Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Francis Ford Coppola is getting closer to starting his ambitious next film, an Italian-American family saga.
- Steven Soderbergh has signed on to produce and direct a ten-episode series starring Clive Owen entitled The Knick. Details here. So, now that he's (really not at all) retired, Soderbergh has also launched a web site, Extension 765, where you can buy, among other things, cinephilic t-shirts.
- James Gray has divulged some details regarding his next project, an ambitious sci-fi set entirely in space:
“I want to try and do something specific and rather different, and the intention is to make a film which is almost science fact, and it takes place entirely in space. I had read about NASA trying to find ‘emotionally -- what’s the right word -- undeveloped’ people to travel to Mars, because being cooped up for a year and a half is very difficult. So the idea that I had was to sort of mix a kind of Conrad-ian story, a ‘Heart of Darkness,’ with the idea in which NASA has made a miscalculation about one of its astronauts, who cannot handle deep space. So the idea is a kind of mental breakdown in space, and to do it almost like Apollo footage: incredibly realistic -- so no sound in space, obviously -- and to do it distinguishing itself with the idea that, in a way, human beings need the earth."
Finds.
- Admittedly, these were not films we were particularly fond of in Cannes, but Escalante's Heli featured the choice track above, and below we have a piece by Cliff Martinez from the score for Only God Forgives:
- Julie Maroh has revealed on her blog that she wasn't pleased with Kechiche's approach to the sex scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color, the adaptation of her graphic novel that picked up the Palme d'Or last weekend.
- Still catching up on the flood of Cannes dispatches? Make sure to check out Film Comment's offerings: coverage from Robert Koehler (1 | 2 | 3 | 4), and roundtables conducted by Gavin Smith, one featuring Marco Grosoli, Kent Jones, and Amy Taubin, and another featuring Joumane Chahine, Grosoli, Alexander Horwath, Todd McCarthy, and Jonathan Romney.
- Over at The A.V. Club, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky drops science on Paul W.S. Anderson and his overlooked Soldier.
- From Observations on film art, David Bordwell "On the more or less plausible sneakiness of one Preston Sturges".
From the archives.
- We have a real gem this week, courtesy of Dean Fernando at Cinephilia and Beyond: the entirety of the out-of-print book, The Making of Kubrick's 2001 (Jerome Agel, 1970), scanned for your enjoyment.