This Lone Ranger business is going from bad to worse

By now most people have heard that Johnny Depp has signed on to play Tonto in Jerry Bruckenheimer's The Lone Ranger. But that may be the only good news you'll hear about this entire project. And I'm not even sure that is good news. Since the script is being written by Terry Rossio and and Ted Elliot, the pair who have written the scripts for the Pirates of the Caribbean films, this could be another excuse for one of Depp's off-the-wall takeoffs,

Now I'm hearing that Mike Newell, who made a couple of films I really liked (Dance With a Stranger, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco) but more recently made some I didn't (Mona Lisa Smile, Love in the Time of Cholera) has signed on to direct. And, to make matters worse, the name I'm hearing to play the title role is Matthew McConaughey.

Add to that the fact that the western genre seems pretty much dead, this looks like a disaster just waiting to happen.