Day: August 20, 2024

Not A Great Concern

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Since 2010, Hollywood Elsewhere has been attending the Telluride Film Festival Patron’s Brunch. It’s been a great pleasure to munch and hobknob with actors, filmmakers, fellow press folk, etc. Delightful. But this year’s brunch (Friday, 8.30, 10 am) is a different bird. Some press folk are being disinvited or elbowed aside or what-have-you, and I’ve just learned I’m on this list.

Hey…no sweat. Water off a duck’s ass. It’s all about the movies, bruh. Maybe I’ll be re-invited next year. It’s all a dance.

Posted this morning at 8 am:  Well adjusted and professional adults who know next to nothing about the ins and outs of a certain situation don’t jump to conclusions.

The patrons (flush folk who pay $3500 a pass) have been increasingly riled about the brunch being over-crowded with too many aggressively chatty press people (who pay $780 for a basic “festival pass”) and their tendency to  dominate opportunities for face-time with brunching celebs. I’ve been hearing about such complaints for a few years.

Apparently push has come to shove over this issue, and as we speak the festival is extra concerned about alienating or angering the swells. 

I know Telluride honcho Julie Huntsinger well enough to know it’s not some “we kinda don’t like you as much today as we did five or ten years ago” deal.

A sizable group of press has never attended the patron’s brunch in years past. It’s never been a “come one, come all” situation.  This year Julie has been lamentably pressured into expanding the roster of non-invited press…that’s all.

Will THR profile assassin Rebecca Keegan be cordially told “sorry, not this year”?  Will any reps from the Penske mafia (Deadline’s Pete Hammond, Michael Fleming, IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, THR’s Scott Feinberg) receive this message from Telluride management?  Of course not. They’re too politically powerful, too well-armed.

I haven’t seen a list of the people who’ve been zotzed, but I’m presuming they’re among the smaller, more independent fish in the pond.  I’ve attended the brunch for  14 years straight (since 2010) but not this time.

I’m not passing along loose talk about anyone else who may have been handed a proverbial “black spot” (Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”) or who have otherwise been elbowed aside.

Three Stand Out

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Chris Nashawaty‘s “The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982” celebrates eight landmark films that opened 42 years ago — Conan the Barbarian, The Road Warrior, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, The Thing and Tron.

But only three of these were truly stellar and earthshaking — E.T, The Road Warrior and Blade Runner. The other five were noteworthy but problematic here and there.

Poltergeist was pretty good but not classic. I actually sorta kinda disliked The Thing (I prefer the 1951 Howard Hawks version to John Carpenter’s) and Tron. Ricardo Montalban was great in The Wrath of Khan but otherwise calm down.

The Day “Aliens” Opened

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I caught Aliens at the big Los Angeles all-media screening, which happened eight or nine days before the 7.18.86 opening. I had such a great time at the all-media that I went a second time at Westwood’s Avco on Wilshire Blvd. — the same theatre where Tarantino and his Video Archives pallies were. The all-media crowd was on fire, but the commercial screening (I attended an early evening show) was even better, more reactive, more roof-lifting.

Tis A Pity She Says “Whore”

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Cailee Spaeny says “horror” three times in this interview clip, but says it correctly only once (i.e., the first time). The second and third time she says ‘WHORE.”

Horror is a two-syllable word that Marlon Brando had no trouble pronouncing correctly in Apocalypse Now (“The horror…the horror”) but Spaeny mouths a one-syllable version. When Spaeny said it the second time I thought she’d made a simple grammatical mistake, which we all do from time to time, but then she said it again.

Saying “horror” clearly is obviously not rocket science. You emphasize the first syllable but then you tell the back of your tongue to follow up with the second syllable, and Spaeny blows it twice.

Ask any RADA graduate to pronounce “horror” and they’ll nail it without effort. James Whale said it correctly. Ditto Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Val Lewton, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee. Even Lon Chaney, Jr. said it correctly. But Spaeny can’t get there.

This is called the degradation of the King’s English by an Amurrican. This is called a lack of an exacting education. This is called a shopping mall way of speaking. This is basically a Millennial-Zoomer disease.

Swinton Obviously Looks like Death

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So Pedro Almodovar‘s The Room Next Door (Sony Pictures ClassicS, 12.20) costars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, but with a few supporting characters.

Why, then, does it feel like a two-hander? It seems to be about Swinton’s war-correspondent character winding down toward finality. Could it be Pedro’s version of Wim Wenders‘ Lightning Over Water?

Swinton has described the film as “a natural successor, strangely, to Pain and Glory.”

Peter Baker Said It

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Last night the cheering Chicago multitudes said over and over, “We love you, Joe!” But deep down they were saying, “For 24 days we thought you were determined to send us to hell, Joe…you seemed as committed to a Trump presidency as much any MAGA fanatic, and we were horrified and howling. We thought you’d not only lost your mind but turned into a kind of Irish banshee. But thank you, Joe…thank you for caving to reality…thank you for not murdering this country.”

From Peter Baker‘s “The Speech Biden Never Wanted To Give,” posted early this morning:

I hate the theatrical pretension of dabbing tears off your cheek with a handkerchief. Hate it!

AOC’s Voice Is Too Thin, Chirpy and Squeaky

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And a part of me will never forgive AOC for having a funny-looking, galumphy, red-haired boyfriend with huge feet, a tiny-eyed “bin racoon” who was obviously not her match…a woman can’t run for president if the appearance of her boyfriend/husband is a topic of negative conversation.

“Comedy With Tragic Relief”

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I’d be surprised if film-loving Millennials and Zoomers had the slightest awareness of Peter Medak‘s The Ruling Class (’72). It’s too British, too mid-20th-Century and too propelled by class hatred (iconoclast British lefties despising old-school Whitehall elites) to connect with 21st Century viewers, but very few films fiddled with murder, sex, notions of universal love, vaudevillian music-hall humor and demonic horror like this one did. It may be the only film that successfully mixed these elements.

Peter O’Toole wore a straw-blonde Jesus wig during the first 65%, but his slightly reddish, honey-colored hair during the final 35% is a real trip….gleaming, eye-filling.