Chris Beck

Christophe Beck, who won an Emmy scoring Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has reworked Henry Mancini’s legendary Pink Panther score for the remake of the film. Jon Burlingame talks to him about how he approached "honor[ing] Mancini’s music, while adapting it for audiences more accustomed to hip-hop grooves than to its lightly jazzy lounge sound."

Manohla Dargis talks to the great Jonas Mekas, a New York film-world fixture for over 40 years, as he journeys to Venice to represent Lithuania in the Biennale. In Europe, he says, "I’m like a pop star. In France, teenagers run after me ... But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!"

Four biographies about the guy at the center of Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man have been published in the last four months. Does anyone care? Hayao Miyazaki, "the world’s greatest living animated-filmmaker", makes work that obstinately refuses to compete on the Pixar playing field of hyper three-dimensionality. "We’re making a mystery here," he tells Tony Scott. "so make it mysterious." Meanwhile, animation has apparently advanced to the point where kids can’t tell real penguins from fake ones. It has "sweaty, illicit and brain-fogging sex; furtive hotel room trysts; tussles in boardrooms and darkened apartments; and searing emotions." Sounds like a pretty great Tuesday night. Rona Jaffe’s 1958 bestseller The Best of Everything, and the Joan Crawford film of the same name, are both getting reissued. Scott Bakula alert! The Quantum Leaper hangs out with Mod Squad star Peggy Lipton; margaritas are drunk and pool balls are sunk, and by the end of the night there’s a blonde without a shoe.