy is the wrong man to handle a potential bastardization of a classic. Excuse me while I go curse Hollywood and their lack of creativity.
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