Telluride 08.

First, a couple of online viewing tips. The Auteurs present a "Tribute to 35 Years of the Telluride Film Festival," featuring, thanks, too, to Criterion, "a rotating selection of feature length films to watch in full screen and for free, as well as an exhibition of clips and trailers for all the films."

Meanwhile, Matt Langdon's been rounding up trailers for this year's offerings.

"While last year the festival showcased I'm Not There, Into the Wild, Juno and Margot at the Wedding, this year there are few to no American breakthroughs expected," reports indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez. "Telluride's highly selective programmers typically screen the latest studio and Indiewood offerings, previewing some of the best autumnal roll outs, but the fact so many new American films didn't make the cut has insiders here anxious that new work in Toronto next week will be mediocre."

Updated through 9/5.

"Ah, the quick to judge are already in full force. The talk of the Telluride Film Festival right now is that the 20-minutes of footage shown from David Fincher's highly-anticipated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is decidedly underwhelming. Or at least that's how some are feeling. Keep in mind it wasn't a straight twenty minutes from the film, but rather various scenes and footage stitched together. At best reactions seem mixed." The Playlist rounds up linkage. The SpoutBlog's Karina Longworth objects: "I'm in Telluride, and I hadn't heard this bad buzz - the handful of people I've spoken to who saw the show reel either last night or this morning had generally positive things to day, aside from some general skepticism as to what the film's reported two and a half hour final cut will look and feel and play like."

More from Karina: "Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, who screened short films at Telluride in 2005 and 2006, brought their debut full-length work to the festival this morning. The 74-minute Helen was preceded by Joy, a 9-minute short featuring some of the same actors, settings and situations, which Lawlor described before the screening as 'a slightly more philosophical primer' for the feature. The filmmaking duo place both works within the context of their Civic Life series, 'community-based' films cast with local non-performers, in which the socio-economic issues relevant to modern England and Ireland are improbably but successfully folded into a pure cinema marked by long traveling takes, atmosphere in place of action, and a notable economy of speech."

Also in the SpoutBlog: Kevin Buist talks with Mike Leigh about Happy-Go-Lucky - more on the film from Ryland Walker Knight - and Paul Moore reviews O'Horten.

"The festival staff of nearly 750 includes 54 Bay Areas residents, amongst them filmmaker Barry Jenkins, whose first feature, Medicine for Melancholy, won the Audience Award at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival last spring," writes Hilary Hart at SF360. "For six years, Jenkins has worked in the trenches at TFF as a 'schlepper,' most recently overseeing the set up and operations of the concessions. This week, he's stocking popcorn, hot dogs and soda, and next week his film plays at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the top ten film festivals in the world. In the last year he's acquired an agent, received numerous awards and signed a distribution agreement with IFC Films, who will release Medicine for Melancholy nationwide in February. But as he said in the Telluride Daily Planet, 'There was no way I wasn't gong to Telluride. I love working (here).'"

Jeffrey Wells is hearing good things about Jeff Goldblum's performance in Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected. Kevin Buist talks with Goldblum about his "Media Diet" at the SpoutBlog.

"Telluride is celebrating a great talent coming out of Kazakhstan this year, Sergei Dvortsevoy," writes Paul Moore in the SpoutBlog. "Although he's here with only his first feature film (which, incidentally, took four years to make), there's a slate of documentaries he's brought that the festival directors tout as 'must sees.'" As for his first narrative feature, Tulpan, winner of the Prize of Un Certain Regard at Cannes this year, "It's not just the performances that are enamoring, it's the sheer starkness of the environment."

"One of the best things about watching a lot of movies for a living is that occasional joyous thrill of sitting in a darkened theater being overwhelmed by a film, and knowing immediately that, without a doubt, you've just seen something that will absolutely end up on your top ten of the year," writes Cinematical's Kim Voynar. "When that film is written and directed by a first-time director, it's even better, because you know you've just been witness to the start of a film career that promises to be something special. French novelist-turned-director Philipe Claudel's much-talked about freshman effort, I've Loved You So Long, which has its North American premiere last night here at Telluride following an award-winning showing at Berlin and a hugely successful run in France, is one of those films."

And Cinematical's gathering its Telluride coverage under one link.

JJ of As Little as Possible has caught American Violet and a remastered 70mm print of Baraka.

Updates, 9/1: Let's start with Karina Longworth's report from a panel at the festival (and thanks for the mention, Karina), "Snip Snip: Are Cutbacks in Film Distribution and Criticism Affecting Quality Filmmaking?": "At Telluride, Annette Insdorf (Columbia University), Michael Barker (Sony Classics), Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), Scott Foundas (LA Weekly), Jonathan Sehring (IFC Films), Paul Schrader (Adam Resurrected) and Anne Thompson (Variety) tackle the question of the day: will both films and film criticism as we know them soon cease to exist?"

Also at the SpoutBlog:

• "Irish filmmaker Cathal Black, known for making movies that fluidly mix fact and fiction, documentary tropes and dramatic technique, has maybe found his ultimate subject in Thomas Lynch," writes Karina. "Lynch, who describes himself in Black's Learning Gravity as 'a father, a husband, an undertaker,' is also a renowned poet and essayist whose writings inspired Alan Ball to create his HBO series, Six Feet Under."

• Also: "This may qualify as hyperbole, but Richard Schickel's You Must Remember This - which premiered at Cannes in May, screened here at Telluride as part of a tribute to Schickel and will debut on PBS in slightly different form this fall - is maybe the most appropriately titled made-for-TV Classical Hollywood documentary directed by a working film critic I've seen this year."

• Kevin Buist talks with Ken Burns about his "Media Diet and with Steve McQueen about Hunger.

"The Telluride Film Festival doesn't have the word 'international' in its title, but considering how few home-grown films are showing at this weekend's gathering, it wouldn't be a bad idea to add some sort of worldly adjective to the festival's official name," writes John Horn in the Los Angeles Times, where he also talks with producer-turned-director Marc Abraham about Flash of Genius.

Anne Thompson on Benjamin Button: "The movie could go either way - toward Oscar season glory or inflated noble failure. That's the risk everyone takes with an all-in bet like this. Certainly there's never been anything like it."

JJ has a quick-paced roundup at As Little as Possible.

"Three Things I Have Learned," from Eugene Novikov in Cinematical.

"Before the film festival started proper the town had already started showing films," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "The evening had in store some nice delirium, an outside screening of Jan Troell's solemn A Frozen Dream (1997) preceded by the unexpected programming choice of three eccentric animated shorts, one deadpan American indie, and an equally dead - this time braindead - movie highlight montage."

More from busy, busy Karina Longworth, who's got notes on The Great Sacrifice, presented at the festival by Slavoj Zizek: "Its maker and its message may have been despicable (and Zizek's post film lecture, summarized below, left no doubt that [Veit] Harlan made the film with Nazi ideals in mind), but there's no question that The Great Sacrifice is a breathtakingly visual film."

Anne Thompson is tracking awards buzz.

Updates, 9/3: To start this round with online viewing tips: Variety's Telluride videos, via Movie City News.

"Toronto has the size and clout to tolerate Telluride because it knows it has by far the bigger profile, and at the end of the day there are more press and camera crews and stars and red carpets and that's the name of the game if you're in the glamour business," writes Jeremy Kay in the Guardian. "Still, I'd still love to hear what the Canadians say about the Coloradoan festival behind closed doors because that whole world premiere business must sting a bit. Good for Telluride."

Flash of Genius is a conventional crowdpleaser but not, I'm pleased to report, a shameless one." Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. Also, a Telluride wrap-up.

"Directors David Fincher and Danny Boyle came to the Telluride Film Festival with very different motivations for their fundamentally dissimilar films," writes John Horn. "But both will leave the festival having accomplished pretty much exactly what they needed to do."

Larry Calloway has a big Telluride wrap-up that continues here.

Updates, 9/5: Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook:

I just realized something about film festivals: maybe I don't want to see the latest film by the hottest director on the block before anyone else, or even that random, obscure gem which will screen once in the dingiest cinema and never again emerge to the public eye, being swallowed up and passed over by armies of timid distributors. No; maybe what I want is simply smart, idiosyncratic individuals picking a slew of movies I either haven't seen, haven't heard of, or had never thought of putting together, for their own nefarious and individual purposes.

Telluride provides the proof: as they do every year, in 2008 they let a guest director program a selection of films, and this year that director was Slavoj Žižek. Spanning the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and regimes fascist, communist, and capitalist, Žižek's selection may have the obvious weight of historical context on its side, but that weight made his selection the punchiest, most vital films in the festival.

For Cinematical's Kim Voynar, Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments is "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."

"Revanche had its North American premiere here at Telluride 2008 and was far and away one of the most exciting new films playing. It's a revenge thriller with cinema purist sensibilities from acclaimed Austrian director, Götz Spielmann," writes Paul Moore at the SpoutBlog. Also, I've Loved You So Long: "It's kind of a rhythm: Smoking, snapping, talking. Smoking, snapping, talking."

Cinematical indexes its coverage.

JJ wraps it up at As Little as Possible.

Posted by dwhudson at August 31, 2008 10:05 AM