Brosnan feels free by not being 007
NEW YORK (AP) - The burnt-out hit man Pierce Brosnan plays in The Matador cowers in a stairwell after another botched job, reduced to tears, blubbering: "I'm a wreck. I'm a parody."
The 52-year-old actor appreciates how those words might have haunted his real-life career if he hadn't been cashiered from Bond. "I certainly connected with the line. It's rife with sweet irony," Brosnan says. "I certainly didn't want to become a parody."
But, as he puts it, "That problem got solved without me having to do anything" - except take a phone call informing him that after four James Bond movies, his services were no longer needed.
"You know going into that gig that someday the door is going to close on it. You're not sure when. And you've seen guys who kind of stayed too long on the stage and then you saw ones that just kind of came and went in the blink of an eye," he notes. (Roger Moore and George Lazenby, anyone?)
While he admittedly was miffed at first, Brosnan is now glad he got 86'd from 007.
"With the chapter of Bond past now, there is a wonderful sense of liberation and freedom from having to carry that part," he says. "You have more ownership of your life and the direction your life is going to go and choices of parts. And The Matador is kind of a really wonderful transitional time. Serendipitous, really."
Going into The Matador, Brosnan wasn't thinking: "I'm going to destroy an image that's gone before. But as I got more and more into it I realized that's exactly what's going on."
Brosnan's Julian Noble does act like a vulgarian - the antithesis of so many of his debonair, sophisticated characters - although The Matador begins as any Bond film might: he wakes up next to a beautiful woman he clearly hasn't known for more than a few hours.
Then he takes her nail polish and paints his toenails.
He later struts through a hotel lobby wearing nothing but boots and black briefs, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other, before plunging into a pool. He comes face to face with a shark, which makes no attempt to devour him. Professional courtesy, perhaps?
While Brosnan has played a dissolute, amoral character before (in 2001's The Tailor of Panama) he's getting the biggest raves of his career. He received a Golden Globe nomination, and topped AP's list of top 10 overlooked performances of 2005.
Richard Shepard, writer-director of The Matador, was intrigued by the possibility of having Brosnan play the inappropriately named Noble precisely because "in the past almost every character he has played, Bond, Remington Steele, Thomas Crown, have always been characters in absolute control, and Julian, while appearing in control, is a complete mess."
Casting him paid off, he says. "Ultimately he found a heart in Julian that was only hinted at in the script. He found his soul. And because of that, he took a completely unlikable character and somehow gets the audience to root for him. It's an amazing achievement."
The movie raises the curtain on what's at least Act 4 in Brosnan's professional life. His acting career started in England - where he even learned to entertain with fire-eating - then he moved to the United States, lining up the Remington Steele job within two days of landing stateside. After losing the Bond role in the mid-'80s because NBC changed its mind about cancelling the series, he got a second chance with 1995's GoldenEye.
He's gratified by the credit he receives for resuscitating the Bond franchise, adding: "You revel in it for a second or two, and then move on. Always move on."
But the true satisfaction of acting is "the day-to-day of doing it. ... Come home from work and say: 'Nailed that scene.' ... Because (when) the movie comes out, you have no control over it. If it's great, it's great! And if it's crap, it's painful - beyond words. You just live with it."
Currently, he's filming a western, Seraphim Falls, co-starring Liam Neeson and Anjelica Huston. It's set after the U.S. Civil War, which explains the Vandyke on his face these days. He's also planning a followup to 1999's The Thomas Crown Affair.
Born in Ireland, Brosnan was raised by relatives after his father left while he was still an infant. Reunited in England with his mother by 11, he quit school by 16.
He eventually found sanctuary with people he could identify with ("crazy, mangled, artistic, funny") especially after coming from an "Irish, cloistered, Catholic, repressed" background of the '50s and '60s. A community of actors served as his university while he voraciously read Sartre and Dostoyevksy.
"And I realized I wasn't alone," he says, laughing heartily for the only time during the interview. "I realized it was good to be mad; it was good to feel conflicting emotions."
Even though he got roles in West End productions by Franco Zeffirelli and Tennessee Williams, he felt typecast and longed for America and the movies.
"Thank God for my late, dear wife, who was the one who said, 'This is what we should do. We should go to America,' " Brosnan says, referring to Cassandra Harris - a Bond girl (in 1981's For Your Eyes Only) who died of ovarian cancer in 1991.
In the early '80s, they took out a loan and booked a cheap flight.
"I just felt lucky. I got to America and I felt reborn - brand-new. I thought anything is possible."
Anything is indeed possible for the rest of Brosnan's career. He doesn't know exactly where it's going and never really has. He just has a sensation of where he'd like it to go - drama, comedy, horror, science fiction, musical ...
"I'd like to do it all."
Academy has honorary Oscar for Altman
Robert Altman, one of five directors who hold the record for most Academy Award nominations without winning, is to take home an Oscar this March.
Altman, who had best-director nominations for MASH, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park, will receive an honorary Oscar at the March 5 awards.
Altman's work "has repeatedly reinvented the art form and inspired filmmakers and audiences alike," the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Wednesday in announcing the award.
Altman, 80, is considered one of movie-making's boldest innovators, with an unconventional style that separates him from other Hollywood filmmakers.
His films feature huge ensemble casts, overlapping dialogue and tracking shots lasting minutes at a time.
He is also known for the cutting satire in films such as MASH and Nashville and the understated commentary of films like Gosford Park .
In losing all five times he was nominated for an Oscar, Altman joins the company of Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Clarence Brown and King Vidor, all directors who are five-time losers.
"Altman's innovation, his redefinition of genres, his invention of new ways of using the film medium and his reinvigoration of old ones," all made him a candidate for an Oscar, said Sid Ganis, academy president. "He is a master filmmaker and well deserves this honour."
Altman began his career in documentary, industrial and educational movies, moving into feature films with the low-budget The Delinquents in 1957. After working in television, he shot to fame with MASH, an anti-Vietnam film thinly disguised as a tale set during the Korean War.
His other movies include McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Popeye and the dark Hollywood satire The Player.
Altman's latest film, A Prairie Home Companion, based on Garrison Keillor's radio show, is scheduled for release June 9.
Jack's Back for Another Season on '24'
LOS ANGELES - Jack Bauer has been through hell and it's starting to show.
Over the last four years one day at a time the superhero of Fox's "24" has saved humanity from terrorists, beaten confessions out of close friends, battled heroin addiction, discovered his murdered wife's body, and, last year, even faked his own death. All with little regard for himself.
But now, as the hit series starts up its fifth season with a two-night, four-part marathon (Sunday and Monday, 8 o'clock, EST) , the stress on Bauer, an agent for the fictional federal Counter-Terrorist Unit (CTU), is finally taking its toll.
"This time, something happens to Jack on a very personal level that pisses him off," says Bauer's alter-ego, star Kiefer Sutherland. "Because he's presumed dead, a lot of the boundaries he was restricted by by virtue of who he was working for simply don't exist now. And he's mad."
Until now, Sutherland has only subtly allowed the stress of selflessly saving the world to show on Bauer's boyish face. This season, however, besides being cranky, our clean-cut action hero is looking downright disheveled.
"The weight on people who are responsible for making decisions that affect so many lives, you can only imagine what that must be like putting 10 lives at risk to save 1000," the actor says.
Bauer has been in a constant fight against not only terrorists but often the bureaucracy of his own government.
"Sometimes bureaucracies are incompetent, just by virtue of the fact that they're bureaucracies," says co-executive producer Howard Gordon. "And, sometimes, Jack has to do things outside the law."
Gordon notes that while Bauer has a strong moral compass, "he's sort of politically agnostic. He has a humility and respect for the government on one hand, but a contempt for it on the other ... Jack's strength is in his ability to navigate these really narrow straits, keeping the greater good in mind, even while doing the most loathsome things."
Having faked Bauer's death at the end of last season, the new story line was a challenge for the writers. "We had kind of painted ourselves into a corner," grins Gordon.
Creating a "Jack-centric thriller this year puts him on a collision course with the people who thought he was dead," he explains.
That world includes his one-time mentor, Christopher Henderson ( Peter Weller), who is introduced this season.
"Henderson schooled him on the finer points of counterterrorism," says Weller. "The backstory is ... Jack had investigated some CIA agents and CTU guys. While the other people were brought up on criminal charges, they could never prove anything with me. So for my part, he's my protιgι who turned me in when I was innocent."
Weller probably has a better understanding of Bauer's character than most. "My father was a colonel in the Army who flew President Johnson by helicopter in Texas. He was answerable only to the President," he says.
"This show really gets it," the actor continues, "about how the bureaucracy of the United States gets bogged down in minutia, and yet it can all be severed by one phone call from the C.O."
In addition to Sutherland and Weller, "24" has been able to attract other top-notch talent from the feature-film world, including Sean Astin and JoBeth Williams, who both joined the cast this year.
"We shoot this like one big movie," explains co-executive producer Jon Cassar, one of two directors who helm the majority of the episodes. "The film actors are used to having one director throughout a project, which is what we essentially offer them here. They're quite at home."
Nonetheless, Astin, who plays Lynn McGill sent by the President to oversee the goings-on at CTU found the TV world required a little adjustment.
"The main challenge was memorizing all the techno-talk. There are five- or six-page scenes full of dialogue! 'Yeah, that's television,' I was told," he laughs.
Gordon notes that the series which plays out in real time, with each season covering 24 hours doesn't "go after big names just for their reputations. Our material is deceptively challenging to deliver (credibly), some of these outrageous twists and turns ... and it requires the right amount of seriousness, intelligence and emotion. And Kiefer, of course, sets the tone."
"Kiefer can bring all that backstory and pain in his character, and he does it without hitting you over the head with it," comments Weller. "And he's incredibly professional. On his days off, the guy comes in and reads off-camera lines for the other actors. Most guys take the bullion and are gone to the Bahamas!"
The series films at a former pencil factory in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley on a cavernous set that houses not only the impressive CTU headquarters but the beautiful West Coast retreat for the show's President Logan.
For all of Bauer's toughness, his humanity almost sneaked into one episode filmed recently.
"There's a running joke among fans that Jack never goes to the bathroom," Sutherland recalls. "We had a scene where I was running towards a sign pointing 'BATHROOM' to the left and 'OFFICES' to the right. I did a double-take and ran towards the bathroom! We sent it in to the network, as a joke reel. But, quite frankly, nobody wants to see Jack Bauer go to the bathroom."
So how many more years or days does Bauer still have in him?
"That'll be up to an audience when they start to feel that someone else should come in and do it," Sutherland says. "Personally, I'm hoping that's a long way off."
Jolie Expecting a Baby With Brad Pitt
LOS ANGELES - Angelina Jolie is expecting a baby this summer with Brad Pitt, finally affirming the long-presumed relationship previously only glimpsed on African beaches and in paparazzi snapshots.
Pitt's publicist, Cindy Guagenti, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Jolie is pregnant and that Pitt is the father, confirming People magazine's earlier report.
"Yes, I'm pregnant," the magazine quoted Jolie as telling a charity aid worker Monday in the Dominican Republic, where she is filming "The Good Shepherd" with Matt Damon.
The news comes one month after papers were filed to make Pitt the adoptive father of Jolie's two children. Jolie sought to change the names of the children to Zahara Jolie-Pitt and Maddox Jolie-Pitt.
Pitt accompanied Jolie to Ethiopia in July to pick up Zahara, now 1. Jolie's adopted son, now 4, is from Cambodia.
Jolie's father, Jon Voight, was reached Wednesday morning for his reaction by entertainment TV show "Access Hollywood." The Oscar-winning star of 1978's "Coming Home" said he had not spoken to Jolie, but said, "Angie is my daughter and I am always wishing the best for her."
Previously, Jolie, 30, and Pitt, 42, had not publicly acknowledged their relationship despite increasingly frequent sightings of the couple. They had been spotted together across the globe: in Canadian shopping malls (near Pitt's movie set for "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"), vacationing on African beaches and, most recently, in Pakistan.
In November, Pitt and Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the U.N., toured quake-devastated areas in Pakistan. Jolie also met with Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
Jolie, whose films include "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" and "Alexander," is divorced from actors Billy Bob Thornton and Jonny Lee Miller.
Pitt, the star of films including "Ocean's Eleven" and "Troy," had no children from his four-year marriage to Jennifer Aniston, which ended in divorce last October. The couple cited irreconcilable differences. Pitt has denied Jolie was behind the split.
Pitt and Jolie also starred together in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" last year.
'Star Wars' gets revenge at People's Choice
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Epic space adventure "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" won best overall film and best drama honors on Tuesday at the People's Choice Awards, a widely watched measure of movie, television and star appeal.
In two other film categories, box office hit "Wedding Crashers" was named top comedy and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" was chosen as the favorite family movie.
For "Star Wars" creator George Lucas, the People's Choice Awards held special significance because winners are voted on by fans who cast ballots online, unlike other Hollywood honors given by industry groups and the media.
Despite being a multibillion-dollar film franchise, the six "Star Wars" movies have had a mixed record with critics and Hollywood award groups. "I'm not a big favorite with the critics, but who listens to them," Lucas said onstage. "The reason I make films is for you. The audience rules."
Sandra Bullock was named favorite female movie star, and Reese Witherspoon collected the trophy for favorite leading lady playing country singer June Carter in Oscar-hopeful film, "Walk the Line." One night earlier, Witherspoon won a Critics' Choice award, but like Lucas she noted that the popular voting for the People's Choice held a special appeal.
"You guys voted for us. Not the stuffy people in closed rooms ... people who voted actually go to the movies," she said.
Jennifer Garner was chosen top female action star over Angelina Jolie and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Matthew McConaughey won favorite male action star over Brad Pitt and The Rock.
Pitt, however, did win favorite leading man, and Johnny Depp was named favorite male movie star. Neither was on hand.
TV AND MUSIC
Ray Romano was named favorite male TV star even though his show, "Everybody Loves Raymond," has been off air for many months. The show also earned the title best TV comedy, while "My Name is Earl" picked up the trophy for best new TV comedy.
In one of the award program's funnier moments, Romano tried to coax his 13 year-old sons to join him onstage as they had in years past. But they refused, and Romano teased them in front of the packed house at Los Angeles' Shrine auditorium.
"Now all of a sudden, it's not cool to be with dad ... We got girlfriends. We got body hair," he said. The boys lowered their heads and hid their faces from the TV cameras.
Other TV awards went to "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" for best drama, and "Prison Break" for favorite new drama.
Ellen DeGeneres was favorite daytime talk show host, and Jay Leno earned the title favorite late night show host.
"American Idol" was chosen best competition show, and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" was favorite reality show.
In music categories, one-time "American Idol" star Kelly Clarkson was named favorite female performer, and country star Tim McGraw was best male performer.
Rockers Green Day picked up an award for best music group, and U2 won the award for best concert tour.
Singer Jessica Simpson, who recently separated from husband Nick Lachey, started off the show singing "These Boots Are Made For Walkin,"' and later the song, which is from the film "The Dukes of Hazzard," won the award for favorite song in a movie.
She thanked the fans, but did not say anything about her recent separation or Lachey.
Report: Angelina Jolie Expecting Baby
LOS ANGELES - Angelina Jolie is expecting a baby this summer with Brad Pitt, according to a report on the People magazine Web site.
"Yes, I'm pregnant," the magazine quoted Jolie as telling charity aid worker Monday in the Dominican Republic, where she is filming "The Good Shepherd" with Matt Damon.
The report says the pregnancy was confirmed by representatives of both stars but does not identify them by name.
The news comes one month after papers were filed to make Pitt the adoptive father of Jolie's two children. Jolie sought to change the names of the children to Zahara Jolie-Pitt and Maddox Jolie-Pitt was filed.
Pitt accompanied Jolie to Ethiopia in July to pick up Zahara, now 1 year old. Jolie's son, now 4 years old, was adopted from Cambodia.
Pitt and actress Jennifer Aniston announced their separation last January, and Aniston filed for divorce in March, citing irreconcilable differences. The divorce became final in October.
Pitt, 42, has denied Jolie, 30, was behind the split.
Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, recently toured quake-devastated areas in Pakistan with Pitt. She met with Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and toured a town largely destroyed by the Oct. 8 earthquake that killed an estimated 86,000 people.