[Kalimac]

Personally I think that Sir Alec Guinness would have made an outstanding Gandalf; alas, he's gone to where there are no more casting calls. Not knocking Sir Ian, you understand, he did a great job. I just think that Guinness's performance would also have been something fantastic to watch.<P>Connie Nielsen would make a good Arwen, but I'm not a Liv-hater, I think she rose to the occasion quite well. The trouble I have with picturing most of the other proposed actors (except for Sean Connery) is simple, and it can be summed up in five words: California Accent, Too Well Known. <P>Now I know this isn't quite fair, that they'd have accent coaches and so forth, and while I've never seen Wood or Astin in anything else they probably sound fairly California in everyday life as well. But coaching only takes you so far; there has to be some natural linguistic aptitude for it or you'll never do it very well. There are tons of movies where the accents are horrendously inconsistent; drifting from Assumed Accent to California Accent and back again. Kevin Costner's Robin Hood is a prime offender, as is Titanic (Suuuure he was from Wisconsin). And the trouble with a California Accent, lovely as it is, is that it has the indisputable smack of the present day. I'm not saying that it hasn't existed for a long time (I don't know if it has or not) but fairly or unfairly, it is very strongly associated with *now* in America, with computers, taken-for-granted plumbing, and X-boxes. It's the same way that having an Oxford accent is associated (again, not necessarily correctly) with being old-fashioned, stuffy, and hyper-educated. To hear a 21st-century-sounding accent coming out of a person in ME would break the mood faster than you can say "Dude, where's my Ring?"<P><BR>But the insurmountable trouble with Cameron Diaz, Leonardo DiCaprio (who I have to say makes a convincing LOOKING Legolas, he just wouldn't SOUND that great) Julia Roberts, and so forth is that their faces are very well known and are already identified with very, very different types of movies: Titanic was a big production but plot was hardly one of its selling points; Something About Mary is hilarious but again, it's in a different universe from LOTR. Erin Brockovich? Don't get me started. It would be impossible to look at Cameron-Arwen and not think "Hair gel!" Again, like the accents, we'd be yanked back into the present century whenever we so much as looked at her, unless she was so heavily made up as to be unrecognizable - which would defeat the purpose, rather.<P>Sorry about the longwindedness. Just my $0.02 1/2