Day: September 3, 2011

So the mob is going apeshit over Warrior, and I think it’s just a rousing, brother-against-brother, forgiving-and-healing, emotionally manipulative MMA movie. Rank-and-file festivalgoers are creaming over The Artist…every Telluride viewer I’ve spoken to loves it…and I think it’s just a clever, assured, highly diverting curio — a tribute to the lore of black-and-white silent cinema and the divergent-Hollywood-career plot used by Singin’ in the Rain and A Star Is Born. And women of all shapes and sizes and social classes love The Help, and we all know the name of that tune.

So what am I to do? Do a flip-flop and say I was wrong but now I’ve seen the light? Twist my neck 180 degrees like Linda Blair in The Exorcist and say, “You know what I did? I saw three Best Picture contenders and failed to recognize them as such”?

I don’t think so. I know precisely how good these three films are, and they’re all con jobs. They aren’t Illuminating Truth-Tellers. They aren’t addressing the deep bedrock stuff. They’re all highly accomplished entertainments, but don’t tell me they’re serious Best Picture contenders. None of them dramatize or illuminate some aspect of our common experience all that primally or skillfully or meaningfully. They’re all about their own realms and realities — the racist South of the early ’60s, the movie business in the late 1920s, the secular world of Mixed Martial Arts. You come out the theatre saying, “Well, that was good but it wasn’t about any place I live in…later.”

If they all become Best Picture nominees, fine. If Hollywood Elsewhere gets to run ads supporting these films, great. And if one of them wins….forget it, won’t happen. Or at the very least it shouldn’t.

Here, thanks to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone for sharing a video of the q & a that followed yesterday afternoon’s screening of The Descendants at the Chuck Jones theatre. Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy moderated the stand-up chat session with George Clooney, Shailene Woodley and director-writer Alexander Payne.

And by the way, Sasha’s chuckling improves the video — it makes it feel more natural and technically unpretentious and real-timey.

Glenn Close gives a classic minimalist performance in Albert Nobbs. One defined by a restricted palette and limited moves, but no less expressive for that. The great Kristin Scott Thomas went to this well, of course, in I Loved You For So Long, and the legendary Steve McQueen (the dead one, not the director of Shame) was surely one of the reigning minimalist actors of the 20th Century. So there’s a tradition here, a realm, and Close knows exactly how to operate within it.

Albert Nobbs star Glenn Close — Saturday, 9.3, 9:45 am inside Telluride Mountain Village’s Chuck Jones theatre.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I did a tag-team interview with Close about an hour ago inside the Chuck Jones theatre lobby, and I wish I had the time to describe it in some detail.

I noted the giving-less, showing-more tone of her performance, and asked what the difference was between playing Albert Nobbs on stage in the early ’80s and in the film. Stage acting is always a bit more expressive, but the central current in Nobbs’ character is trauma and repression — a woman who was brutally raped as a youth, who has hidden her identity, who’s constantly fearful of being discovered. So Close played it that way in both formats.

I recorded the chat and will elaborate upon the topics we covered later today or tonight, but you have to bang it out fast and move on when you’re covering a festival. No lounging around and sipping green tea as you carefully sculpt sentences and paragraphs.

I have to catch Werner Herzog‘s Into The Abyss doc at 12 noon…outta here.

Glenn Close and Rodrigo Garcia‘s Albert Nobbs screened last night at Telluride’s Galaxy theatre to, it must be said, a somewhat muted reaction. With the exception, I should add, of Janet McTeer‘s brilliant supporting performance as Hubert, a woman pretending to be a man.

Nobbs came to Telluride with the advance buzz being that Close might be delivering an Oscar-calibre performance. Close is striking, no question — she’s playing a sad, curious inhabitant of a long-ago era in a granular, highly concentrated way — but McTeer’s performance has the dignity, heart and heat.

Close’s Nobbs, a 19th Century Dublin waiter living her life as a male for both economic and emotional reasons, is a very odd bird. Porcelain, cautious, corseted and buttoned-down to a fare-thee-well. And flagrantly asexual. For Nobbs the gender facade is all — hiding who she is an absolute. This obviously renders her as a metaphor for repression, but Nobbs is so primly Victorian that she hasn’t the first clue about anything remotely emotional and/or sensual. She sees marriage as an opportunity for companionship and mutual economic endeavor.

So there’s really nothing in the character to relate to from a 2011 perspective other than the sad fact that she’s some kind of ultimate closet case. It’s not enough to pull and hold you in. Nobbs wants a female wife, but is so uninvested in the universal human longing for love and laughter and whatever else makes your day. She’s interested primarily — only — in security and saving her money and perhaps one day owning a tobacconist shop. More on this later– have to dash up to an interview.

Albert Nobbs is slated for a limited release sometime in December.