A couple of years ago “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde” was announced and into the role of Bonnie Parker, a beret-wearing outlaw rendered a fashion icon of sorts in the late 1960s by actress Faye Dunaway, stepped one-time child actor Hilary Duff. The casting obviously caused some consternation, and, at the time, it played out as a humorous spat between the former Disney poster girl and Dunaway, herself prone to kooky behavior of late, who squawked to the press, “Couldn’t they at least cast a real actress?”
Dunaway got her wish. According to The Hollywood Reporter Duff seemingly inconvenienced the project by getting herself pregnant earlier in the month and, was let go as a result, and though the producers Tonya Holly and Tom Rogers insist otherwise, it’s a pretty asshole-ish move whichever way you look at it. On the plus side, perhaps the detractors can take a rest for a while. Though Duff has tried to dirty up her “Lizzie McGuire” image in the years since that show went off the air, the thought of her roaming the countryside in a mauve beret, cigarette clamped in her jaw, with a machine gun in one hand and vapid, pretty-boy acting vacuum Kevin Zegers as Clyde Barrow hanging off the other, was a horrifying prospect that would have had even the most temperate and understanding cinephile straining for the barf bag.
As anyone with half a brain realizes, remaking Arthur Penn’s 1967 classic is brazen stupidity of the highest order anyway. It’s rooted in a specific moment of Hollywood history, reacting against both the mores of the Depression of the 1930s and seizing upon the counter-cultural trends extant in 1967; so much so that even Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review of the original – “Bonnie and Clyde” is the most excitingly American American movie since “The Manchurian Candidate”…” – remains the stuff of lore.
The film, riddled with production setbacks (the producers insist “financial, scheduling and other factors such as tornados [are] devastating some of our locations”) is blithely soldiering on regardless. Now, as Duff is with child and Zegers has thankfully moved onto pastures new, let the speculation for “the-two-most-annoying-good-looking-former-tween-actors-we’d-like-to-see-riddled-with-bullets-in-a-balletic-orgy-of-violence-at-the-film’s-climax” begin. This writer plumps for Kevin Jonas and Ashley Tisdale.
Chloe Grace Moretz would make a great bonnie parker.
The actors and actress to play Bonnie and Clyde. It should be Johnny Depp as Clyde Barrow and Summer Glau of the movie "Senerity " to play Bonnie Parker. By looking at the actual photos of Bonnie and Clyde, these people look like them . Clyde Barrow was short and weigh 130 pounds. Bonnie Parker was 4' 11" tall and weigh 90 pounds. She had dark hair, not blonde hair. Dunaway and Duff do NOT look like the real Bonnie Parker. They do NOT need Dunaway's approval on this one. If they are going to do a remake, they should do the actual story about them. The actual cars, the actual guns and the actual death scene, not the Hollywood Crap like the 1967 movie.
Wait a minute…is it a full-on remake of the Arthur Penn film, or just another film about Bonnie and Clyde? If it\’s the second case, then that\’s at least acceptable—I mean, look at how many movies have been made about John Dillinger.
She was reported in late spring/early summer to have been bounced from this and paid off; why are they touting it as fresh news again?
\”I hope Hilary does more mainstream movies from now on and begins her ascension to the A-list.\”
I laughed.
The producers are idiots. They announced that Hilary and Kevin Zegers would star in it back in January 2009 and have subsequently done nothing for two and a half years.
When are they finally going to make ‘The Story of Bonnie and Clyde’? In a couple of months? Why not a year? How about a couple of decades?
I hope Hilary does more mainstream movies from now on and begins her ascension to the A-list.