About to sit through this, but not happy about it. Grim up. Another deranged, mostly non-human predator…a symbol of today’s socially and psychologically adrift incel misogynists…another hostile demon-dude out to psychologically torture and murder a young terrified lass…the umpteenth variation upon Stanley K.’s “Jack Torrance out to chop up Wendy and Danny”, etc.

If the following 17 films are screened at Telluride 2024, I’ll be a mostly pleased attendee. It all starts six days hence. I’ll be arriving in town by early Wednesday evening.

Highest Anticipation Levels: Anora (D. Sean Baker). Conclave (d: Edward Berger). Emilia Perez (d: Jacques Audiard). The End (d: Joshua Oppenheimer). All We Imagine as Light (d: Payal Kapadia). The Piano Lesson (d: Malcolm Washington). Nickel Boys (d: RaMell Ross). Saturday Night (d: Jason Reitman). Misrecordia (d: Alain Guiraudie). Piece by Piece (d: Morgan Neville). Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (d: Embeth Davidtz). Disclaimer (d: Alfonso Cuaron). Better Man (d: Michael Gracey). Maria (d: Pablo Larrain). The Friend (d: Scott McGehee, David Siegel). No Other Land (d: Basel Adra). The Apprentice (d: Ali Abbasi).

This is the first in a series of special Hollywood Elsewhere pre-Telluride Angelina Jolie hit pieces. No originals, all re-posted.

They will appear between today and Tuesday evening, or just before I wake up at 3:30 am on Wednesday, 8.28, in order to catch a 7:30 am LGA flight to Dallas, followed by a short hop to Alberquerque and then a rental-car drive to Telluride.

Posted on 2.11.15, the title was “Gone For Four Months“:

There’s this imaginary guy I’ve been visiting at Cedars Sinai. He went into a coma early last October and just came out of it yesterday. I wasn’t there when he awoke but he called today to say thanks for stopping by all those times. His mother told him about my four or five visits.

Then he said he’d gone online this morning and visited the latest Gold Derby and Gurus of Gold charts, and he wanted to know what the hell had happened to Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, which was the Best Picture front-runner for weeks on end. “Where’d it go?” he said. “What happened? It was the leading Best Picture contender…it was all over but the shouting and the formalities. Every last default-minded, deferring-to-Dave Karger Oscar expert had it at the top of their lists. What’s the most likely film to win Best Picture? Why…Unbroken! What else? And now it’s vanished.”

I tried to break it to him gently. “What happened,” I explained, “is that Universal finally screened it, and a few days later the air had seeped out of the balloon. And then it just disappeared.”

He asked me why. “It was the Christian torture-porn thing,” I said. What’s that? “There was something in the movie that said that the more a guy has been beaten and tortured, the braver and more beautiful and closer to God he is.” Oh, the guy said, suddenly sounding weaker and less curious.

“Right now the only chance Unbroken has at the Oscars is Roger Deakins‘ nomination for Best Cinematography,” I said. “But it would be surprising to a lot of people I know if Birdman‘s Emmanuel Lubezki loses out.”