I just wonder if mainstream audiences will find it movie-ish enough for their tastes. It doesn't use CG sharks (totally real ones swim right next to, and even bump up against, Ryan and Travis) and only one jolting underwater shot of a shark's eyes, and it's mostly a dialogue thing about bobbing in the ocean...oh, God, what was that?...and trying to control panic.

Moreover, director Chris Kentis, who shot this low-budgeter with video cameras over a period of three years with wife/producer Laura Lau, isn't too interested in conventional suspense techniques. I admire this on one level, but dammit, you're right in the water with these guys and you want to see at least one of them make it, so you'd like to know how smart or committed the rescuers are and how their search efforts are progressing. You know...rooting interest?

Travis's character says at one point that there's no point in trying to swim anywhere due to currents and whatnot. But there's something not only terrible but maddening about this situation. I think it needed something more than just these two waiting to be bitten. ("I don't know what's worse, seeing them or not seeing them," Ryan cries at one point. "Seeing them," Travis answers.) At one point they spot a buoy floating two or three hundred yards away, and they swim for it...but not hard or long enough. I wouldn't care how many life forms are underneath or how hungry they might be, or how strong the currents are. I would reach that sucker.

OPEN WATER is nonetheless an original, as much as JAWS was in its way. I'm sure I'll see it again on DVD. (I've been to three screenings, counting the Sundance showing last January). Lau told me during an interview last week the disc will feature three docs (two driven by real-life shark material, along with a making-of piece), along with audio-track commentary from she and Chris.

But don't wait for the DVD. OPEN WATER is definitely made for communal viewing. The shriekers make it special.

Bump in the Night

If an ending works, a satisfying movie becomes a very satisfying one. Endings are (almost) everything. If an ending is good enough, if it emotionally locks into place, it doesn't need to pass the standard of scrupulous plausibility, although it has to be plausible enough. It doesn't need to add up by way of calculus or behavioral science, but it needs to feel right. It has to give the audience what it wants.

If the movie isn't cheesy, that is. If it doesn't have the confidence, deep focus and whip-smart pizazz that all good films have one way or another, these terms don't apply. But if it does, they do. And this, for me anyway, is exactly what manifests in the final moments of COLLATERAL.

Stuart Beattie's script never precisely says that COLLATERAL is about redemption, but this is what gradually filters through. It's intimated but never quite put on the table top. And it's the fulfillment of this theme (by way of inference, of course) that puts a cap on it. That and a surprisingly touching death-scene element that works precisely because you don't see it coming, much less the fact that it will still be with you days later.

Jamie Foxx is Max, an L.A. cab driver coping with huge procrastination issues. He's been driving for twelve years and wants to start his own limo business (or so he tells the occasional fare), but he's plotzing and basically swirling down the drain in slow-mo. And then along comes a savior in the form of a hit man named Vincent, played by Tom Cruise. A lethal (tough love?) therapist who threatens, terrifies, challenges and punches through.

If COLLATERAL director Michael Mann had tried to expand upon this in any way, the film might have felt hammy. He doesn't, of course; the basics are conveyed and the action takes over. But all the while it's a waiting game. Will Max do anything? Is it in him? Can he somehow extricate himself from Vincent's killing spree, which he'll probably be the final victim of?

I'm not going to spill the finish so I can't really explain my case, but Max's moment is coming and wanted and necessary. The audience has been expertly (i.e., not too urgently or on-the-nose) prepped, and when it finally arrives those familiar feelings -- those crescendo-orgasmo endorphins that all good thrillers sock home -- take over. It's conventional stuff, you've seen it in 179 other thrillers, and you don't really care. Because it's being done the Michael Mann way.

I know some will disagree, but the satisfaction is such that it manages to overwhelm even a walloping right-cross-to-the-jaw coincidence regarding a secondary character. But you know something? It's buyable. A stretch, but it just makes it under the wire.

Reactions to Mann's power-pulser (opening today), which, as of Thursday evening, were running about 90% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, have mostly remarked upon this ending, with a sizable contingent saying it's a problem.

I don't just disagree; I'm amazed. The reasons I've been reading about why the final 15 or so minutes are a speed bump aren't poorly explained; they make sense. But if you're really into the spirit of this thing they don't matter, or at least they shouldn't, if you can accept the heightened logic of a great payoff. To my mind the complainers are missing or denying the righteous emotional finality.

Or they get all this and it doesn't count. Whatever. Can't please 'em all.

No one I've read so far, by the way, has talked about how Vincent, for all his cynicism and sociopathic indifference, turns out to be someone you genuinely feel sorry for and almost want to hug. Almost. And all due to a few deft brush strokes by Mann, Cruise and Beattie. No speeches, no emotions except anger (mostly), no pay-attention-to-me emoting.

And man, that music by James Newton Howard! Especially for the last five minutes. I tried to freeload a copy of the soundtrack last week through DreamWorks publicity, but their attentions were too divided. Tower Records is selling it for $14.99, and they've got a copy waiting for me behind the desk.

Well Said

With one quibble, I really like the way David Denby puts this observation about Michael Mann in the current issue of THE NEW YORKER, to wit:

"Shot by shot, scene by scene, Mann, whose recent work includes HEAT and THE INSIDER, may be the best director in Hollywood.

"I don't mean that he's the greatest artist. He lacks such qualities as the tormented humanism of Scorsese, the generous showmanship and warmth of Spielberg, the moral curiosity of the Clint Eastwood who directed UNFORGIVEN and MYSTIC RIVER. But Mann has become a master builder of sequences, the opposite of the contemporary action directors who produce a brutally meaningless whirl of movement.

"Methodical and precise, he analyzes a scene into minute components -- a door closing, an arm thrust out -- and gathers the fragments into seamless units; he wants you to live inside the physical event, not just experience the sensation of it."

The quibble is over Spielberg. Generous showmanship? Too often hackneyed, I say. A bit less generosity and a stronger aversion to projects like THE TERMINAL, HOOK, A.I. and AMISTAD would do wonders for his reputation.

Proscenium Pacing

I laughed at that Sheigh Crabtree piece in Wednesday's HOLLYWOOD REPORTER that attempted to celebrate BOURNE SUPREMACY editors Christopher Rouse and Richard Pearson as the New Cool Guys on the block because of their super-fast cutting of that film. It struck me as funny because the reaction on the street (if you talk to any Regular Joe who's seen it) is that some of the sequences are cut so fast and wild-ass they're next to incomprehensible. A few big-gun critics have said this also.

Before I go any further, let me say that I think the bulk of the cutting in THE BOURNE SUPREMACY is cool and commendable. It just goes over the top in three places -- the opening-chase sequence in India, the hand-to-hand battle in the Munich condo, and the closing car chase in Moscow. Okay, maybe in a couple of other spots.

The REPORTER piece was, of course, studio-friendly. It was obviously run to deflect criticisms about the hyper-fast cutting, which aren't actually mentioned in the piece until the second-to-last graph, and in a snide fashion at that. Always push the negatives to the rear.

I was especially amused when Rouse and Pearson said that "the entire production team" -- producer Frank Marshall, director Paul Greengrass -- "all wanted to take the project a step further." Standard circle-the-wagons studio spin.

Rouse explained things a bit when he said that Greengrass "is a huge fan of long lens material, so there was more of a verite feel [to the film]. Because the camerawork was more aggressive, shots wouldn't necessarily hold up as long as if they were static, locked-off shots. That also dictated having to make a cut as opposed to not."

Pearson told Crabtree that super-fast cutting "was a brave style for everybody to invest in. Everybody above the line knew when they made the film there were going to be risks involved. The studio probably could have made safer choices, but to their credit they didn't."

Frenetic cutting is risky? Not according to an action director I spoke to a few weeks ago about this subject. He said that studio executives are often the ones pushing for faster cutting, rather than gritting their teeth and going along with the wishes of their editors, directors and producers.

"Increasingly, you'll hear studio execs spout 'truths' of the marketplace, and one of these is that young audiences have been so influenced by MTV that they can't accept anything other than faster and more frenetic cutting," he said.

"I know that mandates have been given in the editorial room by studio execs to cut it faster....cut it faster. I've heard this from a number of director friends, and when they're told this they'll always say back, 'Why?' and they'll hear back some arbitrary idiotic fiat like, 'Kids like it.' And in today's Hollywood, once that is offered as a way to do things, it's unassailable. Kids like it!"

Actually, I liked Pearson's idea about SUPREMACY's cutting being inspired by driving down the L.A.'s 405 freeway.

You're tooling along, he told Crabtree, "and in the oncoming lane you see something happen out of the corner of your eye, and you go, 'Oh s---!' And it's that very kind of caught, haphazard action. It's never 15 angles with a beautiful crane shot that shows in slow motion the car arching through the air. It's one of those, 'Oh god! That looked horrible."'

On the other hand, Rouse's way of describing the criteria of those who have criticized portions of SUPREMACY's cutting was arch and specious. These are people, he said, who "want to see the film presented to them in a proscenium-like fashion and watch a piece of entertainment unfold from a distance."

Sure thing, Chris. Critics calling for slightly less hyper cutting would ideally like action scenes to deliver all the heebie-jeebie excitement of a Harold Pinter stage play as seen from the balcony of the Winter Garden. Or follow the pacing of the first-act love scene between Charlton Heston and Haya Hayareet in BEN-HUR.

Hmmm. I wonder how Rouse and Pearson would have cut William Wyler's footage of the chariot-race sequence in BEN-HUR? This is one of the best-cut action sequences ever assembled, and I don't care how unhip or lacking in boldness that sounds. Would Rouse and Pearson's version be as easy to follow? Would viewers be able to differentiate and keep track of each chariot rider, and where they're riding in relation to Heston and Stephen Boyd? I wonder.

What would those guys have done, for that matter, to William Friedkin's subway-car chase in THE FRENCH CONNECTION?

"That is certainly one of the greatest action sequences of all time," my director friend said. "You will not find an action sequence that affects you on a more visceral level than that, and it's cut quite quickly but in a way that lets you follow the geography...the cutting lets your eye to settle on an image here and there so you can root yourself and get your bearings."

I don't know. Sounds awfully old-fogeyish to me. Bearings?

Missing

Regency Outdoor Advertising did it! Took down Vincent Gallo's BROWN BUNNY blowjob billboard, that is. On their own volition. I was told this by Gallo's p.r. rep this morning. She says no one knows why and they're currently trying to figure out what happened.

A woman working for Regency, the company that physically put the billboard up last weekend and took it down yesterday, said the company has no comment. She wouldn't even tell me when the billboard was removed at first, although she relented after speaking with a colleague and said it was "basically" removed Thursday.

Wellspring distribution executive Daniel Goldberg, whom I called twice, wouldn't get on the phone. A message left for Gallo at his L.A. home resulted in nothing.

Gallo's p.r. rep says payment of the $50,000 monthly fee for the billboard wasn't an issue, so obviously somebody pressured Regency to have it taken down. It was probably some L.A. politico who'd decided that the billboard is unseemly and bad for the civic image of Los Angeles, and told Regency it was not in their interests to keep it up.

Uncle Grambo at www.whatevs.org reported a few days ago that Gallo, after a private screening of THE BROWN BUNNY he attended in Detroit, "delighted in telling us about the giant billboard on Sunset Boulevard that he purchased WITH HIS OWN MONEY to promote the film." (Caps are Grambo's.)

An MRC rep has told me she understands that the Detroit screening did in fact happen.

A guy named Mark Graham told me in an e-mail Wednesday that Gallo told him directly he designed the billboard. I don't know Mark, but if it's true it would fit Gallo's m.o. That weird blur effect around Sevigny's neck [see photo] looks amateurish, like a non-pro was behind it.

The billboard was an anachronistic '70s style thing featuring a black-and-white shot of Sevigny's character, named Daisy, performing oral sex on Gallo's character, who's named Bud Clay. It's taken from a scene near the end of film.

The earth will presumably continue to rotate on its axis despite the missing billboard, but since I ran a piece about it Wednesday I felt obliged to follow through.

Bourne Cutting

"Like many of your readers, I suspect, I'm with you on the editing of the key action pieces in THE BOURNE SUPREMACY. In many ways, the two Bourne's are similar -- spare, efficient, old-school action thrillers that really deliver the goods. The car chase in the first film is, for my money, one of the finest ever put on film.

"So what happens with the sequel? We get Jason Bourne a la Michael Bay? Sorry, I didn't sign up for that. The hand-to-hand sequence in Munich, the foot-and-car chase through Moscow, and the footrace in Munich all had the potential, as far as I could tell, to be memorable action set pieces. It seemed to me that Greengrass knew his stuff (I still need to sit down with the DVD of BLOODY SUNDAY) -- the scenes are well planned and plotted -- but the editing style yanked the rug out from anything he was able to accomplish.

"I'm a 30-year-old (31 tomorrow) male, so maybe I'm outside the intended demographic, but is it too much to ask that a scene be edited so that we have some clue of what's going on? The suggestion that the editors wanted to convey the disorienting nature of the chases is interesting, but in the end I'm not really sure it holds water. Is this really the direction action films are inevitably going to head? I hope not." -- Brian Reynolds

"Disorientation is the point in THE BOURNE SUPREMACY. The rapidity of the cuts and the caffeine-addled camera are not the only evidence; there are instances where screen direction is reversed (the camera crosses the line of action) for no reason whatsoever except to throw the viewer a loop. The first time I noticed it is when the Russian assassin is pulling his gun out of his trunk during the opening chase. We see him from one side of the car, and then the other. (There are further examples that I can't remember.) Bad editing? I don't think so.

"The movie is an impressionist work. It's something I've never seen before -- I don't need another standard car chase, and this isn't a martial arts film where the fun is admiring the mechanics of a fight. It's about a man barely in control whose constant goal is to keep a grip on his tenuously held bearings. The images that flash by are comprehensible in a visual art sense, but not in the 'physical action' sense that we're used to having seen many movies that make us say 'cool' rather than get us inside the character.

"So BOURNE's most ambitious sequences aren't in direct competition with classic chase scenes (BEN HUR's chariot race, THE FRENCH CONNECTION subway chase), which are perfect for what they are.

"The audience of the future won't blink at this. (A scary thought to some!) This is probably the first time an experimental film made $50 million in three days." -- Steve Felix

"I liked SUPREMACY, but the lightning-quick editing was out of control. The car chase at the end was the worst. Why even bother with the car chase if the viewer has no absolutely sense of what's going on? The filmmakers could have saved a lot of time and money if they had just told the cameraman to run down the street like a lunatic while swinging the camera around wildly. There would be no difference in the final product." -- Jeff Horst

"The prevailing dialogue about Bourne is that damn editing. Every single person I've spoken to that has seen the film agrees on two things: (1) it's a good film but (2) the quick editing sucks. In that order. Every single friend I have has pretty much said the same thing. Their age didn't matter, but they ranged from 21 years old to 40 years old. Those damn studio execs don't know jack-shit about what audiences want. Bastards." -- Rich Elvers

"Everyone I've talked to from 18-60 years old hated all the damn hand-held camera work as much as the editing. Everyone also loved the first one, but were very disappointed in the second. Myself included." -- Gary DeBrown

Do It Now

I'm being told that the hyphen in the URL for the new Hollywood Elsewhere site (which may be active sooner than September 1st...stay tuned) will be a problem for some. People don't like hyphens, don't like typing them between words, etc. So please, to prevent any problems along these lines, if you're into this column and intend to follow me to my solo site, bookmark the URL here and now: www.hollywood-elsewhere.com.

Here's what the top-of-the-column logo art will look like, by the way. I'm not planning any radical design changes on top of this. Same old format, archives, link to recent columns, etc. I might go with a big cover page, or I may not. But please bookmark the new URL-with-a-hyphen. I know about laziness (particularly my own) and I want to avoid any problems with people finding the site, for obvious reasons.