Telluride on Labor Day: Salinger, and playing catch-up with TBAs

The town of Telluride
empties considerably on Labor Day Monday, even though the screenings continue,
and the festival’s final event –The Labor Day Picnic- takes place then. Many
film industry people (and to my surprise, many regular festival goers) take off
and head back to the real world outside of this surreal-looking mountain town.
But Monday is actually a perfect day to play catch-up with some of the films
you have heard people talk about throughout the festival, but not had a chance
to fit in your schedule until then. 

Navigating the Telluride program is incredibly tricky. As you get closer to the end point, the number of TBAs noted in the festival booklet grows, and Monday ends up being a day that is entirely made up of TBAs. That said, you can’t plan in advance and determine what you’re seeing each day and trust that you’ll have checked off all your priorities from your list of must-sees when the festival comes to a close. The festival announces all the TBAs the night before. Therefore, you pretty much have to wait until the last minute on any given day to decide on an optimal screening schedule for the next day. Complaining about how many of your “must-sees” are clashing or omitted (e.g., if I had only known they were/weren’t going to screen such and such) is a big part of the fun, as I quickly discovered. And I chipped in with my fair share of complaining.

As soon as Monday’s TBAs were announced late Sunday night, I knew what my schedule was going to be. The 9am sneak screening of Shane Salerno’s Salinger, despite the fact that it’s hitting theatres in just a few days on September 6 via Weinstein Co distribution, was a must-see in its first-ever public screening. John Curran’s Tracks, which screened in Venice and Telluride earlier in the week and got acquired by The Weinstein Co, was also going to be a priority. And the final film was going to be J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, simply because that was the only film (among the ones I hadn’t yet seen) that logically fit my schedule. It’s worth mentioning here that some exceptions aside, I consciously tried to distance myself from many Cannes-hailers that are headed to the 51st New York Film Festival, thinking, if one traveled all that distance, one should try to make a schedule unique to Telluride as much as possible. That said, I purposefully skipped the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska and Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is The Warmest Color (which won the Palme D’or) and saved them for New York.

As expected, the 9am screening of Salinger was packed with a curious crowd. I joined the priority patron line in order to guarantee my seat, and spotted Indiewire’s Eric Kohn, Thompson on Hollywood’s Anne Thompson, The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg, my friend, Awards Daily’s Sasha Stone (whom I caught most of the sneaks with) and Michael Moore. A side note here: Members of the attending press are given four patron tickets each to be used at any screening of their choice. We were all promised a “reveal” at the end of Salinger (which took Twitter by a snark storm just a few weeks ago), and in Telluride, it is important to be one of the first few to discover a secret. Hence, that was going to be a patron ticket, well spent. 

Post-Screening Q&A, moderated by Ken Burns

Salinger did not disappoint as a documentary. Based on the titular book by Shane Salerno and David Shields, which is derived from nearly 200 interviews (and being cross-promoted alongside the film), Salinger meticulously chronicles the life of this legendary, mysterious, larger-than-life and personally unlikeable writer. Witnessing his struggles as a writer who constantly got rejected by The New Yorker in his early career, his relationships with very young and bright women, and his eventual choice to isolate himself from the public, I couldn’t help but think of Howard Hughes (who is also mentioned as a frame of reference in the film), but mostly, Citizen Kane’s unlikeable but ultimately vulnerable Charles Foster Kane. By the end of it, I thought –just for a hot second- that I had just been handed out a piece of the Rosebud sled that ought to have been burnt, and that only I knew about it. In reality, however (and trust me, this is not a spoiler – the news is all over the Internet), the reveal ended up being an announcement of Salinger’s completed but unpublished works, slated to be published between 2015-2020. Some appear very striking. Many will be looking forward to owning all of them. It is useful to put the reveals aside for a second, and think about Salinger purely from a filmmaking standpoint. A perfect blend of archival footage and landmark interviews, Salinger has a convincing and immersive structure that makes you believe in and respect the amount of labor put into the project. It is largely engaging and entertaining. The only hiccup (and a big reason why I can’t give full points to it) is the musical bombast in the end that is completely overbearing and unnecessary (think of the music in Christopher Nolan movies –like Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, and imagine how self-important that would come across in a documentary.) Once the film ended, Sasha and I exchanged thoughts while also tweeting about the film and taking notes during the post-screening Q&A (moderated by Ken Burns). Then she pointed out a woman in the second row who looked like the writer Joyce Maynard (whose relationship with Salinger is one of the long subjects of the film). I briefly thought to myself how ironic it was that Maynard somehow bookended this year’s festival: Reitman’s Labor Day (which I saw on the first day of the festival) is adapted from her book of the same title, and there we were, on Labor Day, discussing a story which she was a big part of. Sasha was quick to notice that Maynard (who saw the film for the first time that day) left the theatre in tears before the Q&A even ended. When we stepped outside, we spotted Anne Thompson –being the great journalist she is- doing an impromptu interview with Maynard, who is apparently “angry that the film does not come down hard enough on Salinger as a serial predator of young girls.” I strongly urge you to read Anne Thompson’s piece here.

Following Salinger, I decided to head to my condo to catch up on some writing, and consequently, I skipped the Labor Day Picnic. Then I caught John Curran’s Tracks as I planned, with Curran and the star Mia Wasikowska in attendance. Adapted from the true story of Robyn Davidson's 1977 journey through the Australian desert towards the Indian Ocean, the existentialist Tracks failed to impress by not reaching its full emotional potential. It’s slow-moving, somewhat cold, and makes you wish it somehow realized the true power of the real story it is adapted from. Made watchable mostly by Mia Wasikowska’s elegant performance, Tracks deserves some attention by being a rare film about an empowered and independent female character who is not defined by her romantic attachments, yet it unfortunately doesn’t go much further than that.

After finally seeing J.C. Chandor’s brilliant All Is Lost (one of the exceptions I made to my Cannes-hailer-headed-to-NY rule) in which Robert Redford tries to survive in the harshest, most unforgiving of conditions and delivers an incredibly nuanced performance (the Oscar buzz you’ve been hearing is much deserved), I called it a festival and headed back to my condo, with a strange sadness that immediately washed over me. Telluride was officially over, and realized I was already looking forward to its next edition.

Thankfully, there were still some friends in town to help ease my gloomy mood. On my final night at the Rockies, I met with my friends Kris Tapley (of HitFix/In Contention) and his lovely wife April. We grabbed drinks, discussed our favorites/disappointments of the festival, and then decided to take the gondola to the top of the mountain one final time in order to do some stargazing. And what a great idea that was.
Too bad the festival directors are adamant about going back to their usual four days in 2014. As a first-timer, it’s impossible for me to imagine this festival a day shorter. With many experiences I couldn’t have fit in even with the extra day (such as the filmmaker tributes and free screenings in the park), what would I subtract? I guess I will find out what one less day means next year. Until then, “To Hell You Ride."

'Butler' returns to win in mixed bag Labor Day weekend

During a quiet Labor Day weekend, The Butler made a splash, becoming the first 2013 release to stay at the top spot for three weekends in a row. The Civil Rights-movement drama starring Forest Whitaker and, of course, Oprah, earned $14.8 million from Friday to Sunday and $20 million

over the four-day period. Its Monday total was enough to push it ahead of One Direction: This Is Us, which earned $15 million over the normal weekend period, and $18 million through Monday. Concert movies have been popular ever since tween singer Miley Cyrus (you know, the star that performed at the VMAs last weekend) took the sleepy Super Bowl weekend by storm and opened Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour to $31 million. Since then, concert movies have been a bit hit-or-miss, with the Jonas Brothers completely bombing their debut, and Katy Perry not doing much better last year. But Sony was quick to point out that the One Direction movie cost just $10 million, making it an inexpensive win for the studio.

A Spanish-language underdog of a movie, Instructions Not Included, made it to fifth place over the long weekend with a total haul of $10 million. It marks the biggest hit yet for Pantelion Films,
the Lionsgate arm devoted to distributing films targeted at Hispanic audiences. The family-focused narrative, a mixture of comedy and heart, wowed audiences, who gave the movie an "A+" in exit polls. Popular Mexican comedian Eugenio Derbez plays a man who takes in his daughter after her birth mother abandons her, then fights to keep her when the mother shows up after they've formed a close bond. In release in just over 300 theatres, it had the best location average of the week, $28,000 per screen.

The car-set thriller Getaway lived up to its 2% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a four-day total of $5.5 million. Still, that was better than the thriller Closed Circuit, which earned $2.5 million over the weekend. Focus Features has used this time slot before for adult thrillers like The American and The Debt, but this opening was markedly worse than those two releases, coming in with just a fraction of the take of those movies' opening weekends.

While the long weekend was poor for new releases, other returning releases posted lower-than-average drops. Blue Jasmine, in its second weekend on over 1,000 screens, had a four-day total of $5.3 million, matching last week's performance day for day. The Grandmaster, which expanded onto over 700 screens, earned $3.1 million, an excellent showing for the martial arts feature.

This Friday will be a light in major releases, with only Riddick opening in over 2,000 theatres.

 

James Franco creates a stir at Venice Film Festival

FJI critic Jon Frosch continues his coverage of the Venice Film Festival, this time reporting on a Judi Dench tearjerker, James Franco-mania, a new-generation Coppola, and a drama about the JFK assassination.  Read his report for France 24 here.

 

40th Telluride Film Festival Weekend Recap: Gravity, Prisoners and other Sneaks...

The weekend in the Rockies was marked by an interesting
trend that has emerged in this year’s festival. If you are the kind of person
who keeps an eye on Twitter for film-related news and musings every now and
then, you would have noticed a number of folks already talking about All Is Lost (lost in sea) and Gravity (lost in space) in some kind of
a thematic togetherness. But the weekend over here has confirmed that this
thematic trend would continue to be the talk of this year’s cinematic stories
under the umbrella of “survival”. Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Eugene
Hernandez posted a very insightful piece about Telluride being marked by extreme
stories of survival, including not only Gravity
and All Is Lost under this theme, but
also (very rightfully so) 12 Years A
Slave (which I talked about in my previous Telluride dispatch). Over at The
New York Times, A. O. Scott similarly hinted towards the same trend (by calling All Is Lost "another movie about the fight for survival in a hostile environment.") So here
we are, slowly heading into the madness of the awards season, with survival in
mind. Seems ironically fitting.

So, what did I see over the weekend? My Saturday was marked by ‘dizzying tension’, as well as survival. Early Saturday morning (8:30
am, to be specific), I started my day with a sneak peek of Prisoners directed by Denis Villeneuve (Incendies), which was a competent if not slightly overwrought
procedural/thriller. While capably maintaining tension throughout, Villeneuve’s
film lost some blood due to a few issues in its script (written by Aaron
Guzikowski), reminding us that it is never good news when characters take
unconvincing steps and make senseless decisions as a convenient means of
furthering the plot. Still, there is a lot to like here. Tension, for one.
Melissa Leo, for two. And most importantly, Roger Deakins’ gorgeous photography
that makes the experience worthwhile. Prisoners
will hit the theaters in just a couple of weeks under a Warner Bros
distribution. You may choose to check it out, or perhaps re-watch a masterpiece
called Zodiac instead that an
ultimately Fincher-esque Prisoners
will inevitably make you think of.

After a brief stopover at the Elks Park to hear a free panel
moderated by Annette Insdorf (Moving Pictures: How is narrative shaped by
evolving visual strategies? What makes a story cinematic?), with the attendance
of Jason Reitman, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Asghar Farhadi; I continued
my Saturday with David Mackenzie’s excellent Starred Up, starring a jaw-dropping Jack O’Connell (whom you might
remember from This Is England and Harry Brown.) Depicting the corruption
within the British prison system through the story of a teenage criminal,
Mackenzie’s accomplishment lies in his unbending honesty and naturalism in
telling the story of another survival struggle. Starred Up is drawing a lot of comparisons to Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, and there is currently some
distribution buzz around it.

In the evening came this year’s hottest ticket, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity in 3D (and along with Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, my favorite of this year’s festival). A dizzying, nauseating and heart-stopping space
adventure, Gravity is very much a tightly choreographed piece of
cinematic dazzle, completely free of excessive flashiness and overwrought
dialogues. For reasons you will understand as soon as you see it, many talk
about Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as a point of reference to this movie. But in
all honesty, it made me think of Ridley Scott’s Alien a lot more –
it was almost impossible to not recall Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney
Weaver) while watching Dr. Ryan Stone (played by a marvelous Sandra Bullock)
embracing all her intuitive instincts in order to survive in this masterpiece
that celebrates the classic adventure genre by slightly turning it over its
head. During the post-screening Q&A in front of an overexcited audience in
the Werner Herzog Theatre, writer/director Alfonso Cuarón (joined by his
co-writer and son Jonás Cuarón) said, “This film was a big act of
miscalculation. That's why it took four-and-a-half years to make.”, jokingly
addressing the challenges of pulling off an overambitious project such as this
one that deceptively looked easier to tackle at first.

Saturday was concluded with a laid-back (and surprisingly
under-attended) Fox Searchlight party over at the New Sheridan Bar. In addition
to prominent journalists and bloggers, the entire 12 Years A Slave team were in attendance (all but Brad Pitt). It
was the right way to end an epic day marked by Gravity; catching up with
friends over a few drinks, and watching the contenders Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong'o dance the night away.

The following day, I was able to fit in Ritesh Batra’s
heart-warming and old-fashioned love story/drama The Lunchbox, which is slated for distribution by Sony Classics. Charged
by humanistic performances by Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur, this little film has
become a darling in the streets of Telluride, producing much enthusiastic word
of mouth. I continued my day with Yuval Adler’s Bethlehem – a powerful drama that navigates the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict through a Palestinian teenager’s troubling life. Following Bethlehem, I had an incredible 30-minute chat with The Past director Asghar Farhadi on his
latest movie and his cinema collectively. I can hardly wait to transcribe our conversation in which he offered generous insights about his narrative choices and cinematic aspirations.

Catching up with Twitter later on alerted
me about the three pieces of news that broke a little earlier that day. First
was The Weinstein Co acquisition of Tracks. The second was Hayao Miyazaki’s
retirement decision (which convinced me to catch his somber and beautiful The Wind Rises at Chuck Jones later that
night.) And the third was, the Weinstein Co Team bringing the Salinger documentary to Telluride
crash-landing in Telluride’s frightening regional airport. Thankfully, no
injuries were reported. Talk about a weekend being marked by stories of
survival...

40th Telluride Film Festival unveils big guns and sneak peeks into its 2nd day....

Here we are, at the start of another thread of fall film
festivals that are officially kicking off the most exciting time of the year
for brand-new movies from renowned and new filmmakers. The opening night of the
70^th Venice Film Festival was just a few days ago, with people
swooning over what looks to be a heart-throbbing Gravity. Toronto will start in just a few days, and the 51^st
edition of the infinitely prestigious New York Film Festival is slated to kick
off on the last Friday of September, just like every year. But there is one fall festival, a very unique one that
stands between Venice and Toronto called Telluride, that has –in a way- stolen
the unofficial spot of Toronto as the kick-starter of the awards season that
stretches through the Oscars. And I am currently at that very festival,
reporting from its 40^th Edition. Celebrating a landmark year with an
added day (5 days instead of their usual 4), the festival directors Julie
Huntsinger, Tom Luddy and Gary Meyer drew attention to not only the highly-anticipated
titles in this year’s line up, but also under-the-radar titles that are waiting
to be discovered such as The Galapagos
Affair: Satan Came to Eden (Daniel Geller, Dayna Goldfine), Fifi Howls from Happiness (Mitra
Farahani), as well as their Guest Directors program, which aims to collaborate
with a variety of participants who help craft a dedicated slate to bring a number
of overlooked films to light. During yesterday’s press-orientation meeting, the
directors noted that their programming and scheduling structure sometimes means
having to make “tough choices” (e.g. today, two sneak previews were scheduled
at the same time; Steve McQueen’s 12
Years A Slave and Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners),
and added that the program tends to reflect the current cinematic landscape as
well as their own tastes, as opposed to a conscious worry to give equal weight
to different trends or countries.

After proudly talking about their brand-new,
state-of-the-art venue named after Werner Herzog, the small number of us in the
press orientation were guided to the gondola to take us to the Chuck Jones
Theater up at Mountain Village, for a “surprise” screening for press and
patrons which ended up being Jason Reitman’s surprisingly untypical Labor Day. The Telluride veteran Reitman
dedicated the movie to his mother, and jokingly warned the audience about the
difficult transition ahead: “You will need to step out of a beautiful town on a
Labor Day weekend, and step into another beautiful town on a Labor Day weekend.
It’s like seeing Gravity. You’ll
somehow get there.” I wouldn’t be exaggerating in saying Labor Day took all of us in Chuck Jones by storm. By the end of it,
there were many tears being wiped, many sighs being exchanged in appreciation
of a somber study of love and family. Labor
Day is very much a departure for Reitman. In what can be labeled as a
“coming of age” story, he is incredibly lyrical, patient and observing. At
times, Labor Day –in a very loose
fashion- made me think of Malick in its lyricism around human nature. And it
has been -very fittingly so- compared to Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World and The
Bridges Of Madison County by In Contention’s Kris Tapley. “It sits with its
characters, measured, patient with them.”, says Tapley in his accurate
comparison. Scheduled to release at the end of this year, Labor Day will surely head into the awards season with a strong
voice, and it will be interesting to witness how its –along with its cast’s- journey
will shape from there on out. Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin are two strong performers, but
the glory also belongs to the newcomer Gattlin Griffith. My only reservation
with the movie is its slightly overblown tease of danger (supported by a
suspenseful score by Rolfe Kent), yet the other side of the same coin would
mean giving Reitman the credit he deserves in keeping the audience on their
toes in this wonderful drama.

During the rest of my first day, I decided to make a stop at
the “Opening Night Feed” briefly, to help myself to some wine and food, and head
out to the Werner Herzog Theatre, to discover Herzog’s 1972 classic Aguirre: Wrath Of God for the first
time. I mean, how often does one get to sit in front of Herzog in a theater
named after Herzog himself, right after he introduces his own film? After this
once-in-a-lifetime experience, I ran over to the other end of the town to check
out Gia Coppola’s (Francis Ford’s granddaughter) confident, soundly observed
debut Palo Alto, adapted from a
collection of short stories by the prolific James Franco.

Today (day 2) started on a very high note, with Asghar
Farhadi’s masterfully crafted The Past,
starring Bérénice Bejo and Tahar Rahim. In yet another complex human drama
where complicated individuals seek truth and justice through their competing
motives, Farhadi, following his masterpiece A
Separation, once again proves his mastery in intricate plotting and using
every inch of physical space to his plotlines’ advantage. During a fascinating
Q&A, he mentioned he actually wrote a sequence of The Past here in Telluride when he was here a couple of years ago
for A Separation (in response to a
question whether the Oscar win had any impact on his career or storytelling).
He also talked about his previous stage work and how handy that expertise is
coming to him in composing his scenes. The stakes don’t feel as high in The Past as they did in A Separation; yet this film is beautiful
in quieter ways and I very much look forward to seeing it one more time in New
York.

After The Past, I
made my way to the Herzog Theatre once again to see Teller’s Tim’s Vermeer (the second Sony Classics
film of the day). After a brief impromptu chitchat with Alejandro González Iñárritu on his
Telluride experience so far in front of the theater (thanks to First Showing’s
Alex Billington for the introduction), I caught this instantly winning film
among an enthusiastic audience. The documentary follows a passionate, obsessive
inventor who sets to prove that Vermeer was using photographic techniques in producing
his work; by building a replica of his studio completely out of scratch to
reproduce one of his classic paintings. Very much an appreciation of the
crossover between arts and sciences –as well as ambitions that make us human- Tim’s Vermeer is likely to play to equally-strong
reactions once it hits the theaters. The screening was off to a bumpy start
with some severe sound issues, but director Teller and the film’s producer Penn
Jillette took the opportunity to entertain the audience while the technical
issues were being resolved. And how great was that… Honestly (as I said to Sony
Classics’ Michael Barker and Tom Bernard in passing later) – they couldn’t have
bought that extra time and used it to the film’s advantage that brilliantly, if
they planned for it.

Later in the day brought out the festival’s REAL big gun:
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, one
of today’s sneak peeks. In attendance in the screening were Steve McQueen, Brad
Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong’o and the magnificent Chiwetel Ejiofor (it
looked like seeing “some” names in attendance here took everyone by surprise.)
And…what a movie this was. Adapted from Solomon Northup’s memoir with the same
title, 12 Years A Slave tells the
story of a free man, kidnapped and sold to slavery in 1840s Washington DC. It
is impossible to not feel shell-shocked after witnessing McQueen’s
unapologetically fixated camera in which he captures extreme brutality to even
further brutal effect. This is an account of history of racism that I don’t
believe to have witnessed in cinema lately. Not simplified, not sugarcoated
(far from it) and to its credit, extremely brave and fittingly raw. It is tough
to predict what an average moviegoer’s reaction will be to McQueen’s
uncompromisingly graphic images and the near-perfect script by John Ridley. Some
will find the movie extreme, I’m sure. It is going to be hard to watch for some.
But it is incredibly necessary, if not crucial, to watch and endure these
images. It is crucial to take them in with all the details delivered by an
excellent ensemble of actors in incredibly demanding, physical performances. As
early as it might be to call winners, I don’t really see a scenario (expect
perhaps for an upset by Robert Redford in All
Is Lost) where the Best Actor title could be stolen from Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Equally stunning are Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong’o; definitely two
other names I’d love to see go far. Movies rarely get much better than this,
dare I say…

One couldn’t really see anything else to follow 12 Years up. Following the screening, I
got to catch up with First Showing’s Alex Billington as well as Awards Daily’s lovely
Sasha Stone and got to hear their takes on the titles they’ve seen thus far. We
even got to chat with Jason Reitman and All Is Lost director JC Chandor for a little while. That’s
the thing about Telluride. Everyone’s here to hang out and be accessible.
Unlike Sundance, it’s an extremely pressure-free environment where you just get
to enjoy the show along with some breathtaking views.

Many other titles and debuts ahead for tomorrow. The hottest
ticket in town will surely be Alfonso Cuarón’s
Gravity. I’m planning on lining up early.

"Girls" co-star Adam Driver enlivens 'Tracks'

Adam Driver, co-star of HBO's "Girls," is the main reason to see John Curran's Tracks, according to FJI critic Jon Frosch, who is reporting from the Venice Film Festival for France 24. Driver has a supporting role as a National Geographic photographer in this tale of a woman (Mia Wasikowska) who trekked 2,000 miles across the Australian desert. Read Jon's latest post here.

Films to look out for at the Venice Film Festival

Most of us can't make it to Italy for the Venice Film Festival, but the good news is that our critic Jon Frosch is reporting on the event for France 24. On the eve of the festival's opening, he highlights the selections on his radar. Those interested in this year's award season should watch for reviews of Parkland, the story of JFK's assassination that will play at the fest. Another upcoming 2013 release, Gravity, will play out of competition (it's also playing at Toronto).  The rest of the lineup includes films from a who's-who of indie directors, including David Gordon Green, Kelly Reichardt, Errol Morris, and Xavier Dolan. Check out his first post here, and circle back as he continues his coverage of the festival.