• He has lied, cheated and killed, but House of Cards President Frank Underwood isn't done yet. Next he's going to sing. Two-time Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey will take time out from filming the third season of the Netflix hit series to show off his vocal talents at a one-night-only gala concert Sept. 29 at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. The concert will benefit scholarships and grants for emerging artists. Spacey, who played singer Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea, promises some Billy Joel songs, some Simon & Garfunkel, a bit of Frank Sinatra, plenty of swing, a few stories and a surprise guest or two, all backed by a 40-piece orchestra. "You never know what I might come up with," he said. Tickets, still available, are $104. Proceeds from the show will help fund the Kevin Spacey Foundation, which recently chose Pace University in New York to be the first institution of higher education in the United States to receive its scholarships and funding support. Spacey, who won Oscars for the movies The Usual Suspects and American Beauty, was also the star of Pay It Forward, and the Juilliard-trained actor said he remembers being a middle-class student struggling to pay tuition.
• Well before the turn of the millennium, Michael Keaton was the first 21st-century superhero. Keaton's role as Batman in two Tim Burton-directed blockbusters a quarter of a century ago made him a global star, and helped spawn a Hollywood obsession with comic-book franchises that has put a generation of leading men into spandex. Whether that was good for the movies, or the stars, is at the heart of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which opened the 71st Venice Film Festival in Italy on Wednesday. The soul-searching supernatural comedy-drama stars Keaton as Riggan Thomson, an over-the-hill actor, once famous as avian superhero Birdman, struggling to regain his self-worth by mounting a heavyweight Broadway play. So how much Michael Keaton is there in Thomson? "That's the giant elephant in the room," the actor conceded in a Venice news conference. But, he added, he'd recently been to Africa and was very fond of elephants. Keaton, 62, insisted he's happy with his place in movie history, but said the credit for reshaping superhero movies should go to Burton. "It's been copied, sliced up, what Tim did -- more than cocaine from a cartel," Keaton said. "He changed a lot and I was part of that, and proudly so."
A Section on 08/28/2014