One of the more interesting cases of racially-blind casting is the upcoming film Alatriste with Viggo Mortensen (Danish/generic American heritage) playing a 17th-century Spanish mercenary. Even if he does speak fluent Spanish, it's Argentinian dialect, not old-world Spanish.

But, like, isn't Spain the most eclectic mix of heritage ever, already? You've got your blonde Spanish people in the north, with their European heritage of Celtic etc. extraction, then there were the Romans, and the Africans, and the Middle Easterners, and like every culture ever and its brother, and all that all mixed together, with like Chocolate and a churro?

I just watched Saved! and i absolutely love it! the entire cast was awesome.

as for recent movies, i want to see Ocean's 12, Blade: Trinity and many, many others. sadly, i will probably never get to do so in the theatre. i'm so glad things get to dvd so much sooner now.

Ooh, that international Batman Begins poster is very very pretty.

Saved was great. Fave line: I can see your pad, Hilary Faye!

Ha!

Just saw "Sky Captain" at the dollar movie. So-o glad I didn't pay full price. I know it's an "homage" to a genre, but, dammit, couldn't they have a story that maybe involved a little character development? One where I wasn't praying for the bad guys to just kill the girl reporter right now? Or that Joe would suddenly realize "My god, your stupidity and cluelessness have risen to the dangerous, get the hell out of my life already."

So happy that she screwed up her pictures.

I thought Ocean's 12 was pretty disappointing as well. It was downright boring at times. The first one was all pop and snap, but this one had parts that really dragged.

...some plot points that are astonishingly lame. Like, watch-from-the-hall lame.

God, yes. The bit you mentioned was painful.

It certainly is an astonishingly attractive cast, though.

I saw Ocean's 12. The aforementioned plot points were lame, but the movie was scattered with enough laughs and pretty people to make it float for me. I still enjoyed it.

What are they doing ? News on the adaptation of Pullman's His Dark Materials.

[link]

Someone had linked (in another thread, I think) to an article that indicated that Pullman was okay with it, and implied it was because piles of money had been thrown at him.

Frankly, I thought the books were pretty hostile, so I'm not surprised.

I don't know if I'd consider them hostile - they were certainly anti-religious. It's just that seemed one of the main themes, to me anyway, and I can't see an adaptation working without referring to it.