Which pop-music legend deserves a big-screen bio?
With all the news about Renée Zellweger and/or Pink playing Janis
Joplin, and Andre 3000 playing Jimi Hendrix, what musician do you
think should have a movie made about him, and who do you think
would be right for the part? -- Greg
Soulful tuxedoed crooner; reluctant Motown love god; hedonistic
sexual healer; tormented genius murdered by his own father. No pop
artist of the last 40 years has had a more arresting life than
Marvin Gaye, and if you look at his early album covers, it's clear
who was born to play him: Taye Diggs, a superb actor with a great,
honeyed voice and a virtual replica of Gaye's killer curl of a
smile. Beyoncé could take on the role of his Motown partner, Tammi
Terrell, and how about Morgan Freeman as Gaye's vengefully
rivalrous father?
What film would you most like to have seen done by a different
director? -- Jeremy
To me, Edith Wharton's ''The House of Mirth'' is the greatest American novel. Its heroine, Lily Bart, experiences the tug-of-war between
romance and material well-being as a spiritual dilemma worthy of
Hamlet. In 2000, the British filmmaker Terence Davies turned
Wharton's masterpiece into a piercingly intelligent yet bloodless
movie. I would have liked to have seen the adaptation done by
director Iain Softley -- another Brit, but one whose 1997 adaptation
of Henry James' ''The Wings of the Dove'' came as close as anyone has
to turning the eternal, if not metaphysical, conflict between love
and money into the stuff of timeless drama.
(Got a movie-related question for Owen or Lisa? Post it here.)
