A warm and relaxing time was enjoyed by all at Universal’s First Man gathering at the Sheridan Bar (6:30 to 9:30 pm). The usual journalistic suspects (myself, Pete Hammond, Sasha Stone, Chris Willman), Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling plus director Damien Chazelle, First Man costar Olivia Hamilton, screenwriter Josh Singer, producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, et. al. Delicious food and desserts in the rear salon, lotsa joshin’ and good cheer. Everyone got a good laugh out of the First Man ubiquitous flags tweet [below] that appeared early this morning.

(l. to r.) First Man screenwriter Josh Singer (also winner of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Spotlight), producer Frank Marshall (also celebrating The Other Side of the Wind) and wife-producer Kathy Kennedy, director Damian Chazelle, producer Sid Ganis and wife Nancy Hult Ganis.

I’ve just come out of a late-afternoon screening of Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased, and it’s quite good all around — palpable story tension, dramatically satisfying, superb performance by Lucas Hedges, taut script, emotionally affecting, much better than The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Thumbs up, big applause when it ended, good job by all.

The only slightly jarring element (for me, and I say this with discomfort) is Russell Crowe‘s resemblance to Gerard Depardieu, William Howard Taft, Orson Welles and Andy Devine.

But slightly more impressive was Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Fox Searchlight, 10.19), a real-life Manhattan drama about alcoholism, desperation and forgery that really delivers the goods. We’re talking Best Picture material here. Melissa McCarthy grand-slams as late journalist-author Lee Israel, dealing totally straight cards with zero laugh lines — her greatest performance ever (the highlight is a court scene in which she confesses her sins) and a guaranteed slam dunk for a Best Actress nomination with an almost-as-likely Best Supporting Actor nomination for costar Richard Grant.

HE reader on Colorado Avenue: “How do you feel?” Me: “Fast and loose, man.” HE reader: “In the gut, I mean.” Me: “I feel tight but good.” [Bonus points to anyone identifying what film this dialogue is from.]

Roma maestro Alfonso Cuaron, Boy Erased director-writer Joel Edgerton in Herzog theatre lobby, prior to this afternoon’s Erased screening.

White Boy Rick producer John Lesher. I told John that it takes character and cojones to wear a cowboy hat.

Legendary director Werner Herzog, Alfonso Cuaron prior to Boy Erased screening.

Following this afternoon’s Palm screening of Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me, Melissa McCarthy and Richard Grant kicking things around.

I’m going to hit three Telluride films and one party today — Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me at 1 pm, Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased at 4:15 pm, a 20th Century Fox soiree for First Man at the Sheridan Bar, and Ralph Fiennes‘ The White Crow at 7 pm. That should fill the day up. Tomorrow’s slate includes a 9 am screening of The Other Side of the Wind, and then Olivier Assayas‘ Non-Fiction at 1 pm, and then we’ll see after that.

The White Crow director & costar Ralph Fiennes, first-time-actor Oleg Ivenko (who portrays the legendary Rudolf Nureyev) during last night’s Sony Picture Classics dinner at La Marmotte. Pic was written by David Hare.

I was hoping that Rob Garver‘s What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, which I saw three nights ago, would deliver some degree of enjoyment. It’s much better than that. I found it wonderfully alive and attuned, electric, bracingly intelligent, well-honed and about as spot-on as a doc of this sort can be. If you’ve any passion for film or particularly the glory days of personal-vision American cinema (late ’40s to early ’80s), this is essential viewing and a whole lot of fun to sit through.

Filmed four years ago, Garver provides a rush of immense comfort and stimulation with perfectly timed, just-right film clips and talking-head dialogue to explain and depict what was going on in the legendary critic’s life and head over a half-century period. The effect, for me, is ecstatic. Razor sharp and smooth as silk and yet always with a drill bit…it goes right into the whole novelistic tumult and miasma of that wonderful period in film criticism (’60s to early ’80s)…making sense of it, cleaning it up and making it all perfectly understood.

Here’s an excellent review from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy.

And here are quotes that I typed as I watched it on my Macbook Pro:

Kael: “The world is divided between the people who get deep pleasure from doing a good job, and those who are just trying to get through the day. There are a great many critics who belong to the latter category, who are scared of their readers, scared of their editors, scared of the movie companies and with some justification, but are never good enough to conquer their fears. The point would be really to try and strengthen your own writing style and develop some more courage, because then you’re in a better position.”

Quentin Tarantino: “The way Pauline described Band of Outsiders…she said it was as if a bunch of movie-mad young French boys had taken a banal American crime novel, and translated the poetry they had read between the lines…that is my aesthetic! Right there! That’s what I hope I can do.”

David Edelstein: “I disagree violently with that term…I am not a Paulette.…I am a Paulinista…I have learned from her approach and applied it in my own way.”

Kael: “Every good critic is a propagandist…there’s no other way to play the game.”

Observation: “Pauline was a west coast girl, and somewhat lacking in deference to authority. What she couldn’t achieve in art, she was able to achieve in movie reviews…she said I want to loosen my style, to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we all learn at college…I wanted sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice. [Before Pauline] New Yorker readers were used to this rather genteel rolling prose. Pauline didn’t believe in categories…she was very much against snobbish art-house cinema…she embraced popular cinema…only bad critics impose an academic formula…what Pauline Kael called the gentlemen critics…she wrote like someone who had bought a ticket and found a seat and watched it with a crowd.”

Early last evening I saw Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favorite (Fox Searchlight, 11.23), and came away mostly pleased. All the things it’s been praised for so far — the comic perversity, All About Eve by way of Peter Greenaway, Dangerous Liaisons and Barry Lyndon lite, amusingly brittle performances (Rachel Weiss, Emma Stone, HE’s own Olivia Colman), the scabrous humor, Robbie Ryan‘s handsome cinematography — are there in abundance. I mostly had no beefs.

Lanthimos hasn’t backed away from his generally perverse sensibility, but The Favourite is certainly his most accessible, audience-friendly film.

Colman (whose performance in Tyrannosaur was so worshipped by this columnist that I raised money to pay for press screenings that Strand Releasing wouldn’t pop for) will definitely snag a Best Supporting Actress nomination, and Stone, who’s being currently tributed by the Telluride Film Festival, may also land a Best Actress nom. Perhaps Weiss also. Or all three will.

Set in the early 1700s, The Favourite is about a pair of shrewd, ruthless schemers — Weiss’s Sarah Churchill and Stone’s Abigail Masham — plotting and back-biting in order to gain favor with and power from the emotionally volatile, constantly-health-challenged Queen Anne (Colman).

For the first hour or so The Favourite is…well, not entirely “great” but a delightfully wicked hoot. It put me in reasonably good spirits. A critic sitting near me was laughing heartily and having a great old time; ditto most of the audience.

But somewhere around the 75-minute mark and until the end (basically the last 45 minutes) the film slows down and then begins to run out of steam. By the 100-minute mark I was muttering under my breath (a) “I’m starting to not care all that much who wins this battle of courtly influence” and (b) “let’s wrap this up already…why does it have to be two hours?”

Lanthimos began to try my patience in the way that Whit Stillman‘s Love and Friendship had. The laughing critic downshifted into chuckling, and then into silence.

28 or 29 years before Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, John Hughes and Dylan Baker created “Owen” — everyone’s idea of a hinterland Trump supporter, or certainly mine. Do they even make tin-buckle galoshes any more? My mother always made me wear them during rainstorms and snowfalls. Hate and humiliation.