…or is it true that Anna Paquin would have made a better Penny Lane? I recently watched “Almost Famous” for maybe the third or fourth time and, while it’s true that Kate Hudson was at her very best in the role, that isn’t saying a whole hell of a lot. Looking at her body of work, it’s pretty sad that “The Skeleton Key” and “About Adam” are her next two highest rated movies.
Instead, imagine Anna Paquin, who played Polexia Aphrodisia in the film, in the role of Penny Lane. Paquin has since proved in “25th Hour,” “The Squid and the Whale” and “Buffalo Soldiers,” that she can play the role of young seductress quite well. She even added a level of sexiness to both X-Men movies, and she has more depth in her little finger than Hudson does in her entire body.
Is this just a blonde/brunette thing?
Yeah, but Penny Lane needed to be someone who’d been around the block a few times…and good actress or not, Anna Paquin was only 18 when “Almost Famous” came out (and younger when it was filmed); there’s no way she could’ve credibly pulled off the world-weary performance that Hudson did…even if Paquin IS only three years younger than Hudson.
I think the inference was that Penny Lane was younger than 18…she has that conversation with William at the beginning where she asks him his age and he says “18…17…16″ and after each one she says, “me too!”
Then again, she did fly off to Morocco at the end so who knows.
You have shown a preference in the past for underdeveloped cuties (ahem, Natalie Portman), but if I’m a rock star, and Kate Hudson approaches me, I’m totally hitting that. If Anna Paquin is with her, I pawn her off on a roadie.
I don’t think I was saying Anna is any hotter than Kate, just that she’s a better actress. That said, I’ve always had a preference for brunettes and Kate has a little too much space between her eyebrows.
If you were a rock star and you actually talked to Anna, you would get a sense of her depth, which is the whole point of Penny Lane…the groupie with a heart of gold.
The HOT groupie with a heart of gold. The guys in Sweetwater, Stillwater, Bongwater, whatever, may have loved Penny Lane for her heart of gold, but they only got to know her in the first place because they wanted to hit that. Anna is indeed the better actress, but this isn’t about depth, dude. It’s about tits and ass. Kate 1, Anna 0.
You’re just talking looks. Your preference is Kate. Mine is Anna. But it doesn’t matter when you are talking about who would have played the role better. At least that’s the question I originally posed.
The lead singer of Stillwater (played nicely by Jason Lee) was with Anna’s character, so I don’t know that the “group” thought one was hotter than the other.
Anna may well be the better actress…and, okay, I admit it, I even think Anna’s cuter (though, as the saying goes, I wouldn’t kick either of ‘em out of bed for eating crackers)…but I stand by my position that the role was better suited for Kate. Anna looks more innocent, while Kate managed to look like she’d seen it all. Plus, the script makes a point of identifying Polexia as being 16…and intentionally does not identify Penny’s age. And the trading back and forth of ages between Penny and William can’t be trusted, since it’s clear that she’s just trying to make him feel better about the fact that he feels really young…
Though she did stop when he said he was 15, which I thought was pretty funny.
It would be interesting to see Anna in the role – I think she could pull it off, and I’m not sure you need to be that old to get burned out in the groupie/”band aid” scene.
I’m also pretty disappointed in Kate’s career since “Almost Famous.” She was pretty good in the film (though I think Anna would have destroyed her in the pill swallowing scene and the explanation scene thereafter) and it was a great launching point for her, but she chose a bunch of poorly written rom-coms and wasn’t particularly good in them.
I will say that I didn’t mind “Skeleton Key,” though any starlet could have played that role.