I’ve just come out of Angelina Jolie’s latest innocents-being-tortured film, called First They Killed My Father.  I saw it this afternoon at the Chuck Jones. Yes, totalitarian brutality is very bad. But it’s also kinda bad when all you do is bludgeon your audience with depictions of same, over and over and over and over.

I know about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (’75 thru ’79) .  I know about the killing fields and I’ve seen Roland Joffe‘s excellent, same-titled 1984 film.  Is it okay to depict the same horrors in a 2017 film?  Sure.  Is it good to expose younger audiences to this horrific genocide? Certainly.  

But I had a very bad time with it, basically because of the lack of a decent story, which I define as one that builds and pivots and is about more than just stuff happening.  “A family and their youngest  daughter in particular went through absolute hell” is not a story.  

I found Jolie’s film deeply boring. I wanted to escape but like those captured and forced  into hard labor by the Khmer Rouge, I couldn’t. 

Jolie has a thing about brutality visited upon innocents.   In The Land of Blood & Honey — Serbs brutalizing Bosnian Muslims.  Unbroken — Japanese soldiers brutalizing American POWS. And now First They Killed My Father — the fanatical Khmer Rouge brutalizing and murdering two million Cambodians in agrarian work camps.

Willful, systemic brutality and cruelty, in and of themselves, are not engaging or stirring or even interesting. Savagery abounds in this sad world, but mere depiction isn’t enough.

No thanks.  Not for me.  To each his own.

Christian Bale was a topic of concerned chatter when he showed up at yesterday’s Telluride brunch with all of that American Hustle weight back on again, minus the goatee and the combover. Dressed in black T-shirt, black baggy shorts and black sneakers, tennis ball-length crew cut, hanging with a small kid. He’s bulked up  to play Dick Cheney in Adam McKay’s untitled Dick Cheney movie, which costars Steve Carell and Amy Adams. Bale will attend a Tellurude party tomorrow night for Scott Cooper‘s Hostiles.

I was in such an anxious, cranked-up state as I finished posting around 12:20 pm that I just grabbed my stuff and sped (i.e., speed-marched) over to the Palm for the 1 pm screening of Battle of the Sexes. What’s that? The 1 pm screening of Battle of the Sexes wasn’t at the Palm but the Galaxy, which is four blocks to the east? Yeah, I finally figured that out when Natalie Portman and two other guys took the stage just before the film began. “What does Portman have to do with Battle of the Sexes?” I was muttering to myself. I re-checked the program…fuck. I was at a 1:15 pm screening of Eating Animals. I leapt out of my seat and literally ran over to the Galaxy, but no dice. Battle of the Sexes had been playing for 20, 25 minutes, and every last seat was taken. Now I’ll have to catch it Sunday night.  I do stuff like this from time to time. I’m trying to be relaxed about this bonehead move, but it’s not working.

There’s nothing like a good Telluride deadline panic. It pushes you to the limit, makes you breathe and walk faster, cleans out the blood, cranks up the heartrate. Later…

Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour, which I haven’t time to write about because a 1 pm Battle of the Sexes screening is breathing down my beck, is partly a celebration of the fighting spirit of Winston Churchill (winningly played by Gary Oldman in a colorful, right-down-the -middle, straight-over-the-plate performance) and partly a political drama about the wavering discord and uncertainty that gripped the British leadership in the early days of Churchill’s first term as prime minister.

It’s basically the governmental deliberation side of Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, or the handling of that disaster and matters of backbone and patriotism and never-say-die in May and early June of 1940.  

It feels familiar and well-trod (how could it not be given all the recent Churchill portrayals?) but rousingly straightforward. It’s a stirringly square, well-handled audience movie. The easily impressed were cheering and clucking when yesterday afternoon’s Palm screening ended.

Will Oldman’s flamboyantly twitchy performance result in a Best Actor nomination? You betcha, but honestly? He’s given the kind of classically actor-ish, heavily-made-up turn that could have been performed 30 or 50 or even 70 years ago. There will be no ignoring Oldman’s work here, but it’s not wedded to the present-day zeigeist. It’s a golden-oldie performance, albeit delivered fresh and new with plenty of zing and punch.  Nothing wrong with that.

And that’s all I can write for now as I have to leave for the Galaxy theatre to get in line, etc. I’ll try to fill in later.

As one who was nearly euphoric about that ten-minute clip from Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing that I saw five months ago at Cinemacon, it breaks my heart and drains my soul to report that this portion of Payne’s film is far and away the most engaging, and that the rest of it is…well, certainly original and fascinating and intriguing as far as it goes. But the film as a whole doesn’t score on a jackpot level.

Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22) came into Telluride like Leo the lion, fed by those high aggregate review scores out of the Venice Film Festival and those highly admiring reviews from Todd McCarthy and Owen Gleiberman, but things quickly turned quiet and gulpy after yesterday’s 2 pm screening at the Chuck Jones theatre. 

Right now I would call Downsizing a respected lamb that no one I’ve spoken to, and I mean no one, is truly over-the-moon about. Except for Todd McCarthy, I mean.  1:05 pm update:  An older woman I just spoke to in line called it “embarrassing.”  That’s too harsh!  What it does is under-deliver.

Everyone knows the boilerplate. A futuristic setting and a dazzling, astonishing scientific discovery from Norwegian scientists that allows humans to reduce themselves to five inches tall. In so doing small volunteers live much more luxuriously and lavishly (their financial holdings are worth much more) while hundreds of thousands if not millions of carbon footprints are sharply reduced, and a far healthier environment results. Or so it seems at first.

The story is about shlumpy physical therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his shallow wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) deciding to get small and live lavishly inside a downsized tiny town. A controlled environment inside a plastic dome, safe from birds and cats and other predators.

The truth is that Downsizing starts off like a house on fire (loving it! yes! so great! Christoph Waltz is a hoot!) and then it starts to droop around the 40-minute mark, and then it really droops and sags when the movie moves to Norway. (No, I’m not going to explain what means, just that the film goes there during the final act. Read the McCarthy and Gleiberman reviews if you want specifics.)

I wanted a whipsmart social satire mixed with a sci-fi adventure about the exotic thrill of suddenly (and somewhat depressingly) being five inches tall and all that would entail, but what I got after the first act ended was a somewhat mopey, down-spirited love story between Damon and a spirited, peg-legged, often-hard-to-understand Vietnamese woman (Hong Chau) living in hand-to-mouth fashion and coping with total methane ruination of the planet.

I didn’t want a “love fuck” or a “pity fuck” (lines from the actual film) — I wanted a satirically funny excitement fuck, and that wasn’t what Payne was into when he wrote and directed.

I am not, however, “panning” Downsizing. It’s definitely a major, highly original, award-season release that everyone will have to see. It will be a huge topic of conversation during the late fall and holiday period. I am in no way saying “don’t see this” or “wait for streaming” or anything along those lines. 

Downsizing is smartly written, well acted, conceptually daring and dynamic and certainly an awesome technical achievement. It starts out as a kind of grandly visionary Preston Sturges-level social satire, then it downshifts into an occasionally amusing but sad-sacky relationship film, and then it turns soft and sappy and drearily humanistic in the final act. I never said to myself “I’m not admiring this” or “this is boring” — it’s definitely a first-rate film, and I’m very glad that Payne finally got it made — but I couldn’t get high off it. I tried but it wouldn’t let me.