Entertainment In Brief
Saying goodbye to Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes. Plus, keeping an eye on James Bond
Soul mates
We have this recurring image of Bernie Mac (above, left) and Issac Hayes (right) sitting on a big cloud in heaven, laughing, singing, and thanking the Lord that they get to skip the press junket for Soul Men. Those things are hell.
Of course, being a Scientologist, Hayes wouldn’t have believed in heaven, but rather in a form of reincarnation. Unfortunately, that just made our daydream too complicated.
Strangely, Soul Men, which is released November 7th, has death running all through it. Mac and Samuel Jackson star as former members of a Motown-type band who reunite to honour their recently deceased group leader by taking part in a tribute concert at the Apollo Theater. Musician Hayes — most famous for writing the Shaft theme and voicing Chef on South Park — plays himself in an extended cameo.
Mac and Hayes died just one day apart this past August. Mac went first on August 9th, succumbing to pneumonia, and Hayes of a stroke suffered while running on a treadmill in his Memphis home on August 10th.
In an interview with USA Today, the film’s director Malcolm Lee describes getting a call about Mac’s death one day, and then a call about Hayes the very next day. “It was surreal,” Lee says. “It had to be some sort of bad dream that these two giants would die on the same weekend, and both would be in my movie.”
In another strange twist, Soul Men isn’t the only movie Mac has coming out on November 7th. He’s also the voice of Zuba, Alex the Lion’s dad, in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.
—Marni Weisz
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Artifact
This month’s objet de film
Bond’s Big Eye
While about $200-million worth of extravagant sets were indeed built specifically for the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, you may be surprised to learn that one of the most stunning structures was merely borrowed.
The
surreal blue eye that dominates the stage during the scene where 007
battles baddies during a production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca
belongs to Austria’s Bregenz Festival, renowned for mounting
summer-long productions on a floating stage known as Seebühne Bregenzer.
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Director Marc Forster felt that the giant eye fit perfectly into the Bond style (eyes often figure prominently in the franchise’s iconic opening-credit sequences), and made arrangements to spend 10 days shooting on the stage.
During actual performances of Tosca, that disconnected iris opens to reveal new characters and closes to serve as a screen on which images of the opera’s title character, a jealous soprano, are projected.
—Marni Weisz
©tosca photo by Böhringer Friedrich