Dallas Redux

Hollywood Hawk Lawren K. Mills brings word that Dallas is coming to the big screen.

This is gonna be interesting.....

We used to watch the series pretty faithfully back in the 80's and in particular revelled in the obvious fun Larry Hagman had in portraying J.R. Indeed, my brother's impersonation of him saying, "Well, naah, Bob" at inopportune moments was sufficiently infuriating for me to slug him on several occasions. And my mother used to refer to Linda Gray as "Lizard Woman" for the fact that she never completely shut her mouth and always looked as if she were going to shoot out her tongue and pick off a fly.

It may sound dopey, but when I went through a bout of homesickness my first semester at college in Connecticut, it was rather comforting to watch the show. Even though Dallas and San Antonio are about 400 miles apart and in completely different regions of the state, there was enough Texas commonality to sooth my nerves.

Of course, the series eventually jumped the shark. Personally, I thought it never really recovered from the untimely death of Jim "Jock Ewing" Davis. By the time they got to the Pam/Bobby "It was a dream" business, the writers had all but conceded defeat. (Although, in the Silver Lining Department, that particular fiasco set up one of the funniest series closers of all times - the last episode of Newhart.)

A few years ago, the Missus and I watched a Dallas Reunion made-for-tee-vee movie. We had hoped that the movie would recapture some of the exuberance of the series - the lavish helpings of lust and greed, the Texas-style go-go villainy and so on. Instead, it turned out to be the most bizarre thing we'd ever seen - a few of the original cast, all of them looking old and tired, rattling around nearly empty sets like shadows of themselves. The experience left us with a rather....creepy feeling, like we'd just caught sight of the Flying Dutchman.

The article Lawren links doesn't say much about casting for the movie, but here's a suggestion: the role of Jock should go to Tommy Lee Jones.