Telluride Tagged Articles at Cinematical

You've got to admire a festival that attracts hordes of particularly picky movie fiends with a secret lineup year after year. If you're not aware, Colorado's Telluride Film Festival does things a little differently than the other biggies. Rather than releasing their film list early, and allowing attendees to peruse and ponder the choices, they release it as the fest kicks off, banking on blind faith and great movie taste -- a risk which seems to always pay off.

Telluride runs through Labor Day, and the lineup has finally hit. This year, it's led by John Hillcoat's Proposition follow-up The Road, which Variety just pummeled. Star Viggo Mortensen is being honored with a tribute, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. We've got films that include Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Coco Before Chanel with Audrey Tatou, Todd Solondz's latest -- Life During Wartime, the Red Riding Trilogy (four novels adapted by Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker), Jane Campion's Bright Star, and maybe even Jason Reitman's Up in the Air.

How's that for a festival? It's a nice reminder of the worthy fare that exists between the cracks of mainstream mediocrity. Check out the whole lineup over at indieWIRE.

A few stray thoughts from the end of the festival, hopefully of general interest. I still have one more review in the pipeline, which should come tomorrow afternoon.

- I am even more gung-ho about Slumdog Millionaire than Kim. It sort of ruined the last day and a half of the festival, because I've been unable to think about much else. I want to see it at least a dozen more times, immediately.

- I need to say something about With a Little Help from Myself, François Dupeyron's follow-up to the arthouse hit Monsieur Ibrahim. It's a respectable, low-key drama set in a French housing project, featuring a justly-acclaimed performance by Félicité Wouassi as a woman working to keep her head above water and her family together despite a seemingly infinite number of obstacles. It gets a bit too cute at points -- there's a subplot regarding the protagonist's sex-starved neighbor that is the epitome of "neither here nor there" -- but it's mostly the sort of solid, unpretentious film I greet with open arms at festivals. There's enough buzz about Wouassi that if you live in a city, you'll surely see it at a theater near you sooner rather than later.

Flash of Genius is a conventional crowdpleaser but not, I'm pleased to report, a shameless one. Chronicling the true story of a college professor's fight to reclaim his invention – the intermittent windshield wiper – from the car company that stole it, the film does many of the things you'd expect, but it may also surprise you. Don't let its Telluride placement fool you: this is a staunchly mainstream, unchallenging film, the sort of underdog-vs.-corporate-behemoth story you've seen time and again. But it's a decent rendition, hitting the right notes without insulting our intelligence.

Now, the intermittent windshield wiper is not exactly the light bulb. If you're not familiar with the term, the wiper is "intermittent" in the sense that it can pause between wipes – a problem that apparently puzzled engineers at all the major car companies until Kearns cracked it the late 60s. But part of what's nifty about the film is its ability to create suspense and curiosity around something so seemingly mundane. Kearns' first demo of his device to Ford is exciting in a very goofy way, but exciting nonetheless.

1. People are willing to get out of bed at seven in the morning to watch a movie about people starving themselves to death. I don't care how much people paid to be here: it is simply amazing that the 8:30 am showing of Hunger (which Kim reviewed at Cannes) -- one of the most intensely unpleasant films I've ever seen, with a program description that did that aspect of it justice -- was a near-sellout at Telluride's largest venue. By the time I got to the theater at 8 am on a rainy Sunday morning, I was 259th in line. Everyone keeps saying that what "makes Telluride special" is the enthusiasm and undying cinephilia of the audience (most of whom come back year after year), and nothing epitomizes that attitude better than this morning's Hunger queue.

2. Anyone who fights to save the whales is automatically a hero, no matter his means. Just as it was remarkable to see people line up at the crack of dawn to watch an indescribably painful art film, it was disappointing to see a Telluride audience give an uncritical standing ovation to "eco-pirate" Paul Watson following a screening of Pirate of the Sea, the mediocre, one-sided documentary profiling him. Watson, a Greenpeace dissident who goes out on a boat and tries to sink or sabotage whaling or seal-hunting operations, may well be a hero, but there's no way you could fairly come to that conclusion after watching the hagiographic documentary, which takes Watson's word as gospel, and refuses to explore the troubling implications of his often violent efforts. Another documentary about Watson, called At the Edge of the World, will play Toronto; here's to hoping it's a bit more considered and thoughtful.

Director Ole Christian Madsen began his career as an adherent to Dogme 95, the famous minimalist filmmaking movement began by fellow Danes Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. I haven't seen Madsen's previous two non-Dogme films, Nordkraft and Prague, but the remarkable, ultra-stylized Flame & Citron is about as far from the Dogme aesthetic as you can get and still have a movie. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also one of the most exciting films I've ever seen at Telluride: bold, brave and one of a kind.

Flame & Citron tells the story of two heroes of the Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation, but it is far from your typical World War II period piece. Instead, it plays like some unholy, brilliant marriage between spy noir and comic book movie. Filled to the brim with assassination plots, double-crosses, larger-than-life villains, and big, dramatic gestures, this is not for viewers who like their movies timid and sedate. And under that grand façade, the film grapples with tough moral questions regarding war, occupation, survival, and ideology.

"Flame" and "Citron" are the code names for two Danish assassins who brazenly go after high-profile Danish turncoats and, increasingly, the occupying Germans themselves. ("Do they know what I look like?" asks Flame when he learns of a hefty bounty on his head. The response: "They know you're a redhead.") For them, the necessity of their work is an article of faith: the only moral response to occupation is to kill off the occupiers – and those who assist them – one by one. They take orders from an ornery police solicitor who claims to be in communication with the British. He hands them a name and a photograph, and off they go.

Last year was great for American independent cinema; this year, not so much. The lineup for the 35th annual Telluride Film Festival has been announced, and only two U.S. filmmakers made the cut -- Paul Schrader (Adam Resurrected) and Tim Disney (American Violet). In addition, David Fincher will be there to screen his cut of Zodiac and to accept the festival's Silver Medallion.

According to Michael Jones at Variety's festival blog, the scarcity of U.S. films is simply the result of not very many homegrown films being submitted. Some likely candidates, like Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler and the Coens' Burn After Reading, chose to focus on other festivals. Other contenders, like Revolutionary Road, Milk, and W., aren't done yet. The writers' strike and the big studios' ongoing financial problems with their art house divisions also contributed to the dearth of American product.

It looks like a fantastic foreign lineup, though, with 22 films from 14 different countries. You can see the full list here (and there might be some late additions), but some of the highlights include: Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky (U.K.), Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long (France), Kim Ji-Woon's The Good, the Bad and the Weird (South Korea), and Ari Folman's animated Waltz with Bashir (Israel).

The Telluride fest takes place over Labor Day Weekend every year in the small mountain town in southwestern Colorado. To maintain its reputation as a down-to-earth, unglamorous, it's-all-about-the-movies festival, the organizers don't announce the lineup until the last minute, thus avoiding most of the hype and celebrity-gawking that plagues Sundance. Cinematical's Kim Voynar is there, so watch for her coverage over the weekend.

There's almost always some controversy around the Best Foreign category at the Oscars. This or that film doesn't make it in because of some minutae of the rules, and critics (and sometimes, directors and producers) howl in protest. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the category this year, though, it was a bit different. The loudest howls of protest were not over the films excluded for various obscure rules, but over the exclusion of Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu's Cannes winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (aka, "that Romanian abortion film." )

The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips wrote on his Talking Pictures blog recently (originally posted February 5, and rerun today) about the film's exclusion. Phillips writes that the film was third on his own Top Ten list for the year, saying, "It is a rare film indeed that shows you so much in the way of dire circumstances, yet does not exploit or cheapen the human factor." Phillips talked to Mungiu about the film for this post, and the director has some rather astute things to say about some specific decisions he made with regard to the filmmaking.

(Since Juno is now screening in limited release, we're re-publishing Kim's review of the film from Telluride. We'll also publish a new review of the film when it goes wider later this month.)

I've been waiting to see Juno for a long, long time now. I first heard that Jason Reitman was going to be working with Ellen Page on this film shortly before Sundance this year, and I talked briefly to the young actress about Juno at Sundance. At the time, Page was promoting An American Crime; that film, in which she played Sylvia Likens, a young girl brutally murdered while under the care of a foster family, was emotionally wrenching for Page, and she told me then she was looking forward to taking on some lighter fare with Juno, and especially to working with Reitman, who was still riding the waves of success from his feature debut, Thank You for Smoking.

I was lucky enough to get to see Juno at a jam-packed sneak preview here at Telluride today; it was utterly charming in every possible way, and is getting the most positive buzz I've heard about any film so far at the fest. Page stars as Juno, a smart, quirky, 16-year-old girl who, after a sexual encounter with her best friend, Bleeker (Michael Cera), finds herself pregnant. Right from the start, we know this isn't going to be your average "after-school-special" film about a teenager getting knocked up and facing Big Decisions. Scribe Diablo Cody (aka Brooke Busey-Hunt) sets the tone from the opening scene, with tiny Page chugging a gallon of Sunny Delight while she looks at an abandoned easy chair and tells us, "it all started with a chair." Three pregnancy tests later, Juno accepts that she is, in fact, pregnant, and from there has to decide how to handle it.

One of my dreams for when I'm a millionaire is to spend a year crisscrossing the globe, just traveling from one film festival after another. I've already got the major ones lined up: Sundance in January, South By Southwest in March, Tribeca in April, Cannes in May, Toronto in September; the rest of the slots are still to be determined. I bet if you had unlimited resources, you could literally spend every day of the year at some film festival somewhere.

Well, the helpful folks at Variety have got my back. In Monday's issue, they have an article called 50 Unmissable Film Festivals, and it reads like a wish list for avid film lovers. They list the "Big Five" -- Berlin, Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, and Venice -- right off, then list the rest alphabetically, from Adelaide to Warsaw.

Some of the ones you'd expect to see are on the list. South By Southwest, Telluride, AFI, CineVegas. And then there are others, mostly foreign fests, that I'd never heard of. And I am intrigued!

Camerimage, held in Lodz, Poland, is where "cinematographers are given the rock-star treatment"! What about Courmayeur Noir, at the foot of the Italian Alps, where the focus is mysteries, horror, and suspense films? I've never been to Iran, and can't imagine ever going -- so perhaps my future millionaire self, flanked by dozens of bodyguards, will visit some February for the Fajr Film Fest.

From Guadalajara to Eastern Europe to Seoul to Nantucket (I once knew a man from there!), there's a cool-looking film festival in just about every corner of the world. If you love movies and traveling, check out Variety's list and feel jealous about what you're missing.

I'm home now from the Telluride Film Festival, and we're heading into our massive Toronto coverage, but I wanted to give a quick wrap up of Telluride and those films heading from Telluride up north to the biggest market fest in North America. Telluride is a both a nice predictor of how those films playing both fests are likely to play at Toronto, and a restive break for the filmmakers and publicists before they have to hit the ground running at TIFF. The two fests are polar opposites: Telluride is a relaxing fest where the focus is all on the art of the film, Toronto is much more about the art of making money off those films. From a film journalist's perspective, Telluride is also where you have a chance to meet and chat with filmmakers in an environment that's not, as more than one filmmaker put it to me over Labor Day weekend, the big "dog and pony show" that is Toronto.

Labor Day, the last day of Telluride, is almost all TBAs, which makes it a nice weathervane for which films really played well at the fest. Those films that sold out screenings, that passholders weren't able to get into, will get TBA slots on Monday so everyone gets a shot at seeing them. Good thing too, because, as I've previously discussed, this year there seemed to be an awful lot of passholders who weren't able to get into films they wanted to see, and the poor folks who were just trying to buy tix had it even worse.

I mentioned the other day that the big buzz at Telluride was about Jason Reitman's film Juno, which sneak previewed at Telluride before heading to Toronto. The biggest indicator of Juno being a hit, aside from it being the film everyone was talking about in line, on the gondola, and in the coffee shop, was that it had not one, but two TBA slots on Monday. Sunday's TBA saw over 200 passholders turned away, so it's a good thing they added two more. The first Juno TBA Monday sold out again, and while I wasn't at the Galaxy for the final screening, I'd bet it was pretty packed as well. Good news also for Tamara Jenkins, whose film The Savages, starring Telluride fave Laura Linney (a tributee a couple years ago) and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, sold out the 600-seater The Palm, with (so I hear) well over 200 passholders turned away. Both films will screen at Toronto, so check them out.