Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman (Fox Searchlight, 10.17), an audacious, darkly hilarious serving of snap-crackle brilliance and psychological excavation par excellence, blew the roof off the Werner Herzog theatre last night. I was giddy, ecstatic, swooning as I half-stumbled into the night air…so was almost everyone I spoke to about it over the next two or three hours. Okay, not everyone but those who were hungry and adventurous and receptive enough to revel in a work of reaching, swirling genius…pig heaven!
Like I said on Twitter last night, it’s an all-but-guaranteed Oscar nominee in several categories — Best Picture, Best Director (Inarritu), Best Actor (Michael Keaton), Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Edward Norton), Best Supporting Actress (Emma Stone), Best Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki), Best Editing, etc.
Birdman is not just a visual groundbreaker — not actually a single seamless, roving Steadicam shot from start to finish but a wonderful illusion of this. It’s more profoundly a searcher, reacher and a mad leaper of a film with one live-wire, mad-rodent performance after another. Everyone sings and dances and somersaults in this tag-team circus but Keaton is the leader and the daddy. He opens himself up and slices in like a surgeon in an awesome, at times unsettling tour de force. Whether he wins the Best Actor Oscar or not, you can absolutely call him the Comeback Kid.
For the sheer immersive pleasure of it I saw Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan this morning at Mason’s Hall Cinema. Not quite as cool as seeing it all big and wowser at the Salle Debussy last May, but certainly good enough. It’s 2:50 pm now. At 4 pm I’m seeing Robert Kenner‘s Merchants of Doubt at the Nugget. At 6:45 Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman (allegedly a big one) screens at the Werner Herzog. And then a Sony Pictures Classics gathering at La Marmotte; also a Fox Searchlight party at the Sheridan. Three films, two parties, three or four hours of filing time…that’ll do for today.
To my surprise, Morten Tyldum and Graham Moore‘s The Imitation Game (Weinstein Co., 11.21) works quite well. Although mostly a tale about the personal, bureaucratic and old-school morality issues that interfered with and ultimately shut down the beautiful mind of Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing, The Imitation Game nonetheless conveys the melancholy alone-ness and heartache that colored Turing’s personal life, and as such slams a solid triple.
True, it downplays or more accurately nudges aside Turing’s secret life as gay man during World War II and the early ’50s, and in place of this focuses on a close platonic relationship between Turing and Keira Knightley‘s Joan Clarke (obviously a strategy embarked upon to appeal to and engage mainstream straights), but it’s a sharp, well-ordered thing — a movie that knows what it’s doing and how to make it all cook and simmer in just the right way.
I’d been presuming that material this familiar and well covered — the ’86 BBC drama Breaking The Code, the Turing-related (if not Turing-specific) Enigma, a documentary called Codebreaker — might come off as a bit ho-hummish, but this is a classy, handsome show. All the required elements are here. Crisp directorial discipline, Moore’s impressively honed, well-ordered script, Oscar Faura‘s first-rate cinematography, Alexandre Desplat‘s stirring score and particularly Benedict Cumberbatch‘s wholly lived-in, subtly fascinating performance as Turing — a knockout job that will almost certainly land him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
This is a sad but fascinating tale about the lonely fate of an eccentric, exceptional genius-hero, and how 1940s and ’50s Britain gave him grief every step of the way. Over and over the powers-that-be (with the exception of Winston Churchill) and the sense of morality that existed in mid 20th Century England conspired to darken, confine and repress Turing’s life, and I must say that you find yourself wondering after an hour or so if there was anything to his amazing man’s life other than shadows and strife and the oppression of assholes.
I returned an hour ago from tonight’s first-ever Telluride screening of Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater, an entirely honorable, you-are-there absorbing political melodrama — well-honed, believably acted, tightly crafted. Prior to that evening (which began just after 9 pm) a packed Werner Herzog Cinema audience saw Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game, which struck me and everyone I spoke to afterwards as a Best Picture contender; Benedict Cumberbatch‘s performance as Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing will definitely land a Best Actor nomination. The day’s first screening was Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Wild [see below]. It’s 12:30 am and I’m too beat to write anything. I’ll give it another go tomorrow morning from 7 to 9 am before catching a 9:30 am Leviathan screening.
Scrappy, despondent, somewhat resourceful Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) goes on a thousand-mile journey-of-self-discovery hike in Wild , another in a long line of solo survival-in-the-wilderness tales (127 Hours, All Is Lost, Gravity, Tracks). Witherspoon handles herself pretty well. Okay , quite well — it’s one of those “watch me get down and pull out the stops” award-season performances. But the movie…I don’t know, man. It didn’t feel right at first — emphatic, hasty, tonally off in some way — and then it felt moderately okay and then better-than-half-decent in a tapestry-weave sort of way during the last half hour or so. I’m sorry but Wild is…well, some (many?) women will like it. That was my take-away from the Chuck Jones screening that broke around 4:30 or 5 pm. Some women and some guys, I guess (two were weeping during the screening). But smart-ass guys like myself are going to be checking their watches. I think it’s somewhere between (a) an earnest mixed-bag — a hit-and-misser that starts out poorly but gains as it moves along, and (b) a shortfaller. I didn’t hate it. It didn’t annoy me but I didn’t empathize a great deal with Witherspoon’s Strayed. I admire her determination and to some extent her survival skills but much of the film is about her depending on the kindness of strangers, at least a few of whom are nursing fantasies of getting sexual favors. On top of which she’s not the best prepared hiker. (Planning for ways to replenish your water supply helps.). On top of which Reese/Cheryl experiences far too many dream-flashbacks of her late mom, played by Laura Dern. It felt to me like there 30 or 35 Dern flashes. I was starting to go “later” when the 20th appeared. (Written on iPhone while waiting in line outside Werner Herzog theatre to see The Imitation Game.)
I remember darkness from my childhood and teen years. You’d go outside around 9 or 10 pm and you’d either have enough moonlight to make out certain shapes or it would be so dark you could barely see your hand. There were streetlights, of course, but I’ve got myself convinced that they weren’t as bright as they are today. Darkness has been all but presently eradicated in urban and suburban areas. Everything under the stars is lamped up and flooded with glare. But not in Telluride. There’s darkness all over, and it’s wonderful. The moonlight is low right now so it’s even better. The stars are amazing. And the crisp piney aroma and the cool, flirting-with-cold night air (you needed jackets and scarves last night)…this is really a place that’s been excused (or has escaped) from the 21st Century in all the best ways.
This, from my perspective, is an exceptional, quite brilliant trailer. This is it — the mini-version, the bullets, the sex, the snippets, the all of it, the bottles and bottles of vodka, the Phillip Glassyness, the symphonic smack…wow.
You can walk right into a little downtown Telluride store called the Green Room and buy a modest amount of potent weed. Out-of-staters don’t get to buy the same quantity as Colorado residents but so what? This is 21st Century Colorado, and nobody blinks an eye. I haven’t turned on in decades but as a pot smoker in my 20s I almost regarded myself as a kind of outlaw. I completely accepted this identity back then — everyone did. But I still had a few friends who were popped for possession and two or three who were busted for weight and did time.
From the website: “Telluride, Colorado’s leading medical and recreational marijuana dispensary in variety and quality. We are the provider of the finest, most reasonably priced, diverse marijuana medicines and products to serve your medical needs. In addition to our medicine we have a selection of books and artwork to educate and enlighten you.”
The Telluride Film festival is tributing Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now, or rather its 35th anniversary. People forget that it was released on 8.15.79, which by today’s standards would indicate a dump strategy. There’s a big, knock-your-socks-off screening this afternoon (2 pm) at the Werner Herzog theatre, followed by an on-stage discussion between Coppola, cinematographer Vittoria Storaro, co-screenwriter John Milius, editor-sound designer Walter Murch (who was on my Pheonix-to-Durango flight), producer Fred Roos and moderator Scott Foundas. Coppola’s classic will screen again at the Chuck Jones tomorrow morning at 8:30 am.
I would love to attend for the rollicking recall aspect, but the first big screening of Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Wild (un-announced on the schedule) is happening at the same time, and this is a here-and-now creation. At the end of the day I just can’t justify a nostalgia sink-in, as much as I’d like to go there. I’ve seen Apocalypse Now 10 or 12 times, and the Redux version three or four. This is the Telluride heartache factor — there are always three if not four high-interest screenings happening against each other and it’s always a tough call. But you have to go with the new. If I succumb to second thoughts I can always catch Apocalypse tomorrow morning.
I arrived in Telluride around 6:15 pm. The rental (three stories if you count the converted basement) is at 548 West Pacific, or rather the alley (i.e., almost a street) behind that address. I went for groceries, roamed around, said hello to Leslee Dart, Baz Bamigboye and Peggy Siegal in front of the Sheridan Hotel, etc. Just the usual setting-up, getting-ready, breathing-in-the-thin-mountain-air stuff. Eugene Hernandez and pallies are having some sort of gathering over at the Sheridan right now (i.e., 10:15 pm). Friday morning, 6:50 am: A sizable assembly at the Sheridan last night. Life Itself director Steve James, Ryan Werner, Sony Pictures Classics Michael Barker and Tom Bernard (all hail Leviathan!), Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Eugene Hernandez, James Rocchi (jacket-less due to United having misplaced his luggage), In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. Shots of tequila, gang’s all here. I stayed for about an hour. Flopped at 12:30, awoke at 5:30.
