Well, to be fair, the source text wasn't the novel, it was the original musical.

In which the Phantom is still old and creepy.

The Phantom isn't supposed to be pretty. His voice is. See, it's the whole thematic thing. Raoul's pretty (we don't much care about his voice.), but Phantom's voice should make one weak at the knees.

Nova, about Richard Gere, my gold standard for being impressed with singing and dancing by actors is "could I do better?". So, I came away unimpressed by either his singing (even more so since, having now heard Jerry Orbach do it.), or his dancing (which lots of people were very impressed with)

I fear for any Sondheim on screen. I've seen a number of movies taken from plays where the script is pretty well lifted, and the patterns are too stagey (imo) for film. Sondheim is that, with music, to the nth. Not that I don't hope it does really well. I'm just...very wary.

Yeah, and with there already being a DVD release of the actual original cast, I'm not sure it needs a film translation. Sondheim is so... theater.

Worried about Rent for much the same reason. Not sure I believe that it will translate to any larger a set.

Rent, I can see working, though I'm not as wildly in love with that show as a lot of people are. I do worry about the age of the original cast, though.

Imagine the movies:

Actress Hilary Swank has Sandra Bullock and Ashley Judd to thank for her Best Actress Oscar for Million Dollar Baby - because the role was refused by both actresses. The movie's producer Albert S. Ruddy's first choice for the part of a tragic female boxer was Bullock, who turned down the part when she was told she could not pick the director - Ruddy next approached Judd, whose salary demands would have busted the budget. After Ruddy finally settled on Swank, Bullock's agent called him and said she would do the picture after all, but, "Al just said, 'Too late,'" a source told website Pagesix.Com.

The problem with him directing Wicker Man is that I've seen what his conception of feminism is, and my skin is crawling just trying to imagine what his concept of paganism is.

(Sorry, didn't mean to ask a question and disappear.)

OK, that I can totally see. Leaving aside LaBute himself, a mormon take on paganism would be...I daren't hazard a guess, actually.

Yeah, such was my blink. Mostly. I suspect we'd end up with more of a growling Sweeney than a singing one.

Didn't he do ROCKY HORROR in Autstralia for a while (like, a long while)? Granted, that's also rock rather than Sondheim, but he may have done more musical theater than that.

Remake "The Wicker Man"? But it wouldn't be the same movie without the bad 70's haircut and the weird musical sequences and nekkid Britt Eckland having sex with the wall!

Nicholas Cage. Blaargh. Neil LaBute. Double blaargh.

Oh, also meant to mention I finally got around to seeing THE AVIATOR over the weekend, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It didn't particularly feel all that overlong to me. Maybe when Hughes was locked up in his screening room, but I thought that was supposed to feel interminable.

I must say, it's the first time I've ever seen DiCaprio not look like a teenager. The scary thing is how when he grew the mustache, he started to not only looking like Hughes, but also like the older Charles Foster Kane (I figure with Scorcese at the wheel it HAD to be deliberate). It was kinda unsettling seeing DiCaprio's voice come out of Kane's mouth.

Huh.

I can't see Ashley Judd in that role. . . Sandra Bullock -- maybe. Although, I'm not sure she has the gravitas for it.

Suddenly picturing SB being told that by somebody and being all "I have gravitas. I have gravitas coming out of my bottom!" Don't know why, but it amuses anyway.