34rd Annual Telluride Film Festival 9/1-4/07
“Frederico, why do you never look at rushes?”"I don’t want to know what I’m doing.”
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
It’s Telluride Time again, kids! It was an awesome year, as usual. Every time I go there, I fall a little bit more in love with that town. Too bad I would have to work three jobs to live there. I would never get to enjoy it!
Anyway, there’s usually kind of an unofficial theme to the Festival, but this year I couldn’t really find one. Maybe corpses? Darkness? Just plain depression? I dunno. That’s kind of a theme for ALL film festivals lately.
So, since there’s no real theme, I’ll just give you the reviews in a random order. So here goes:
When the Alexandria Police Orchestra is invited to play in a small town in Israel, things are inevitably going to get a little bit strange. But when they get lost in an even smaller town, comedy ensues.
The leader of the orchestra (Sasson Gabai) tries his best to keep everyone in line and respectable. The townsfolk, headed up by restaurant owner Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), are a little bit resistant to their new guests, but they find out that they have more common ground than they though. Especially loneliness.
All of the characters in this film are great. The three leads (including the brash ladies man) are amazing and very funny. Watch for the scene in the roller rink. Pure gold.
With all of the problems in the Middle East right now, I think more movies like this need to be made. It plays with the notions that one group of people have about another and manages to keep everyone human…even the small side characters. I didn’t really have a lot of interest in seeing this one, but I’m glad I did. It was one of the best ones I saw.
When I found out that Aardman had a film at the Festival, I knew that I had to see it. Everything they touch is gold. I even thought that Flushed Away and Chicken Run were pretty damn funny. I didn’t really expect what I got, though.
The Pearce Sisters are trapped on an island. They fish. They gut the fish. They smoke the fish. They eat the fish. And that’s about it.
Or is it? What happens when a sailor washes up on shore?
Certainly the most adult film Aardman has done yet, this one is NOT for the kiddies. It’s for people who like their animation twisted as all hell with a dash of Texas Chainsaw for good measure. I wouldn’t say it’s one of my favorite films of the Festival, but it’s certainly worth checking out for the fan.
Oh, and it’s not claymation. It’s not even computer generated claymation. It’s completely different from just about anything I’ve seen before. Interesting.
After the twistedness that was The Pearce Sisters, I knew that Cargo 200 had to do something major to be as fucked up. And, MAN, was I right.
The film takes place in 1984 when the Soviet Union was really falling apart. The military was stuck in a war with Afghanistan and were getting their asses kicked. So, of course, they were taking it out on the people.
That’s about all I know about that period of their history, so I’m not really sure that I got all of the references and symbols in the film. The guy who introduced it, Russian scholar Kirill Razlogov, says that it’s the most important film to come out of Russia since Eisenstein. I can’t agree or disagree because of my lack of knowledge of the area, but I can say that it’s one of the darkest films I’ve seen in years. And that includes things like Pan’s Labyrinth.
A young man and his girlfriend are leaving with her best friend in the morning. But the guy decides that he wants to get the friend drunk and see what he can do with her. Unfortunately, he takes her to a little cabin in the woods to get some “good” vodka. He falls down drunk and she gets involved in a rape “relationship” with one of the guys there who turns out to be MUCH more important to Russia than we thought at first.
And things just get more fucked up from there. It involves corpses, senile mothers, war and rape. Lots and lots of rape. In fact, there’s really no end to the raping that this movie does. My friends and I walked out of it thinking that there was no more good in the world.
It’s hard to say that I liked this movie, but it’s also hard to say that I disliked it. In fact, I have no idea how I felt about it. It’s so dark and twisted and just generally fucked up that there’s no way to describe how it was making me feel. I was trying to rationalize all of the exploitation in my head (the older generation was raping the younger, the Communists were forgetting what they were originally setting out to do for their people…), but it was very hard. I need to sit down with someone who really knows the history and get their reaction to it. I do know that it was banned in Russia, so that could really mean something.
As it stands, I would say don’t see this movie ill-prepared for the darkness.
Another year, another Holocaust drama.
I don’t mean to belittle the Holocaust. It was a horrible time in human history that came very close to wiping out an entire race/religion of people. But I have seen so many movies about it now that it seems like the effect of those movies has worn off. It all started, pretty much, with Schindler’s List back in 1993. And I don’t think anything has really topped that one yet.
Stefan Ruzowitzky’s (The Inheritors) film is about a group of Jews who are forced to counterfeit British and American money in order to flood the other countries’ markets and ruin their economy. They are led by Sally (Karl Markovics), the best counterfeiter in the world. He was only caught when he tried to make American dollars. Later, the man who caught him, would be his protector (sort of) in the concentration camp.
It’s a very good movie that kind of comes at the Holocaust from a different angle, but there were so many parallels to Schindler’s List that I couldn’t thoroughly enjoy it without thinking of the earlier movie.
I do actually highly suggest seeing the film. Just don’t go in thinking that you’re going to see something too different.
When critic Edith Kramer introduced this film, she went on and on about how it was her favorite film and how she had tried to get it for her festival for about 15 years with no luck. When Telluride asked her to pick three or our movies, she knew that this was her time. With the help of Criterion, those gods of film, she finally got it and was able to see it on the big screen for the first time…with a slight blip from the mountain electricity that likes to go out occasionally.
Basically, the movie is about a guy (Michel Piccoli) who doesn’t really know what to do with his life. He goes to work, comes home to a sick (but perfect) wife, a semi-hot neighbor and does nothing but fiddle with things in his apartment. Even the people he knows are things to be fiddled with. No one makes a real impression.
He opens up a package with a gun in it. The gun is wrapped in newspapers from the day that Dillinger was killed. He plays with it, takes it apart, goes to a projector, plays some home movies…and that’s what the movie is. Him playing with things. For an hour and a half. Piccoli is very good at this sort of thing, so it’s funny at times. But still, it’s a dude playing with stuff. For an hour and a half.
What’s really strange is that the movie still manages to be very good. I was still interested in what was going on even though nothing WAS going on.
At least that’s the way it seemed. My viewing buddy and I talked about it later and realized that everything is a playtoy with this guy. He just plays with things and people as if they have no real use. The end, which is only a little bit unexpected, is him finally putting something to use.
Marco Ferreri (Blow-Out, Tales Of Ordinary Madness) created a very interesting movie out of pretty much nothing at all. Definitely worth seeing for film buffs. It may really try the patience of your normal, everyday filmgoer.
In 1929, four guys (kids, basically) with virtually no experience got together and decided that they wanted to make a movie. They wanted to make it about real people, using non-actors. And they wanted it to be fun.
Those four guys were Curt Siodmak (writer of The Wolf Man and The Invisible Woman), Robert Siodmak (director of The Killers), Edgar G. Ulmer (writer of The Black Cat, director of Detour and Bluebeard) and Billy Wilder (if you don’t know who he is, get off my site…or at least look him up).
For a first film it’s very good. It is about an asshole cabbie, a womanizing wine salesman, a sweet record salesgirl and a lazy model. The cabbie and the model live together, but when she backs out of their plans with the wine guy, Mr. Cabbie runs off to play with the girls. Of course, he doesn’t get too far because he’s awkward and doofish…and an asshole.
It’s pretty interesting to see Billy Wilder (who is really the only one of the filmmakers that I’m familiar with here) write his first screenplay. Every once in a while you can see the wit shine through that would later become his trademark. It’s not the best film, really, but it’s pretty good. By the time it got to Monday, though (which, to be fair, was only about 10 minutes of the movie), I was ready for it to be over.
When you hear that the offspring of a great actor/director is about to direct a movie, be wary. Be very wary. Occasionally someone really pulls it off (Sophia Coppola), but usually it’s just bad news. I usually give them the benefit of the doubt and check it out.
Enter Alison Eastwood. (We’ll call her The Daughter With No Name.) She has decided to pull in a few favors from her dad’s friends (Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden) and make what basically amounts to, well…a really damn good Lifetime movie.
Tom (Bacon) is a train engineer. It’s his life. He’s even (surprise, surprise) sacrificed his relationship with his wife, Megan (Harden), for trains. When she reveals that the cancer that they thought she had licked was in her bones and she has precious little time left, all he wants to do is try to save her. All she wants to do is live.
That’s when all hell breaks lose. A young woman puts her car in front of Tom’s train in order to commit suicide. She leaves behind an 11 year old boy named Davey ( Miles Heizer, who really steals the show). When he confronts Tom, believing that Tom killed his mom by not acting, something clicks on all three of them. They realize that they all need each other.
Kevin and Marcia were, of course, very good. I don’t think either of them have put in a bad performance in a long, long time. The big surprise was Miles. A lot of times it’s a little it unbelievable when a kid deals with this kind of trauma in a movie. Miles pulled it off like Elijah Wood or Haley Joel Osment. There were at least two scenes where he made me moisten up a little.
This kid is one to watch. He’s the one everyone was talking about after the movie. We’ll see if he does anything with it.
We’ve seen a lot of this before, but Alison managed to make it seem, for the most part, fresh. Her style isn’t too jazzy (just like her dad), but it gets the job done. And, with this kind of movie, it’s all you can ask for.
I would, however, like to put a moratorium on the close-up of the hand waiting for another hand. That just needs to end.
Jellyfish was preceded by this rather long short about a girl, a train, lots and lots of luggage and organ stealers. Oh, and there’s a moth involved, too. Possibly a fairy.
Actually, I’m not entirely sure what this short was about…but it looked freakin’ awesome! The stop motion was amazing. In fact, for a second at the beginning, I forgot that it was stop motion. That’s mostly because the eyes are real. They digitally put actual human eyes onto their puppets and it looks so strange, but beautiful.
It’s hard to recommend this whole-heartedly because it doesn’t make very much sense (although the joke with the chess board almost makes it worth searching for the film). But it is really pretty. Any animation buff should try to check out Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s work. (But I think Maciek should buy a vowel if he wants to hit the big time.)
Weddings are filled with stories. This one is no exception.
The young couple, Michael (Gera Sandler) and Keren (Noa Knoller), try to have a decent honeymoon, but when Keren breaks her ankle at the reception, their plans go out the window. They end up at a shitty hotel near their own beach, changing rooms every night so that she can be happy. Things change when Michael meets a beautiful stranger.
Batiya (Sarah Adler) is a waitress at the wedding. Her boyfriend left her and now she has to deal with a kid that she finds at the shoreline. Where did she come from? Why did she choose Batiya? And where the hell are her parents.
Joy (Ma-Nenita De Latorre) is a Filipino caregiver who is now giving care to a mean ol’ bitty. Her son, meanwhile, is on the other side of the world and wonders why his mommy isn’t home for his birthday.
All of these stories intersect in funny and tragic ways. Director/writer Shira Geffen and co-director/husband, Etgar Keret, had never made a movie before. Shira wrote the script and, after every producer in Israel turned them down, ended up letting her husband do most of the duties.
Personally, I think it worked. It had its surreal moments (moving pictures and lots of boats), but kept its head from getting too far into the clouds. And the tragicomic tone made you feel even more for the characters.
I didn’t start a love affair with this movie, but I did like it a lot. If you get a chance, check it out.
Before Jar City, they showed this short about a guy who always takes things one step too far. It really pisses his girlfriend off. So, he tries to make it up to her with flowers. But things go horribly wrong when he decides that a practical joke is in order.
Absolutely hilarious short that is NOT for the feint of heart. But if you can laugh at other peoples’ pain (especially when they deserve it) see this. I never know how to see shorts unless I’m at a festival, but hopefully this one shows up online or something. Nash Edgerton should go on to do some pretty awesome things.
Baltasar Indridason is not well known in America, but maybe he should be. He seems to be assimilating our favorite types of stories into Icelandic film. First he did it with the slacker movie in Reykjavik 101. Now he’s moved on to a police procedural with his latest. (The Telluride program guide even calls it “CSI Reykjavik.” Which is a bit insulting, really. Jar City has MUCH more depth.)
Erlunder (Ingvar Sigurdsson) is a detective with a VERY strained relationship with his drug-addict daughter. And now he’s called upon to solve the murder of a man who may, in a very strange way, have something to do with the death of a little girl and a 30 year old rape case. Could the corruption go all the way to the top of the police food chain?
At times hard to follow for this American, Jar City is still a very good detective story with strange characters (especially Erlunder’s partners) and enough gore to please even the most die-hard CSI fan. And the pathos goes all the way to the bone. Check it out if you get a chance.
Unfortunately, I had to ask this question when I read the synopsis. Little did I know that he was the titular character in Hitchcock’s Saboteur, worked with Welles onstage, was a great friend and a tennis partner of Chaplin, has been so many well-known movies (including Spellbound (the Hitch movie), Dead Poets’ Society and In Her Shoes) and was a regular on “St. Elsewhere.”
Which begs the question…how has his name escaped notice of all but he most hardcore film scholars?
And, of course, it all kind of boils down to the HUAC trials. (And, by the way, where Hitch made his career, he also saved it later. Was an awesome guy.)
The doc, by Matthew Sussman, isn’t a perfect film. But it gets its point across: know this man, for he IS the history of film. He’s been in the business for 70 years and shows no sign of stopping in his 9th decade. He’s amazing and everyone should know who he is.
Todd Haynes has always been a pretty enigmatic director. He’s done a “woman’s picture” (Far From Heaven), a thinly veiled Citizen Kane version of David Bowie and Iggy Pop (Velvet Goldmine), a story of a woman who is afraid of everything (Safe) and a biopic of Karen Carpenter using Barbie dolls (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story).
Well, chalk up another strange biopic to the man. This time, Bob Dylan is his target and, in the first authorized biopic of the equally enigmatic, self-proclaimed song and dance man, Haynes keeps his strange record clean.
There’s no character in this film called Bob Dylan, but there are Dylan-esque characters that sort of have ties to each other. A young boy (Marcus Carl Franklin from Lakawanna Blues–and he’s awesome…he has all the mannerisms of early Dylan) in 1959 introduces himself as Woody Guthrie and plays guitar and writes songs like no one has ever heard. A country/folk singer (Cate Blanchett–she overplays it a bit, but is very good, as usual) goes electric at the Newport Jazz Festival and sends his fans into a frenzy of hatred. He also goes for the throats of the press. A rebellious folk singer (Christian Bale) is a complete mystery to everyone who talks to him, but he seems to be just as much of a mystery to himself. An actor (Heath Ledger) is called the new James Dean when he plays the rebellious folk singer in a film. He starts to live the rock and roll life style, putting a strain on his family life. And an old man (Richard Gere) who may be an ex-outlaw tries to save the small town that he’s retired to.
All of these people are aspects of Dylan’s personality. The rebel who never wanted anyone to know anything about the real man. The man who saw the injustice in the world, tried to do something about it, but saw the absurdity in it, too. The young man who didn’t know how to handle his fame, so he alienated himself from everyone around him. And the boy who idolized Woody Guthrie so much that he tried to be him.
Doing a biography of Bob Dylan is a tough one. How do you put all of these aspects into one film and yet keep it simple enough to be a film? How do you get to the truth of the many lies Dylan told about his past? And how do you get past the music and find the man behind it?
Simple. You don’t. You tell the story through those personalities AND through the music. There is so much music in this movie that it was hard to keep up with all of it. Some performed by Dylan and some performed by others like Stephen Malkmus of Pavement and Calexico. They did most of the score, made up of Dylan’s music. Malkmus sang for Blanchett.
I really liked this movie a lot. If you know a lot about Dylan, you’ll probably like it, too. If you DON’T know a lot about Dylan, maybe it will make you want to hear more of his music and find out more about him. Good luck on that one. Even his autobiography is a little hard to follow…but it’s very good.
I kept missing this one. It’s one that I wanted to see more than anything else, too. I saw four of five previews for it while I was on my own self-awareness trip and knew that it was perfect timing for this movie to come out.
But it kept alluding me here at the festival.
Until, of course, the last night. I was able to work inside for it since I was one of the few staff members who hadn’t already seen it. And that is why my managers are awesome.
Into The Wild is about Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), a young man who took off from his Atlanta apartment, burned his money (of which he had a lot), got rid of all of his stuff and headed for Alaska.
Ballsy. Stupid, but ballsy.
Why would he burn his money, you ask? Why would he do such a stupid thing? Because he felt more free when he had no money. He changed his name to Alexander Supertramp and wanted to live up to that name, just tramping across the country. Unfortunately, he was completely ill-prepared for it.
He meets some pretty amazing people along the way, including a farm worker named Wayne (Vince Vaughan, who gets most of the preview time), a couple of hippies (Catherine Keener and Brian Kierker) and an old man who just wants to take care of him (the amazing Hal Holbrook–DAMN, it was good seeing him again). As a matter of fact, everyone who meets him just wants to take him under their wing and rescue him. They all know that what he’s doing, while amazing, is kind of stupid.
His parents (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt), however, he demonizes. These people, while they eventually show that they care about Chris, really only use him as a status symbol. They’re SUPPOSED to have kids, so they do. The only person in the family who Chris loves is his sister (Jena Malone). We get the family’s perspective from her narration.
Sean Penn directed this film and managed to make a beautiful story out of what could have just been an annoying adventure story. From what I hear, the book makes Chris/Alex VERY unsympathetic. He’s just a stupid jerk off who couldn’t rub two sticks together to get friction, much less a fire. The film, however, makes him a nice kid who even turns down sex from someone he thinks shouldn’t be having sex with the likes of him.
Really, I think that only Penn could have directed this film. His films before have all been very dirge-like and somber. This one is still pretty somber, but it has moments of levity…which is strange for Sean. But it’s still about a guy who is so rebellious that it hurts. It hurts him and the audience. And, if there’s one director out there whom that description fits, it’s Sean Penn.
This movie is amazing. It’s a story of going out to find yourself and finding out that it’s MUCH harder to find than you ever thought. In fact, it may just be impossible. It was a great way to close the festival and I can’t wait to see what happens around Oscar time. We’ll see.
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
But Into The Wild wasn’t the last movie I saw. I stuck around another day and was able to catch one of the post-festival movies. They show two a night for four nights.
I’m glad I did. The Diving Bell And The Butterfly ended up being one of the best movies I saw this year.
Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric from Munich) was once the editor of Elle magazine. Then he had a stroke and it seemed that his life was over. He contracted what is called “locked-in syndrome.” It means that he is completely paralyzed from head to toe. He can only move one eye. The other eye is completely useless.
Jean-Do, as his friend and family call him, is not a big ball of self-pity. A very sardonic one, but ball nonetheless. Eventually, though, he learns to communicate with his one good eye. It worked well enough that he was able to write the book that this film was based on.
It sounds like a Lifetime movie, but it was a whole lot more than that. Not only was it a very well written “inspirational” story, but it was visually really cool, too. The first part of the movie is from Jean-Do’s point of view: blurry, confused and kinda creepy. He thinks that he’s talking to the doctors, but of course he isn’t. We get information as the Jean-Do does. Not until about 45 minutes in do we get to see Jean-Do in more than a passing reflection.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this movie went pretty far during awards season. Amalric is amazing as both the post-stroke and the flashback Jean-Do. Max von Sydow, who plays Jean-Do’s father, is great, too. But that goes without saying. (The scenes with the two of them are among the best in the film. There is a lot of father-son stuff going on here. The short amount of time that Jean-Do’s son is on screen is just as good.)
If you get a chance, see this movie. I don’t say this about a movie very often, but it’s just beautiful.
That’s all, folks. I didn’t see quite as many features as I usually do, but I got quite a few in. And I got to hang out in an awesome little mountain town.
See ya next year, Telluride!
