Today's Double News: Lilly and Oldman antsy for blockbuster roles

Here's a few more news items I wrote for MS late last week:

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/153611/evangeline_lilly_mogelijk_te_zien_in_ant-man

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/153613/gary_oldman_benaderd_voor_star_wars_episode_vii

Casting rumours abound these days where major tentpole movie franchises are concerned. Basically any news rolling off the Star Wars Episode VII bandwagon concerns casting, while the process of getting new faces aboard the next batch of Marvel movies (Ant-Man and Avengers: Age of Ultron both) also continues on its merry path. I can't say I've been very happy with what I've heard about  Episode VII casting so far. Digging up old fossils like Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, and even Harrison Ford, seems like leeching off the success of the old trilogy instead of paying hommage to those classic films. We don't need to be constantly reminded of the good ol' days of past glory when Star Wars was still honestly good by adding these folks back into the mix, even if it's just mere cameos, which I heard is not the case. Those movies were timeless, but the actors are not. That's the good thing about R2-D2, you don't care who plays him since you don't see the guy in the suit, but that doesn't work for actors whose faces you do see. You can patch them up digitally all you want, but even if they do look like they did thirty years ago, what's the point if you can just come up with new characters to keep things flowing instead of getting stuck in the past. I can understand Abrams' emotional attachment to the old characters, I feel it too, but I would much rather see the story focusing on all new characters, even offspring of those we know, than regurgitate the same old same old ad infinitum. That said, Gary Oldman is a step in the right direction. I have no idea what he'll be playing (nobody does after all), but I've never been disappointed by his performances so far. Of course he can still turn it down, which I doubt he will even though he didn't seem all that eager to talk about it (but that's probably due to doing a tiresome press tour combined with an solemn oath of secrecy about anything Episode VII). Other, less concrete, rumours I also found appealing: good solid actors like Hugo Weaving and Michael Fassbender are certainly most welcome. I just hope they don't give the main role to some kid who can't act if his life depended on it, dragging the overall acting quality through the mud again, as happened on the prequel trilogy. Come to think of it, with the occasional exception, even though we came to love many of these characters, grand acting rarely had anything to do with that (but Episode III's acting was especially feeble, almost taking you out of the movie). Considering Abram's lackluster repertoire, I doubt that's gonna change anytime soon.

Same can be said for Marvel movies, where fun characters and witty dialogue also are not in need of top actors to make for entertaining fare. Evangeline Lilly is a decent enough actress but nothing major, so in many ways she fits right in. And as is the case with Oldman, the question is which character will be hers. I'm hesitant about the rumours of giving Henry Pym a daughter when he never had one in the comics, since Marvel Studios has stuck to comic book lore for the most part so far. However, an emotional bridge between old Dr. Pym (Michael Douglas) and the younger Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) in the shape of a mutual close acquaintaince seems like a good thing to have in terms of building a story around passing the mantle from one Ant-Man to the next. Of course, you don't need a daughter for Pym to do that, but it does make for more personal drama. Even though I like to see the character of Wasp, Pym's long time wife/ex-wife and fellow Avenger, in some shape or another, I doubt the movie will have Lilly's Wasp married to Douglas' old Ant-Man, nor do I see Marvel screwing around with its own legacy by changing such fairly iconic character relationships from their fifty years of Marvel history by suddenly pairing her with Rudd's second Ant-Man. That said, stranger things have happened. Heck, maybe Lilly's will play someone else entirely and all these rumours were just introduced to keep us guessing. That's also an often employed strategy in the casting process of these major blockbuster movies: keep the audience intrigued by telling them about (or even only suggesting) the involvement of top actors without conveying who they're set to play, so all the nerds will start shouting names and options regarding who they could be playing, without any actual clues. And that always means someone's going to get disappointed. But that doesn't mean such actors and actresses won't play interesting characters after all. Even if they're acting isn't on par with the dialogue, action or otherwise simple good fun these movies provide.