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May 20, 2009

I Can't Die Yet, I Haven't Seen The Jolson Story

A few days ago there was a report that Jamie Foxx was up for playing Sinatra in a biopic of the Chairman of the Board. I took it with a grain of salt. It's like those periodic rumours that turn up about a black actor playing the half-Scottish half-Swiss character known as James Bond.

Okay, so Jamie Foxx is going to play the child of two Sicilian-Americans... okay... lemme think this through. Is this a delayed backlash against all those white Shakespearean actors who played Othello with burnt cork on their faces? Particularly Olivier's rendition in the 1960s?

Weird stuff. Maybe they can CGI Foxx into looking more Italianate, much in the manner that they de-aged Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart in the rather shitty third X-Men movie. Leaving aside the issue of race, perhaps this is one of those cases of very famous actor hubris. Very successful actors can have a tendency to think they can do anything. Very few people say "No" to them, so they develop a belief in their own entitlement.

If that's the case, here's an enormous artistic challenge for Jamie Foxx. Perhaps he could star in a remake of the movie in the youtube clip below.

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