L.A. Times Envelope reporter Elizabeth Snead on Ian McKellen`s “A Knight Out in L.A.”, his live one-man show that will have two performances at the Freud Playhouse on the UCLA campus on Saturday, 7.22 and Sunday, 7.23. (Conflicting with Comic Con!) The shows will benefit the Los Angeles Young Actors’ Company. “I’m delighted to be back onstage in Los Angeles supporting the work of the Los Angeles Young Actors’ Company,” McKellen told Snead. “The show lets me revisit favorite parts, tell a few stories, and present Gandalf onstage for the very first time! My aim is that the audience enjoy themselves as much as I shall, all in aid of the best of causes.”

I love how people are expected to defend themselves after the tide has swung against a big popular tentpoler like Superman Returns (for which the Sunday 7.16 cume will be a disappointing but still-considerable $162 million). Suddenly its admirers were wrong …they blindly went along, allowed themselves to be deluded…they lacked the focus and inner constitution to resist.
What’s happening now is a little bit like the Allied forces rounding up known Nazi loyalists after Germany’s defeat and grilling them about the depth of their allegiance.
I reacted to SR the way I did because the too-long issue aside (which hit me after the second viewing, and which I wrote about) and the Kate Bosworth problem (which hit me right away and which I didn’t make that much of a deal about because…I don’t know why…in all candor I should have pointed this out more strongly), I felt lifted up by the emotion that Byran Singer put into this film, and, being a lapsed Christian, found myself responding almost involuntarily to the Christ metaphor, and especially to the IMAX-3D scenes.
(I wrote this earlier this morning, but thought I’d post it more broadly to address the Superman backlash, which I’ve been noticing a lot over the past week or so.)

One reason — perhaps the main reason — this London Daily Mail story about Brandon Routh being unhappy with his moisturizer shade is getting attention is because the tide has turned on Superman Returns and it’s been dismissed as a failure. If SR was going gangbusters at the box-office…I’ve said it. But that said, it’s not cool for new-to-the-scene actor to be identified as the guy who ripped into his assistants for giving him the wrong shade of moisturizer. Look at him here…he’s fine.

Owen “let’s forget about Dupree” Wilson, Jon Stewart, YouTube and this tit-for-tat: Stewart: “How high are you right now?” OW: “Well, I did just go on a jog in Central Park and I’m feeling a kind of runner’s high, so you’re probably picking up on that.”

Pirates 2 did $18,392,00 yesterday (Friday, 7.14), which is off 67% from last Friday’s opener (but that included Thursday midnight screenings, remember). The probable weekend cume will be $58,317,000 and a total so-far of $254,336,000. Truckloads of dough, not that great a film…go figure.
Little Man and You, Me and Dupree were neck-and-neck last night — Man earned $7,536,000 with a likely weekend tally of $21,480,000, and Dupree did $7,374,000 with a probable Sunday night tally of $21,745,000.
Poor Superman Returns did $3,219,000 — off 59% from last Friday — for a likely weekend cume of $10,058,000 and an overall tally of $162,000,000. The word of mouth probably isn’t strong enough to push it to $200 million.
It’s now a safe to declare that the postive word-of-mouth on The Devil Wears Prada will eventually push it past $100 million — it did $3,175,000 last night, and will do about $9,526,000 for the weekend for a Sunday-night cume of $82,600,000.

David Poland riffing amusingly (if a little too fast) about Pirates, Shama-Lama-Disney (he calls Lady in the Water “a question mark”), and Super-licensing on iklipz.

Vice Session

A Miami Vice press conference happened at the Four Seasons late Friday afternoon. I rode down on my bike and arrived about 25 minues in front. I was talking to a couple of friends before the show began about all the cottonball questions that always get asked at these things. So with 15 minutes to go (or around 4:25 pm), I walked up to the conference table where the talent would be sitting, picked up one of the little black mikes and addressed the 30 or 40 journalists in the room.
“I’d like to make a brief announcement,” I said. “I’m just one guy and you guys ask what you want, but since we’ll only have 30 minutes with the talent it would be nice, just speaking for myself, if everyone here would cut back a bit on the typical Us magazine softball questions in order to leave time for more substantive ques- tions. I’m just saying…you know, it would be nice if that happened.”

Miami Vice director-writer-producer Michael Mann (center, shortish gray hair) with stars (l. to. r.) Naomie Harris, Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li and Li’s interpeter at today’s Universal-sponsored press conference at Four Seasons hotel — 7.16.06, 4:40 pm.

Miami Vice director Michael Mann and stars Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li and Naomie Harris walked in around 4:40 pm, the press conference began, and the first seven or eight or nine questions were almost all cottonball stuff. A fair portion of the these questions came from a cluster of female African-American journalists with a certain ampleness of phsyique. They were partly the reason I made my little speech beforehand. One look and I knew.
The softballers asked questions about the ’80s TV series, about why didn’t Mann use the TV theme song, how did Foxx and Harris handle their sex scenes and how did Farrell and Gong Li handle their sex scenes? And then more questions about comparisons to the film and the ’80s TV series and how come the movie was so dark and not warmer and funnier, like the TV series was on occasion?
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Foxx answered every question with charm and humor. He’s a natural entertainer, and everyone in the first two rows was making goo-goo eyes at him and having fits of laughter every time he did a bit (which was often). I’m not saying he’s not funny — he is — but you could take the obsequiousness and the obeisance-before-power in that room and cut it with a knife.
I asked Foxx the one semi-tough question of the day, which I put as follows: “Jamie, you’re a good guy in person and you obviously play one of the good guys in the film, but in the world of Kim Masters’ article that went up on Slate today, you’re kind of the bad guy. That’s how you’re portrayed, I mean. And it’s out there and people are reading it, and it seems fair to ask if the piece is accurate. Is it?”

Foxx kind of rolled his shoulders and smiled and eyeballed me and shrugged. He might have said something but I don’t remember what it was. Six or seven seconds passed, and then Mann stepped into the breach. “I think it’s ridiculous…really ridiculous,” he said. It’s wrong? I asked. The article is inaccurate? And then Mann started in about the “process” and the hurricanes and particulars about the guy that got shot and how he always makes sure that his sets are extra-safe.
But he didn’t get into the thing about Jamie Foxx and his entourage leaving the Dominican Republic location after the shooting, and how, according to Masters’ article, this abrupt departure forced Mann to end the film in Miami rather than an earlier ending that was set in Paraguay. Then Foxx chimed in and then Farrell did also, and they were all locked and unified in their view that shit happens, the process is the process, we made this film together and we’re standing (or at least sitting) together right now, and we’re not getting into Kim Masters’ view of it.
I spoke to Mann later in front of the hotel, and said, “I just realized what you meant when you said Kim’s piece was ridiculous. You meant that her way of looking at the shoot was ridiculous.” He kind of nodded and went into an extension of that earlier complex thought about the totality of the process and the ebb and flow of creativity (while briefly alluding to a factual wrongo or two that I didn’t question him about), and so on.
Pics: (a) Looking northeast at Beverly Hills and West Hollywood from the 14th floor balcony of the Four Seasons hotel — Friday, 7.14.06, 5:25 pm; (b) Colin Farrell (l. blue shirt) being questioned by Boston Herald‘s Stephen Schaefer with Gong Li in-between after this afternoon’s press conference; (c) Post-press conference chit-chat with Gong Li — Friday, 7.14.06, 5:15 pm; (d) Jamie Foxx signing autographs (yes, journalists ask for them after these events) — Friday, 7.14.06, 5:17 pm; (3) Jamie Foxx’s silver Lamborghini outside Four Seasons hotel after Miami Vice press conference — Friday, 7.14.06, 5:40 pm.

A first-hand report from Josh Horowitz about New York Observer critic Rex Reed nearly getting his legs amputated while interfering with everyone’s concentration at a screening of Miami Vice last night in Manhattan.

“What typically nails me to my chair on the first viewing [of any Michaal Mann film] is mood, pure and simple, and Miami Vice holds to that pattern perfectly,” writes Ain’t It Cool‘s Drew McWeeny. (Drew calls it mood, I called it “fumes.”) “This is a smart, adult, demanding motion picture that may well be the most artistically successful translation from a TV show to the bigscreen. Although you won√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t hear the Jan Hammer theme, and you won√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t see any of the same fashions or even the same sort of stylization [o fthe ’80s TV series], this film perfectly captures the broken heart of the series, that sense of slipping into a world that corrupts even the best intentions. And the fact that the film fairly drips with cool doesn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t hurt a bit.”

Jamie Foxx is a deeply charming and likable guy in-person…no question. But in this Kim Masters Slate piece about the making of Miami Vice, the 38 year-old Oscar-winner comes off as a swelled- head movie star who (a) lacks a certain something — a lack of commitment to “the job”, moxie, intestinal fortitude — or (b) has gotten a bit too full of himself. The bottom line is that Foxx put his own personal concerns over that of Miami Vice during shooting, and this, according to one of Masters’ sources, didn’t do the film any good.

The key thing was Foxx’s decision to abruptly bail on the film’s Dominican Republic location shoot after a local man was shot and wounded by one of the film’s security guards. This forced director-writer Michael Mann to change Vice‘s ending and shoot it back in Miami. Mann spins it more positively than an unnamed crew member, but Masters’ story leaves you with a clear feeling that Foxx’s departure may have dramatically wounded Miami Vice to some extent.
“Even before going to the Dominican Republic, Mann had written an ending set in Miamii,” Masters writes, “but then decided to go to Paraguay, then to remain in Miami, and then again to film in Paraguay. Now he went back to the Miami ending.
“It was like turning an oil tanker around on a dime,” Mann tells Masters. “But the Miami ending worked out to be the better ending. It brought all the conflicting characters together in one arena.” Maybe, but would Mann say any different if the Dominican Republic ending was in fact superior? He’ s got a movie to sell and he doesn’t want to “war” with Jamie Foxx, with whom also made Ali and Collateral.
“‘It was very scary’ after the local man was shot, Mann says. ‘What if this guy has six brothers? What if they blamed us? All these questions rush into your head.’ He says care was taken to ensure that the cast and crew could leave the set safely that day.
“But immediately after that incident, Foxx and his entourage packed up and left for good. ‘Jamie basically changed the whole movie in one stroke,’ a crew member says — and not, in his opinion, for the better. The ending that was supposed to be shot in Paraguay would have been ‘much more dramatic.’
“Asked about Foxx’s departure, Mann doesn’t speak for a moment and then says, ‘You hear the sound of silence.'”

My second exposure to Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28) last night was no less pleasurable than the first — this is a great adult popcorn movie that’s about heightened realism and also about life on another planet — a planet I’d like to live on.
Viewing #2 was actually better in a sense because I was able to digest the first-act complexities with a bit more ease. Director Michael Mann throws you right into a very dense and layered situation at the very start, and it may take you ten or fifteen minutes to sort it through. (A movie that makes you work a bit is a good thing.)
A guy I spoke to after the screening said that a woman sitting next to him was having issues with the violence. Which seems silly to me since Vice‘s shootings and sluggings aren’t the least bit gratuitous — it’s just honest, and it has nothing as cruel as the Brandon Routh-getting-half-kicked-to-death sequence in Superman Returns.
A very smart, somewhat snooty industry woman derided the final 10 minutes of the romantic arc between Colin Farrell and Gong Li as “a Sydney Pollack ending”. (I answered that Sydney Pollack endings work for me just fine. )
Another woman I spoke to didn’t care for the Thomson Viper photography — i.e., the sometimes grainy, sometimes-not texture.
So it wasn’t all happy camping at the Arclight, but the after-vibe was, I felt, one of general satisfaction.

The adventures of Smith and Grip-Boy in Austin, briefly recounted.