Keri Russell Accepts "Mission"
Keri Russell has accepted her Mission.
The former Felicity star is reuniting with director J.J. Abrams to star opposite
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 3.
Russell will portray a junior agent mentored by Cruise's character, Ethan Hunt.
The role was originally intended to be played by Scarlett Johansson, but the Lost in Translation star pulled out of the film last month due to scheduling delays.
Lindsay Lohan had also expressed interest in the part, but Russell, 29, ultimately won out.
The cast is rounded out by Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Michelle Monaghan and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
M:I-3 received the official green light from Paramount just last week after the studio reached a deal with executive producers Cruise and Paula Wagner to pare down the budget and adjust Cruise's profit participation deal.
Before the film got the go-ahead, rampant speculation existed that making Mission might become impossible due to its swollen budget. The New York Times also reported that Cruise's increasingly erratic behavior of late was cause for concern among higher-ups at Paramount and DreamWorks, the two studios behind Cruise's upcoming War of the Worlds.
Now that casting is complete, M:I-3 will begin shooting in Italy next month. The film is slated to open in theaters on May 5, 2006.
Apart from her upcoming Mission, Russell currently appears in the Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries Into the West, about life on the American Frontier. The TNT series' premiere drew some 6.4 million viewers last Friday.
New Bon Jovi Album Due In September
Bon Jovi is preparing for the Sept. 20 North American release of its next studio disc. The as-yet-untitled Island Records album will be led by the single "Have a Nice Day," set for July 18 delivery to U.S. radio outlets for airplay consideration. The album will be released Sept. 14 in Japan and Sept. 19 internationally.
"Have a Nice Day" was co-produced by singer/guitarist Jon Bon Jovi and guitarist Richie Sambora with John Shanks (Kelly Clarkson, Hilary Duff), who in February won the Grammy for producer of the year (non-classical).
Originally expected in the spring, the new disc was described to Billboard as a "loud guitar, big rock record" by Jon Bon Jovi in October. "We're very excited about it, and I'm very confident it's going to be a big record for us."
The songs reflect "personal and introspective views on issues I may have had growing up that I certainly would have never discussed publicly before. I've always kept this 'chin up, glass is half-full' kind of optimism, and [now] I showed some chinks in the armor."
The album will be the follow-up to 2002's "Bounce," which debuted at No. 2 on The Billboard 200 and has sold 712,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In 2003, the group released acoustic re-recordings of some of its best-known songs as "This Left Feels Right," which debuted at No. 14 and has sold 418,000. A four-CD, one-DVD box set, "100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can't Be Wrong," arrived last year.
As previously reported, Bon Jovi will take part in the Philadelphia edition of the July 2 global Live 8 concerts organized by Live Aid mastermind Bob Geldof to aid Africa.
Here is the Bon Jovi album track list:
"Have a Nice Day"
"I Wanna Be Loved"
"Welcome to Wherever You Are"
"Who Says You Can't Go Home?"
"Last Man Standing"
"Bells of Freedom"
"Wildflowers"
"One Last Cigarette"
"I Am"
"Complicated"
"Novocaine"
"Story of My Life"
Ghost-Wary, Dot-Eating Pac-Man Turns 25
For a video game, Pac-Man is getting downright old. The ghost-wary hero with an insatiable appetite for dots turns 25 this month.
From the early 1980s "Pac-Mania" to today's endless sequels and rip-offs, the original master of maze management remains a bright yellow circle on the cultural radar.
But there was more to Pac-Man's broad appeal than eating dots and dodging on-screen archrivals Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde.
"This was the first time a player took on a persona in the game. Instead of controlling inanimate objects like tanks, paddles and missile bases, players now controlled a `living' creature," says Leonard Herman, author of "Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames." "It was something that people could identify, like a hero."
It all began in Japan, when Toru Iwatani, a young designer at Namco, caught inspiration from a pizza that was missing a slice. Puck-Man, as it was originally called, was born. Because of obvious similarities to a certain four-letter profanity, "Puck" became "Pac" when it debuted in the U.S. in 1980.
Its success spawned a romantic interest (Ms. Pac-Man), a child (Junior Pac-Man), a cartoon show and hundreds of licensed products. The phenomenon even reached the pop music charts when "Pac-Man Fever" by Buckner & Garcia drove us all crazy in 1982.
Billy Mitchell, the first and only person known to play a perfect game of Pac-Man (he racked up a score of 3,333,360 after clearing all 256 levels in more than six hours in 1999, according to video game record keepers Twin Galaxies) says Pac's popularity was in its nonviolent simplicity.
"The fact that it's cute, it's almost like a hero running around the board from bad guys. It's not an appeal based on violence," the 39-year-old from Hollywood, Fla., said. "Whether it was an 80-year-old lady or a kid, everyone could adapt to the Pac-Man world."
Billions of quarters later, Pac-Man's influence continues.
As part of a final project for a class in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications graduate program last year, students with cell phones and Wi-Fi Internet connections mimicked the game, tracking their movements on a grid spanning several city blocks.
They called this analog re-enactment, where four people dressed as ghosts searched for Pac-Man on the streets around New York's Washington Square Park, Pac-Manhattan.
"We never had anyone clear the entire board," said Frank Lantz, a game designer who taught the course.
Namco, which can't offer an exact date for Pac-Man's birth, sold 293,822 of the arcade machines between 1980 and '87. It shows no signs of giving up on the franchise.
The company has several new games this year, including "Pac-Mania 3D," "Pac-Man World 3," Pac-Pix" and "Pac-Man Pinball." It even began making a special 25th anniversary edition of the old arcade machine.
"People say, `Who buys Pac-Man?' It's one of the few games where the answer is, `Everyone,'" said Scott Rubin, general manager of Namco America.
Herman said Pac-Man's place in video game history is forever secure, saying: "It was a milestone of video game history."
Foo Fighters, Weezer eyeing fall tour
NEW YORK (Billboard) - Modern rock heavyweights Foo Fighters and Weezer are in talks to team for a fall tour, Foos leader Dave Grohl said on "The Howard Stern Show" Tuesday, the same day the band's double album "In Your Honor"
The trek is expected to get underway in September, although sources say details may not be finalized until next week.
The Foo Fighters' only two scheduled North American shows will come Thursday (June 16) in Toronto and Saturday on the site of the former Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, N.M., where they will entertain 500 competition winners.
Beginning July 1 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, the band will hit the European festival circuit. It will also play July 29 at Japan's Fuji Rock Festival.
Weezer is in the midst of its own European tour. The group will begin a summer run July 2 in Las Vegas, as part of the city's 100th birthday celebration. The group's new Geffen album, "Make Believe," is currently No. 17 in its fourth week on The Billboard 200.
'Cinderella Man' knocked out by bad timing
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Sometimes bad dates happen to good movies.
Although studios often argue that the movie business is a 52-week-a-year business, Ron Howard's "Cinderella Man," which Universal Pictures bowed June 3, appears to have launched at the wrong time. That is one of the factors that has left the film down for the count despite largely positive reviews.
On its opening weekend, the period boxing drama, starring
Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger, landed in fourth place, with a disappointing $18.3 million (the studio had hoped to exceed $20 million). Last weekend, it tumbled nearly 47%, grossing $9.7 million to bring its 10-day haul to $35 million. The film cost $88 million to make.
In the wake of Crowe's telephone-throwing incident in New York on June 6, the tabloids tried to pin the movie's drop-off on his bad-boy behavior, but industry insiders see more substantive factors at play.
In releasing an adult-themed film about a beleaguered Depression-era boxer amid the first wave of summer popcorn movies, Universal took a calculated risk, which doesn't appear to be paying off.
Universal and industry sources are citing the "Cinderella's" June 3 release date as the primary factor for the film's less-than-desirable returns.
Although studios on occasion have successfully launched adult-themed movies in the summer, they usually arrive later in the season, once audiences have had their fill of the lighter fare. In 2002, for example, DreamWorks Pictures launched its "Road to Perdition" on July 12, and in 2003, Universal opened "Seabiscuit" on July 25, and both movies went on to cross the $100 million mark.
"No question that later in the summer, it feels collectively easier to make the choice for the alternative after you have wave after wave of tentpoles pounding at you," Universal Pictures vice chairman Marc Shmuger said. "This early, people weren't ready to move off the diet that the usual studio product is providing."
In its second weekend, the gritty "Cinderella" was easily overshadowed by the $50 million bow of 20th Century Fox's escapist action comedy "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," boosted by the star power of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Universal had hoped that the movie's pedigree would save the day: It reunites producer Brian Grazer with Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (who shares screenplay credit with Cliff Hollingsworth.) The trio worked together on the Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind." And though their film encountered critical resistance at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, it was greeted with largely positive reviews elsewhere.
"We had the best intentions going in," Universal Pictures president of distribution Nikki Rocco said. "If you build it, they will come. We knew we had a good movie, and we thought if we put it out in this corridor, the audience would be there. I think we definitely overreached there."
In retrospect, it also appears that the film's marketing campaign, heralding Crowe in the role of real-life, Irish-born boxer Jim Braddock looked too familiar. The film's ads carried the tagline: "When the country was on its knees, he brought America to its feet," which was a veritable echo of that for "Seabiscuit," which read, "The hopes of a nation rode on a long shot." As a result, some journalists began referring to "Cinderella" as "Fistbiscuit."
"Cinderella" also might have followed too close on the heels of Warner Bros. Pictures' "Million Dollar Baby."
Clint Eastwood's pugilist film, starring Hilary Swank, earned four
Oscars in February. And though it originally opened in limited release in late 2004, it hung on through May in some theaters. For adult audiences, especially women who warmed to "Baby" but might have been put off by "Cinderella's" violent hand-to-hand combat, Howard's film could be viewed as one boxing movie too many.
Rocco said that "Baby's" success was not a factor in determining "Cinderella's" release date. "There was boxing in common, but these two movies have different audiences, different emotions," she said. "We were going for the over-35 crowd, the 'Seabiscuit' audience. Wasn't 'Million Dollar Baby' after a younger audience?"
This is not the first time Howard has been burned by releasing a film with a similar theme too close to another movie. The director's "EdTV," starring Matthew McConaughey, grossed $22 million domestically when Universal released it in March 1999, nine months after Paramount Pictures enjoyed greater success opening the similarly themed "The Truman Show" in June 1998 to a domestic gross of $126 million.
A source close to Imagine Entertainment, Grazer and Howard's production company, said the producers argued vehemently against the early summer date.
Originally, "Cinderella" had been penciled in for a Dec. 17, 2004, opening, but that date was abandoned when Crowe incurred a shoulder injury that delayed production. Next, Universal pushed the release date to March 18, but later chose to move it into the early summer.
Imagine didn't return phone calls seeking comment.
Said Rocco: "We don't pick a release date and throw it to the producers and directors. We knew we were taking a risk, but we involved the filmmakers every step of the way. As a studio we are ultimately responsible for picking the date, but everybody knew the risk of going in the early summer."
Universal executives are not throwing in the towel on the film yet. The studio is rejiggering the marketing campaign and is hoping to rerelease the film in late fall to generate Oscar buzz. But while "Cinderella" could mount something of a comeback by year's end, it's not likely to come in the domestic theatrical ring.
Bale Gives Us Dark Evolution of 'Batman'
"Your anger gives you great power — but if you let it, it will destroy you." Advice from the manipulative Chancellor Palpatine to malleable Anakin Skywalker, as the young Jedi teeters on the edge of becoming Darth Vader in the most recent "Star Wars" prequel? Close.
Those words of warning actually come from the mysterious mentor to Bruce Wayne, the industrial heir on the verge of embracing his own dark side for the sake of good and transforming himself into Batman in "Batman Begins."
Although we all know which came first in this chicken-and-egg scenario, comparisons between these summer blockbusters are inevitable, as both reveal the back stories of iconic pop-culture figures.
Some of the same sorts of revelations that give "Revenge of the Sith" a sense of geeky adolescent wonder surface here, too: the joy of discovering how Bruce (
Christian Bale) develops the Batcave, the Batsuit and the Batmobile (rendered here like a gas-guzzling Hummer, nothing like the sleek Corvette-style Batmobile in which Michael Keaton tooled around the streets of Gotham back in 1989).
But except for a few quips from the formidable supporting cast — including
Michael Caine as an ideal Alfred the butler and
Morgan Freeman as Bruce's equivalent of Q from the James Bond films — "Batman Begins" is suffocatingly self-serious. And to continue the comparison, that only makes "Sith" look superior.
Yes, the Dark Knight is supposed to be a tormented soul, having witnessed his parents' murder and used that guilt and anger as the inspiration for his nighttime forays into vigilante justice. You won't find any nipples in the Batsuit here, which should appease the purists who were appalled by the Joel Schumacherization of the franchise with "Batman Forever" and "Batman & Robin" in the mid-1990s.
But at least Schumacher (and Tim Burton more successfully before him) put their own directorial stamps on their films. It's hard to tell that "Batman Begins" began with Christopher Nolan, the mastermind behind "Memento," one of the most inventive films in recent memory.
As director and co-writer (with David S. Goyer, who also wrote the "Blade" movies based on the comic books), Nolan takes an admirable stab at developing a character-driven drama, only to give in to generic action-movie conventions with a blinding, deafening, explosion-laden finale that could have capped off any number of interchangeable Jerry Bruckheimer flicks.
There are also some surprising inconsistencies throughout the script, such as the jarring morning-after-the-destruction scene, and the fact that Bruce is presumed dead for seven years while secretly training to become Batman (Liam Neeson plays his mentor, yet another "Star Wars" reminder), and no one is shocked to see him alive and well when he returns to save Gotham from crime and corruption.
Then again, this Batman isn't exactly a live wire himself. While Bale is beautiful, chiseled and self-possessed, he has a steely detachment behind his eyes — a quality that served him well in the starring role in "American Psycho," but renders him almost passionless here.
But the weakest link of all is Katie Holmes as Bruce's childhood friend and vague love interest, Rachel Dawes. Part of the problem is that this is a man's world — at least it will be until Catwoman shows up in a couple of episodes — so her role is underdeveloped, and part of the problem is the casting itself. It is simply too difficult to accept the former "Dawson's Creek" star, with her exceedingly youthful good looks and little-girl voice, as a tough-as-nails assistant district attorney who represents one of the last bastions of morality in this decaying urban cesspool.
Speaking of Nolan's Gotham, with help from cinematographer Wally Pfister (who also shot "Memento" and Nolan's "Insomnia"), it is a visually striking mixture of images. It's almost Chicago, only a little slicker and a little grittier at the same time.
But another of the film's attempts at relevance — a threat of foreign terrorists spreading poison through the city's water supply to create massive communal panic — comes off as a clunky reflection of real-life homeland security concerns.
It's a little too tabloid- and cable-news-ready for a character, and a story, that are timeless.
"Batman Begins," a Warner Bros. Pictures release, is rated PG-13 for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic element. Running time: 137 minutes. Two stars out of four.