Here’s a top five list for the ages: Top Five White Guys Playing Mexicans. We already know that Charlton Heston OWNS this list.
But also in the running is Wallace Beery; one of the best films I saw at Butt-Numb-A-Thon last year was the 1934 Viva Villa!, in which Beery played the Mexican revolutionary with a certain boozy flair. I kind of love this weird old movie.
Now Johnny Depp is looking to walk where Beery has gone before; he’s in talks to star as Villa in a new biopic with the unwieldy name Seven Friends of Pancho Villa and the Woman With Six Fingers. The Spanish language movie (yes, Depp will act in Spanish) is being directed by Emir Kusturica, a Serbian filmmaker who has some Cannes glory in his past (try and find his film Underground). Depp and Kusturica worked together on Arizona Dream, a movie I can’t say I’ve seen.
Salma Hayek is also in talks to star in the movie, which is being adapted from James Carlos Blake’s novel The Friends of Pancho Villa, which Variety says recounts how Villa and his compadres had a great time fighting and robbing the rich, but also dancing, partying and making love.
4 comments
If you had seen ARIZONA DREAM (any of the cuts), you would remember it. It is a wild, fever-dream of a movie…really good.
I sincerely hope Mexican Ron Silver would make it to the hypothetical White Guys Playing Mexicans list. Even if he is an alien Mexican.
Also: I caught Arizona Dream one afternoon on Channel 11 (New York) back in the Mid 90's. And yeah. It was good.
Anyone read the Blake novel? I find him to be mediocre novelist, but he includes lots of graphic sex and violence so his work could translate well to film.
Eli Wallach… anybody? Anyway, ok, Depp in Seven Friends of Pancho Villa and the Woman With Six Fingers is fine, but is there any news about regarding The Man Who Killed Don Quixote?
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