A friend whose movie tastes I occasionally agree with saw Annie Baker‘s Janet Planet and….uhm, wasn’t a fan. He actually expressed himself in stronger terms, but let’s hold back for now.

He calls it “the kind of pretentious, slow cinema thing that certain critics just overpraise. I must have looked at my watch five times. I didn’t give a shit about that 11-year-old learning to hate her mother.”

NY Film Festival synopsis: “It’s the summer before Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) starts sixth grade, and she is spending the lazy months with her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in their home in the woods.

“As the months drift by, the bespectacled, taciturn girl, fiercely observant, watches Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives, whether romantic interests or reconnected friends.

“Set in 1991 rural Western Massachusetts, the superb debut film from Pulitzer Prize­–winning playwright Annie Baker is a work of surreal tranquility that moves at a different, lost pace of life, and which perceives heartbreak just as Lacy is beginning to grasp the world and her place in it.

“Baker has created a film about a mother and daughter quite unlike any other, heightening the viewer’s senses and expressing oceans of feeling with the smallest gestures. Nicholson and Ziegler perform their roles with an inspiring lack of sentimentality, and the wondrous supporting cast includes Elias Koteas, Sophie Okonedo and Will Patton. An A24 release.”

…that Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn (MGM, 8.31 in Telluride) looks like a possible sophomore slump.

20 or 25 seconds into the trailer and I’m way ahead of it. The movie, set in the mid aughts, will basically say that British rich folk are diseased shits. A middle-class Oxford student named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is invited by a friend and fellow student named Felix Catton (the Paul Bunyan-sized Jacob Elordi) to hang at his family estate for a few days. Twisted upper-class shit happens, and Oliver emerges…well, what do I know?

Update: Okay, there’s more to it. A guy who’s seen Saltburn tells me the trailer doesn’t reveal what the film is actually about, which is basically a riff on The Talented Mr. Ripley with Keoghan as Matt Damon and Elordi as Jude Law.

The trailer for David Fincher‘s The Killer is triple-A brilliant…I want to see it right effing now. The trailer for Michael Mann‘s Ferrari, also first-rate, feels like a ’60s film on some level. Nice shadings, very primal.

HE picks are in boldface. The high-profile films that are giving me bad or iffy vibes…okay, I won’t highlight these. Let’s just take it as it comes.

It’s still fairly devastating that there’s no Pot au Feu, no Coup de Chance, no The Killer, no The Palace, no Maestro, no Killers of the Flower Moon, no Ferrari. I’m even sorry there’s no Priscilla in the lineup.

What happened to the time-honored tradition of Venice premieres concurrently (or almost concurrently) showing at Telluride? There’s some really brutal elbowing going on this year.

“All of Us Strangers” (d. Andrew Haigh, U.K., 2023)
“American Symphony” (d. Matthew Heineman, U.S., 2023)
“Anatomy of a Fall” (d. Justine Triet, France, 2023)
“Anselm” (d. Wim Wenders, Germany, 2023)
“Baltimore” (d. Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy Ireland-U.K., 2023)
“Beyond Utopia” (d. Madeleine Gavin, U.S., 2023)
“The Bikeriders” (d. Jeff Nichols, U.S., 2023)
“Cassandro” (d. Roger Ross Williams, U.S., 2023)
“Daddio” (d. Christy Hall, U.S., 2023)
“El Conde” (d. Pablo Larraín, Chile, 2023)
“Fallen Leaves” (d. Aki Kaurismäki, Finland, 2023…I’ve been warned off)
“The Falling Star” (d. Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, France-Belgium, 2023)
“Finally Dawn” (d. Saverio Costanzo, Italy, 2023)
“Fingernails” (d. Christos Nikou, U.S., 2023)
“Food, Inc. 2” (d. Robert Kenner, Melissa Robledo, U.S., 2023)
“High & Low-John Galliano” (d. Kevin Macdonald, U.K., 2023)
“The Holdovers” (d. Alexander Payne, U.S., 2023)
“Hollywoodgate” (d. Ibrahim Nash’at, U.S.-Germany, 2023)
“Janet Planet” (d. Annie Baker, U.S., 2023)
“La Chimera” (d. Alice Rohrwacher, Italy-France-Switzerland, 2023)
“The Mission” (d. Amanda McBaine, Jesse Moss, U.S., 2023)
“The Monk and the Gun” (d. Pawo Choyning Dorji, Bhutan, 2023)
“Nyad” (d. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, U.S., 2023)
“Occupied City” (d. Steve McQueen, Netherlands-U.K.-U.S., 2023)
“Orlando, My Political Biography” (d. Paul B. Preciado, France, 2023)
“Perfect Days” (d. Wim Wenders, Japan, 2023)
“The Pigeon Tunnel” (d. Errol Morris, U.K., 2023)
“Poor Things” (d. Yorgos Lanthimos, U.S.-Ireland-U.K., 2023)
“The Promised Land” (d. Nikolaj Arcel, Denmark-Germany-Sweden, 2023)
“The Royal Hotel” (d. Kitty Green, Australia, 2023)
“Rustin” (d. George C. Wolfe, U.S., 2023)
“Saltburn” (d. Emerald Fennell, U.S., 2023)
“The Teacher’s Lounge” (d. Ilker Çatak, Germany, 2023)
“Tehachapi” (d. JR, France, 2023)
“Thank You Very Much” (d. Alex Braverman, U.S., 2023)
“Tuesday” (d. Daina O. Pusić, U.S.-U.K., 2023)
“Wildcat” (d. Ethan Hawke, U.S., 2023)
“The Zone of Interest” (d. Jonathan Glazer, U.S.-U.K.-Poland, 2023)

There is one way and only one way to respond to the soon-to-screen Venice Film Festival films by Woody Allen (Coup de Chance), Roman Polanski (The Palace) and Luc Besson (DogMan). And that way is this: Judge these three movies according to classic standards — how well do they work according to their own scheme and aesthetic? — and leave your 100% repulsive, nickle-and-dime woke moralizing out of it.

Many influential artists have lived problematic lives (however you want to define that), and nobody gives a shit about this when they’re staring at a Paul Gaugin painting in a museum, or watching Mel Gibson in the first two Mad Max films or in Peter Weir‘s The Year of Living Dangerously, or listening to the music of James Brown or Richard Wagner or considering the work of any other flawed creator.

It’s called “separating art from the artist”…period. There is no mature or realistic way of responding to art without doing this. You’re not a bad person for finding spiritual payoff and transcendence in art created by questionable artists, but you are a bad person when you insist on ostracizing and diminishing artists not for their work but for certain personal, private behaviors.

Talk about their moral failings all you want (it has been the HE position all along that the accusations against Allen are exceedingly flimsy and unreliable, and strongly contradicted by official investigations), but keep them in a separate box.

Oh, and on a personal note? Aside from the woke-nutter chorus (some of whom unfortunately reside in the HE comment threads), most sensible humans out there despise judgmental scolds. I’m speaking in this instance of tiresome people like THR‘s Scott Roxborough, Agence France-Presse editor Eric Randolph and French feminism activist Ursula Le Menn. Wokesters are the plague dogs of our time. They are proponents of Soviet-styled social propaganda and the absolute enemies of free thought and free cinema.

When the New York Film Festival announced on 8.17 that The Pot au Feu (i.e., The Taste of Things) would be among their selections, they didn’t claim that this constituted a North American premiere. Therefore there had to be another festival venue (pre-NYFF) that would be showing Tran Anh Hung‘s foodie classic as a North American premiere, and it wasn’t TIFF so it had to be Telluride…right? But it’s not showing here. The list is out and it’s missing. What the hell happened?

It all turned out well in the end.

After landing in Albuquerque at 4:50 pm (mountain time) I shuttled over to the car rental community, about a mile from the airport, and lo and behold the National attendant was still there! I’d found a better Priceline deal a few hours earlier , and wound up with a new white Toyota Corolla.

I drove out of town just before 6 pm, and headed north on 25 and then 550. A magnificent day with breathtaking topographical splendor and a vast, bright blue sky and sunlight piercing through the windshield, and a great sound system to boot.

New Mexico driving lifts you up and activates your soul, bruh.

I’d been struggling with airports (LaGuardia and Dallas/Ft. Worth) and a cancelled flight and all the rest of that exhaustion, and suddenly I was free and delighted and flying along at 80 mph.

I made it as far as the Mesa Verde motel in Mancos, Colorado — roughly 100 minutes south of Telluride, call it two hours with pit stops and photo ops.