Telluride, 9/3.

"[S]urprisingly, the hottest buzz of the fest seems to be all about Juno," reports Kim Voynar, whose own rave appeared just yesterday at Cinematical. Extra screenings are evidently planned. "Other films I'm hearing good buzz about include The Counterfeiters" - and here's her take on this "film about courage and morality" - "and Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn, who is here in Telluride and participated in two panels. The filmmaker, who has a reputation for being a bit surly, must really love the mountain air (or perhaps his mood is up because his film is getting raves), because at both panels he was warm, inviting, funny and penetratingly intelligent."

Updated.

"The popular mini-genre of unwanted pregnancies being taken to term continues with Juno, an ultra-smart-mouthed comedy about a planned adoption that goes weirdly awry," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy, reviewing Jason Reitman's buzz-stirrer. "Given that the girl who gets saddled with child here is a 16-year-old high schooler, played by the conspicuously talented Ellen Page, this zippy item skews younger than either Knocked Up or Waitress... The way the torrents of archly amusing, vocabulary-bending dialogue trip off the tongues of the characters here, you know you're in the hands of some manner of distinctive writer, and she would be Diablo Cody - a young scribe very handy at shotgunning bright teen quips, as well as catching the attitudes of two distinct types of adults."

Also: "Margot at the Wedding is a circus of family neuroses and bad behavior that perhaps a therapist could make sense of better than Noah Baumbach can. Displaying some of the keen insight into the screwed-up minds of East Coast literati the writer-director displayed so winningly in The Squid and the Whale and showing ever-developing instincts as a director, this study of a disastrous reunion of two sisters feels more like a collection of arresting scenes than a fully conceived and developed drama."

JJ on Into the Wild: "About half of the movie is great. The other half is bewildering and/or very unfortunate."

"Aggressively missing from the fest is [Francis Ford] Coppola's Youth Without Youth (festival director Tom Luddy is a Zoetrope veteran), which has decided to forgo any festivals in light of the lambasting the young Ms Coppola took on Marie Antoinette in Cannes last year," notes David Poland in a "Telluride Pre-Wrap Wrap."

Online listening tip. At the SpoutBlog, Paul talks with Stefan Ruzowitzky about The Counterfeiters.

Updates: "'A piano is my house,' said legendary film composer and prolific pianist Michel Legrand in Telluride, where the triple Oscar winner was awarded a 'Telluride Medallion' for his acclaimed lifetime of work in the movies," reports Eugene Hernandez, who's also taken notes for indieWIRE on a panel featuring wanderlust-stricken Werner Herzog, Sean Penn and Jon Krakauer.

More online listening at the SpoutBlog: Elisa Miller, whose short Ver Llover (Watching It Rain) is featured in the Great Expectations program, and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis).

Posted by dwhudson at September 3, 2007 9:33 AM