Nevermore

Here's the first pic from the set of the James McTeigue directed thriller 'The Raven' starring John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe. As a major fan of Poe, I'm satisfied with Cusack in the starring role (although I would have cast Johnny Depp myself - with Tim Burton directing, natch), but I'm not thrilled with the goatee. Granted there aren't many images of the poet to work off of - but of the known likenesses in existence, I can't recall ever seeing one in which he sported a goatee. Cusack does not look like Poe here - he looks more like some random guy in 1845 wearing sneakers, Professor Moriarty perhaps. I also don't jive with the plot, which seems a little too Sherlock Holmes-ish for my liking:

"A fictionalized account of the last days of Edgar Allan Poe's life, in which the poet is in pursuit of a serial killer whose murders mirror those in the writer's stories."

I would have preferred a straight biopic rather than a fictionalized thriller - but hey - no one asked my opinion...