TellurideFilmFestival Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Once the novelty of the first-person, subjective-camera horror flicks (Blair Witch, Cloverfield, Quarantine, Diary of the Dead, etc,) wore off for me, I started having logistical issues with the genre. After a while, you can't help but start paying attention to the inherent implausibility of the characters as persistent, skilled camerapeople who keep rolling when any reasonable person would have ditched the damn camcorder long ago. That may seem insanely picky, but it's what happens when the same flawed device is foisted on me time and again.

I had some of the same objections to Paranormal Activity, which screened at Telluride in advance of a planned release by Paramount, and nearly two years after it first premiered at Screamfest in Los Angeles. But the movie is so skillful in every other way -- and so much fun -- that I essentially told myself to shut the hell up. Oren Peli's feature debut, the story of a woman haunted by a relentless and malevolent demon, is a terrific companion piece to this year's Drag Me to Hell, with Sam Raimi's old-fashioned horror chops replaced by the masterful execution of a conceptual gimmick.

Over the weekend, Jason Reitman's Up in the Air premiered at the Telluride Film Festival to some very positive reactions (Cinematical's review upcoming), with some -- like indieWIRE's Anne Thompson -- already talking Oscar buzz. Now, as the film prepares to head on over to the Toronto International Film Festival, the first clip has arrived online over at Apple in advance of the first trailer. Watch it here.

In the film, which is loosely based on Walter Kirn's novel, George Clooney plays a corporate downsizing expert whose job it is to travel around to different companies to determine who needs to be terminated. However, his own job soon becomes threatened as he closes in on his goal of 10 million frequent flier miles, while at the same time meeting the female equivalent of himself (played by Vera Farmiga). In the scene over on Apple, Clooney and Farmiga meet for the first time in what looks to be an frequent fliers club, where they try to one-up each other with their extensive frequent flier card collection.

Up in the Air will hit theaters on December 4.

Just before the kid was born, the world burned. We don't know why, and the characters don't talk about it -- perhaps they don't quite know themselves, or maybe they've decided that it no longer matters. The Boy's universe is grey, full of ash, dust, and the ruins of a civilization he never saw. This is all he knows. His mother, seeing no point in going on, killed herself shortly after his birth. She was not alone. Many of those who didn't take their own lives were soon murdered by the desperate and hungry.

Skip ahead nine or ten years. The kid and his father wander the barren roadways heading south toward the coast for no clear reason other than that it gives them a tangible goal toward which to strive. (And there's always the hope that the ocean will be something other than gray.) Every day is a knock-down, drag-out fight for survival. They run, hide, starve, and fight off attackers who want their food, or their clothes, or, at one point, their flesh.

I set the stage like this not to horrify you or to gross you out, but to give you a sense of the relentless, pervasive grimness of The Road -- and then to turn around and say that The Road may be the most profoundly optimistic and life-affirming film you will see this year. Those who have read Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name won't be surprised by this. John Hillcoat's faithful, near-perfect adaptation beautifully captures McCarthy's synthesis of all-encompassing darkness and enduring hope.

If you've ever been to a film festival, you know the age-old dilemma: do I opt for early sneaks of high-profile releases that will roll out all over the country in a few months, or do I try to catch the obscurities that I may never see again? For me, this choice is frequently dictated by reviewing obligations, but even when it is not, I tend to opt for the former, as I am both impatient and -- sadly -- skeptical of the unfamiliar. I don't know what happened to me at Telluride this year, but for some reason I decided to commit to a trilogy of films made for British television at the expense of several higher-profile options that I will now have to see when they hit theaters later this fall.

Let this be a lesson to you. Red Riding -- the trilogy to which I'm referring -- is, collectively, the greatest thing I've seen since I discovered the first season of Twin Peaks on DVD. Granted, featuring actors like Peter Mullan, Andrew Garfield, David Morrissey, Paddy Considine and Mark Addy, and directed by name-brand filmmakers Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker, this isn't some ultra-independent obscurity. But man, am I grateful for the Telluride powers-that-be for bringing it here, and for whatever possessed me to check out the first one on Saturday morning.

You may know Michael Haneke as the fiery, audience-disdaining provocateur of Funny Games – the subtitled original or the American shot-by-shot remake, no matter. And if so, you may understandably want to steer clear of further efforts by the filmmaker. After all, most sane people don't go to the movies to spend two hours getting yelled at by a crazy Austrian. Even Caché, which I actually thought was quite good, could feel awfully haughty -- like it was somehow above having a plot that's comprehensible on a literal level, without having to stretch for abstract explanations and metaphors.

The White Ribbon, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, has been described – and, in some circles, condemned – as a "departure" for Haneke. That's true. Though the film's dogged austerity and formal precision will be familiar to cinephiles, The White Ribbon features an honest-to-goodness story, one that works on its own terms and as a typically cynical allegory. Armed with a plot, Haneke's talents and style prove richly rewarding. This is one of the year's best films: a tense, foreboding creeper with devastating insight into human nature and why ordinary people sometimes do (or acquiesce to) some very bad things.

In spite of the writer's strike keeping several larger films that otherwise would have been on the Telluride slate out of this year's fest, and the absence of Cannes Palm d'or winner The Class, which many had hoped to see here (that film is opening the upcoming New York Film Festival, and so was unable to play at Telluride), the 35th Telluride Film Festival was a solid success.

The fest scored sneak previews of Danny Boyle's hotly anticipated Slumdog Millionaire, which was very well received by audiences, and gave North American premieres to some films that you'll likely be hearing about come Oscar time, including I've Loved You So Long, Flame and Citron, and Adam Resurrected, and Everlasting Moments.

The Telluride Film Festival has wrapped up and we're gearing up for our non-stop coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, which starts tomorrow. Just in case you missed any of our coverage from the Telluride Film Festival, here's a roundup of what we saw there. Most of these films will also be playing at Toronto as well; if you attended Telluride or are going to TIFF, be sure to let us know which films you love or hate -- we always enjoy hearing what our smart Cinematical cinephiles think about the films they catch at fests.

Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle): Fans of director Danny Boyle's work will find much to appreciate in his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, a sweeping, hopeful story about a boy in the slums of India who becomes an instant celebrity after he wins millions on India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? ... read more

Adam Resurrected, adapted by Noah Stollum Stollman from the book of the same name by Yoram Kaniuk and directed by Paul Schrader, is a darkly abstract and haunting film featuring Jeff Goldblum in his finest, most layered performance ever. Goldblum portrays Adam Steiner, a tragic clown shattered by the horrors of the Holocaust. A clown and ringleader of his own highly successful circus act in pre-War Berlin, Adam finds himself, his wife, and their two young daughters caught in the roundup of Jews. Ironically, his audience was once full of soldiers in Nazi uniforms; now the very people Adam spent his life making happy are just as happy to see him and his family exterminated.

Adam in the present is a prisoner of his memories of those terrible years, and now resident ringleader of a fictional asylum for Holocaust survivors in the Israeli desert. He's a man with a fractured soul, and as a result of his unrelenting anguish and guilt, he astounds the doctors in charge of the asylum by the ability of his mind to make his body bleed and even grow malignant tumors as he repeatedly dies and is reborn.

For the cinephile, discovering a new film by famed Swedish director Jan Troell (one of this year's Telluride tributees) is a lot like eating a perfectly made truffle after a lifetime of mass-produced candy bars. His latest effort, Everlasting Moments, was like that for me; it's that rare cinematic experience that you settle back, bite into, and then savor as the subtle richness of the film cleanses the palate and fills the soul.

Based on the real-life story of Troell's wife's grandmother, the film takes us through the life of Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen, in a remarkable performance), a belabored mother of a large brood in the early days of the 20th century who finds renewed passion and intellectual independence through a Contessa camera she wins in a lottery. The camera sits for many years unused until one day, Maria takes it into the shop of the local photographer, Sebastien Pederson (Jesper Christensen), to sell it to help pay the rent.

The kindly Pederson shows Maria how to use the camera, and once she starts using it, she begins to see the world through a whole new lens. Finding herself unable to resist continuing to learn and improve her eye as a photographer, Maria becomes obsessed with capturing the little moments of life around her through the miraculous ability to capture living moments in still images.

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.