But then surprises tend to be the order of the day with a demanding, imaginative guy like Mann running the show. The material is pulp, but there's a maestro conducting.

The story happens over the course of seven or eight hours, and could be insufficiently described as a mixture of AFTER HOURS and TRAINING DAY. Max (Jamie Foxx) is a thirtyish cab driver with dreams of running his own limo service, but he's a dreamer and a slacker. But life provides a kick in the ass when a sharp, cold-blooded hitman named Vincent (Cruise) jumps into his cab and convinces Max take him around from one "job" to the next -- at first obliviously, then under duress and force.

COLLATERAL is about as sharp, classy and well-oiled as an urban diversion of this sort can be, and I'm here to say that Ain't It Cool's Mr. Beaks is flat-out wrong in declaring that the film "falls woefully short due to a shockingly conventional third act that betrays every ounce of inventiveness that came before." The ending is fine, trust me...there's nothing to feel woeful about in the least.

In fact, Cruise's final line, an echo of an observation about Los Angeles culture that he delivers early in the film, carries a resonance that stays with you. The more you think about it, the more revealing it seems.

And John Lippman's piece last week in the WALL STREET JOURNAL about possible audience concerns about Cruise playing a villain....it just seems like a lot of crap now. Anyone who sees COLLATERAL and says Cruise isn't good or memorable as the bad guy, or that he was much better in one of his smiley nice-guy roles, is suffering from aesthetic blockage.

There was always an element of a hard frosty guy in Cruise's past performances, but somehow he's more touching (to me anyway) as a talkative, ultra-shrewd psychopath than he was in JERRY MAGUIRE or RAIN MAN. His vulnerability starts to leak out in the final 20 minutes or so, and then it sinks in.

In a piece that ran last October, I said that Beattie's COLLATERAL script (which had been tweaked by Frank Darabont) "has a bit more pathos and depth of character than a typical urban shoot-em-up, although it would be a stretch to call the payoff touching or profound." I couldn't see how the finished film would play, of course. It's not quite Chekhov, but there's a slight stick-to-the-ribs thing at the finish. It's a semi-profound thing, which is better than one with no profundity at all.

This is also Jamie Foxx's best turn ever. He plays it quiet and submerged, for the most part....it's all in his eyes, which seem to get more and more stunned and shocked at the chaos he finds himself in. Foxx's big moment comes when Max has to pretend that he's Vincent in front of a creepy Latin mobster (played by Javier Bardem) who doesn't know he's an impostor. The manner in which Max handles this deception is both chilling and riveting.

Jada Pinkett Smith has the third-billed role....she's totally fine but unexceptional. The always-good Mark Ruffalo plays an L.A. detective, and I wish he'd been given more to do since I was really getting into his performance. Bruce McGill has a small, intense role as an FBI guy. Bardem is note perfect.

On visual terms alone, COLLATERAL is instantly one of the all-time great L.A. movies. Charles Bukowski used to talk about the "stink of L.A.," and you can almost smell it off Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron's photography. It gets the hazy texture, the nocturnal sensual stuff, the ugly-beauty element...the whole shmear. (Thomas Andersen's much-admired three-hour documentary LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, about filmed images of this city, will now seem incomplete without clips from it.)

Mann's decision to shoot with Viper FilmStream and Sony CineAlta high-def cameras was inspired. I've never seen L.A. nightscapes look quite so visually alive or luminous. "Film doesn't record what our eyes can see at night," Mann says in the press kit about his reasons for going with high-def. "I wanted to see into the night, to see everything the naked eye can see and more...[to] see this moody landscape with hills and trees and strange light patterns."

About 20% of COLLATERAL was shot on film, but I was able to spot the changeovers only three or four times. One of the nicest visual touches, for me, was the appearance of the opening logos (for DreamWorks and Paramount) in scintillating, ultra-sharp black and white. As soon as I saw this I knew I was in for a treat. I just knew it.

I'll jump into this a bit more on Friday, but this is one of the best films of the year and not just the summer. I plan on seeing COLLATERAL at least a couple of more times, and then buying the DVD next January or February and listening to Mann's voice-over and running all the extras. I'm hooked.

And while I'm on the subject, why won't Mann relent and cut together a longer DVD version of HEAT, just for fans like me? There must be a good hour's worth of unused material that would stand up on its own and would integrate into the whole, and wouldn't play like superfluous out-takes.

Here's The Thing

My final Poop Shoot column will run a little less than six weeks from now -- on Friday, August 27th. On Wednesday, September 1, Hollywood Elsewhere will be a stand-alone entity....I think. I may work out a deal with somebody to host it in exchange for what I require, but come hell or high water my column and I will be alive and pulsing as of 9.1.04.

The URL is going to be a tiny bit tricky due to the presence of a hyphen. The URL will be www.hollywood-elsewhere.com. I'm going to run this information repeatedly over for the next month and a half so one can possibly stay ignorant about this staggering change. Hollywood-hyphen-elsewhere-dot-com....simple, right? You don't even need to write it down.

A Woman of Quality

THE BOURNE SUPREMACY will reign this weekend, which will be the second occasion this summer for the triumph of a truly good, deeply satisfying non-fantasy film (the first being FAHRENHEIT 9/11). There will also be the option of kicking sand around in Halle Berry's litter box, but I'm saying nothing about this until Friday.

But if you happen to be in New York or L.A., going to MARIA FULL OF GRACE (Fine Line) should be a priority. It's only one of the best of the year so far, but don't let that influence you. And please....my failing to mention it in this space last week shouldn't be a factor either.

It's playing on four screens in L.A. and three in Manhattan, and it's better than 95% of the films out there right now, and 95% of the moviegoers out there don't even have an option of choosing it. Fine Line says it'll be expanding MARIA's playdates on July 30.

It's a low-budget indie thing, and a lot of it is spoken in Spanish, but don't get the idea MARIA is something you should see because it's good for you. Written and directed by Joshua Marston, an NYU film school grad, it's taut and true every step of the way. It's also one of the most emotionally involving dramas I've seen in a long while, as well as a sharply crafted suspense thing....once it gets rolling in the second act.

The absence of bullshit in this movie is magnificent. It is hard to describe the delight in watching a first-rate film that Will Smith has had nothing to do with. I don't much like Will Smith these days. He's an android who smirks a lot in one expensive CG crap-film after another.

You're not supposed to say this about Will Smith. He's so likable, has such a good sense of humor...right? And like Spielberg, Smith brings in dollars, dammit. He puts food on the table and he pays the car bills and the mortgage. But I think Smith's patented shtick is spent, and that he's turned into a kind of monster.

Where was I? Oh, yeah...

Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is an independent-minded 17-year-old living in rural Colombia, near Bogotá. She has a low-paying nothing job, nipping the thorns off rose stems, and has no interest in the young putz who's gotten her pregnant. So you're with her when a slick young guy on a motorcycle offers her a job as a "mule," carrying grape-sized pellets filled with heroin into the U.S. in her stomach.

It's a scary gig for all sorts of reasons. Forget the legal implications -- she could die if one of the pellets ruptures in her stomach. But the pay is good (about $5000 per trip, minus expenses), and anything that will save Maria from a life of thorn-snipping, child-rearing servitude must be explored no matter what. I would definitely risk it I were in her shoes.

The risk element, in any event, is what makes MARIA FULL OF GRACE a satisfying nail- biter. The second-act depiction of her drug-smuggling experience easily ranks alongside the realism and verisimilitude in Steven Soderbergh's TRAFFIC. Marston never seems to push anything for dramatic effect -- he just goes from plot turn to plot turn, character to character, observation to observation...and it all weaves together perfectly.

Accompanying Maria on her first smuggling trip is Lucy (Giulied Lopez), an experienced mule whom Maria has befriended. Things get tense on the plane, and then tenser when they go through customs, and then tragedy intrudes, and then more scary stuff happens. Marston has written an awfully good script, and has gotten superb performances out of each and every player, Moreno in particular.

The third act is about what Maria does after a tragic death occurs. She looks for help in the Columbian community in Jackson Heights, Queens, and finds everything very touch and go. Nobody rescues her; she has to figure things out for herself, and it's no picnic. She gets through it, thank fortune, and then she does the right thing for herself also, at the very end. Good for her.

Moreno isn't a trained actress (Marston found her in a casting call in Columbia), but I believe everything she says and does in this film....every last bit. I read somewhere she's living in Manhattan now and looking for work. I shudder to think of her struggling and having doors slammed in her face, but that's the game.

Honest offer to Will Smith: if you help Catalina Sandino Moreno get a job, I'll try to see past your tedious things. I don't know if I'll be successful, but I promise I'll try.

Maestro

I'm looking forward to meeting composer David Amram, a guy I've admired for decades, later this week. It's pretty silly to worship someone whose work you barely know, but all I really know about Amram first-hand is his incredible score for the 1962 version of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.

And the guy's been writing and performing beautiful music for decades since. He's one of the most respected fusion (jazz, classical, whatever) composers out there. And I don't know the first thing about most of his other work, except for clippings I've read over the past few days.

I can report that Scott Rudin, producer of Jonathan Demme's first-rate remake of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, has told me he's deeply admired Amram for years.

There are two kinds of great film scores - the kind you hear and the kind you don't. I'm not trying to diss Rachel Portman's score for the new CANDIDATE, but I can't remember a single bar. And yet I've been playing the fourteen-note main title theme from Amram's CANDIDATE score in my head for three decades.

Amram's CANDIDATE score does more than just penetrate the psyche. It seduces with an unusual tickling strategy that also haunts at the same time. It takes you into curious, unexpected places that are half psychologically spooky and half jazzy-quirky. Journalist Neil Hickey has called it "one of the most consummate scores ever created for a motion picture."

Frank Sinatra, who played Cpt. Bennet Marco in the '62 film, once described the exciting curiousnessness of Amram's score as "almost sane sometimes, as the story is almost sane sometimes. And at other times, the music is in the trees, just like the movie. It's a great score."

It's "a work of immense subtlety and nuance," wrote Hickey, "miraculously evocative of the 1950's, and a fascinating experiment in combining jazz, Latin and classical modes into an integrated, pleasing architecture that not only epitomizes the remarkable film it celebrates, but survives beautifully on its own as a delectable chrestomathy of musical invention."

The "complete soundtrack recording" CD was released in November 1997 by a small label called Premier Recordings. It's listed as 94,225th biggest seller on Amazon.com., and it's one of the greatest scores ever written. Amram sent me a copy by mail but Amazon had, as of Tuesday morning, exactly two copies for sale -- one new, one used.

John Frankenheimer, director of the '62 original, had hired Amram to score for THE YOUNG SAVAGES, a 1961 film about New York street gangs with Burt Lancaster and Shelley Winters. Amram, a young guy who knew all the '50s beat crowd (Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, et. al.), had previously done the score for Elia Kazan's SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS.

The idea, as Hickey relates, was for Amram "to meld jazz from the Korean War period (1950-1954) with symphonic music to evoke the terrible psychological plight of the captured patrol, and the trauma and eventual triumph of the two main characters.

"One instruction Frankenheimer gave to Amram was: 'The picture will tell you what to do. I hired you because you're different from anyone else, and you care and have pride in what you do.'"

Another thing Frankehimer told Amram was, "Remember...it's not just a Chinese war picture."

"It's hard to imagine what it was like living in [the early '60s] and then seeing THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE...it was almost too much to see at the time," Amram recalls. "Now that it's come back it's a different thing. Americans accept now that we don't live in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, but back then it was another story."

The score was recorded at Columbia Studios, he recalls, and fairly quickly. "If the musicians feel loved and happy, the music comes out five times better...I learned that from Leonard Bernstein. I of course I knew how to write and conduct and time it...we just did it naturally."

The orchestra had "a full symphonic string section.,..eight first violins, six second violins, four violas, four cellos, and three basses," he says. "Plus two French horns, two trombones, two tibas, two trumpets, three percussion, one harpsichord, alto saxophone, flute, piccolo, clarinet, a bassoon, a heckle phone, an English horn, a bass clarinet, a bassoon and a contrabassoon."

I wouldn't know a contrabassoon if it walked up and pinched me in the ass, but fine.

I asked Amram what I should try and listen to besides his film score work. He told me about a symphony called "Song of the Soul," a portion of a Holocaust opera called "The Final Ingredient" and another work called "Sacred Service." There's an all-Amram CD called "Southern Stories," on Chrome Records. There's a piece he wrote called HAVANA, NEW YORK that was performed in Cuba in 1977, and a Pioneer World Music Record called NO MORE WALLS.

There are also two classical CDs on Newport Classic records: "David Amram: An American Original" And "David Amram: Three Concertos."

For The Record

I made no mention in last Saturday's updated story about the recently-aired fake Sci-Fi Channel doc about M. Night Shyamalan that AICN's Drew McWeeny was the first to call it fiction. He did so in a piece than ran June 18th. I would have done well to read it, but I didn't.

McWeeny wrote that he received a letter about the doc a month earlier that he initially dismissed. The letter said the Sci-Fi Channel is airing a "documentary" Shyamalan, director of THE VILLAGE, and that Nathanial Kahn (MY ARCHITECT) directed "and is credited with writing as well, though according to sources close to [credited] producer Callum Greene it was actually written and executive produced by Shyamalan himself.

"'The 'documentary' is a FICTIONAL piece in the spirit of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT that emulates the suspense/thriller aspects of THE VILLAGE,' the letter said. 'It will be presented as a factual documentary [about] the making of THE VILLAGE, as well as the achievements and background of its subject, M. Night Shyamalan.'

"So is this all just an attempt to create buzz by stirring up a fake controversy?," McWeeny wrote. "My sources say absolutely. In fact, I've heard that M. Night was the creative force behind this documentary from the get-go. The story certainly sounds fishy the way it's being reported so far, and M. Night is such a notorious control freak that this sounds exactly like something he'd do."

Here's the original link: http://linux10985.dn.net/display.cgi?id=17816.