Reason No. 1 why I wish I were going to Cannes this year

Restored prints of Ted Kotcheff's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Hal Ashby's The Last Detail, Billy Wilder's Fedora, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra (which, I confess, I've never seen in its entirety), Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, René Clément's Purple Noon (a.k.a. Plein Soliel), Buster Keaton's The General, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds...

Delights without end!

The only drawback: I might have a difficult time explaining to any editor who picked up my tab why I didn't have time to see many new movies at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

Blast from the past: Sydney Pollack talks about Sabrina (1995)

As I noted in my original review, Sydney Pollack demonstrated in his 1995 remake of Billy Wilder's Sabrina that "after three decades in the director's chair, he remains Hollywood's most accomplished master of the grand romantic gesture. Just as important, he proves that he can make the very kind of movie that everyone says that nobody is making anymore. Sabrina is Hollywood classicism at its most luxuriantly enjoyable..." Granted: This was, and is, a minority opinion. But as I look at the above video of my 1995 interview with the late filmmaker, I'm reminded again that no other director has ever managed to make Harrison Ford appear so emotionally vulnerable on screen. And it sort of makes you wonder what other kinds of roles Ford might have attempted during the past decade or so had Pollack's Sabrina not been a box-office under-achiever. BTW: While you watch, please remember that this conversation was recorded at a time when Billy Wilder still was very much alive. And, yes, fully capable of teasing Pollack about possible remakes of Pollack's own movies.

First impressions

Jake Paltrow gets the stars to confess: Leonardo DiCaprio was moved to tears by King Kong. Penelope Cruz loved Billy Wilder. And Cate Blanchett was scared witless by Basil Rathbone in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

What if they opened a movie and nobody came?

As Samuel Goldwyn famously noted: "If people don't want to go see a movie, there's nothing you can do to stop them." Want proof? From Greenbriar Picture Shows, the story of how nothing -- not even a post-release title change -- could help a classic Billy Wilder film draw audiences into theaters. (Hat-tip to GreenCine Daily.)

The state of cinema

David Denby writes in The New Yorker: "In the past, commercially successful artists like Alfred Hitchcock, Preston Sturges, George Cukor, John Ford, and Billy Wilder would have been astonished if anyone had told them that they could succeed with only slivers of the audience. They thought they were working for everybody, and often they were. Today, with a few exceptions like Ang Lee, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Eastwood (and not necessarily with all their movies), the artistically ambitious director who is considered to have universal or even widespread appeal is an endangered species. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that directors are working for an audience more diverse than the audience of fifty or sixty years ago. The most important reason, however, is that, by splitting the audience into a spectacle-and-comedy, opening-weekend crowd and a specialty-division urban élite, the studios have given up the old dream of movies as an art form for everyone."

And mind you, according to Denby, that isn't the worst of it