Jacques Demy’s glorious The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme in 1964 and, if all goes as planned, it’ll launch a new series in May within the Cannes Classics section, Palmes d’Or Restored. For that to happen, though, work on the digital restoration must be completed, and Agnès Varda and her family are reaching out for your help.
“Tom Folsom‘s biography of Dennis Hopper has a conceptual-prose hook,” writes Vadim Rizov at the AV Club. “Dropping the standard bio’s orderly alternation of sober reconstruction and anecdotal evidence, Hopper seeks to honor its subject’s outlaw panache with appropriately wild writing. Unfortunately, Folsom’s imitation-gonzo is a pallid, cliché-ridden imitation of Tom Wolfe at his most overheated.”
The Moviegoer Who Knew Too Much is a new e-book collection of fictions and essays by Mark Rappaport as he “re-imagines the lives of people who made the movies and how they revealed themselves on the screen. From Sergei Eisenstein to the actor who played The Creature from the Black Lagoon, secret and sometimes invented histories are explored and put into contexts which they never dreamed possible.”
“Hollywood has shown little creativity when it comes to online media, presenting a contemporary news landscape that reinforces outmoded stereotypes and reductive oppositions,” writes Carrie Battan for the New Republic: “ethically misguided young writers against morally upright old writers, online against print, rapid-fire against steadily paced, blog posts against stories, personal glory-seekers against team players, bold innovators against stalwarts. Clumsiness aside, these shows miss a fundamental ingredient in the new-old media dichotomy: It’s often the youngest who are the most nostalgic.”
In other news. In the Shadow has practically swept this year’s Czech Lions, reports Viktor Palák at Cineuropa. “The classically shot dark drama directed by David Ondříček (son of Miloš Forman collaborator and Oscar-winning cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček) depicts a solitary policeman suspecting a plot of the communist officials behind a seemingly ordinary robbery.”
In the works. As New York‘s David Edelstein profiles Rachel Weisz, one of his favorite actresses, we learn that “she’s scheduled to make her Broadway debut with [husband Daniel] Craig in Harold Pinter’s backward romantic-triangle drama Betrayal, a project picked for them by Mike Nichols, who’ll direct.”
Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon. The Greatest Movie Never Made, the 2874-page, €2000 volume from Taschen, sold out long ago, but fascination with the project has never ebbed. Now the Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth reports that Steven Spielberg is developing Kubrick’s screenplay as a television miniseries.
More browsing? Mike Everleth has this week’s “Underground Film Links.” Also, if you kept yourself offline over the weekend, good for you. But you might want to catch up with Sunday‘s big news update and Saturday‘s roundup on festivals and retrospectives going on all over.
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