Variety‘s Clayton Davis has gone apeshit over Lukas Dhont‘s Close, which I raved about from Cannes on 5.27.22. Clayton may not have seen Casablanca, but he’s definitely speaking the truth about Close. There’s no ducking it — this film is a masterpiece, and the people who are saying it’s too triggering are looking at it from an overly political perspective.

The elite Telluride critic community feels it has no choice but to worship Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking. Politically speaking there’s no upside to not praising it. Naysayers will have to suffer some degree of rejection, and it’s just safer to play along.

I said the other day that Polley’s film is nicely handled as far as it goes, but sitting through it feels confining and interminable. For me, it was almost totally about waiting for it to end.

Others feel differently, of course.

I was listening yesterday afternoon to a knowledgable journalist who believes Women Talking has picked up a headwind and will become a major Best Picture contender down the road.

Maybe, but over the last couple of days I’ve spoken to a pair of Telluride pass-holders (a wealthy 70something guy and a woman in her early 40s) who’ve told me they hated it. I’m not saying that’s the prevailing view among non-journos here, but it’s certainly a view.

I’m also personally upset and resentful about the 54% Metacritic rating for Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light, an exquisite film that works so beautifully and movingly, and which is 10 to 15 times better than Belfast. So far three sorehead critics have lowered Empire of Light‘s Metacritic standing to the mid 50s — TheWrap‘s Tomris Laffly, IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich and Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang.

It’s going to be a much brighter story when Empire of Light opens and joins the general screening circuit…trust me. It’s easily one of the best films of the year, and far more emotionally satisfying than I’d expected. I went in a skeptic, but came away converted.

Last night I caught my second viewing of James Gray’s Armageddon Time (Focus, 10.28) at Telluride’s Chuck Jones cinema. I loved this film — honest, deeply moral, genuinely sad — when I saw it in Cannes last May. I regard it as Gray’s best ever, and feel it fully deserves Best Picture consideration.

Alas, certain wokesters out there may try to beat Gray’s film with a virtue-signaling stick. Variety’s Clayton Davis sounded the alarm in Cannes, and I felt a similar tremor last night.

There’s a scene at a snooty prep school (Kew Forest) that Banks Repeta’s Paul Graff, an 11 year-old based on Gray himself, has recently enrolled in. Jaylin Webb’s Johnny, a spirited black kid from a public school Paul had previously attended and whom Paul regards as his best friend, drops by for a chat during an outdoor recess.

After Johnny leaves one of Paul’s snooty classmates asks if he was friendly with “[plural N-word]” at his previous school. The instant the kid says that, a white guy sitting 10 or 12 feet to my left said “whoa whoa” with a tone of alarm, as if to say “hold up there…that’ll be enough of THAT word, even in an ‘80s period drama…we don’t allow that term at the Telluride Film Festival.”

The “whoa whoa” guy, in short, was announcing to those within earshot that even within the context of a moral-minded period film about racial disparity and race-blaming, the use of such a term had crossed a line.

I was wondering how the “whoa whoa” guy might have reacted if that KF kid had (God forbid) repeated the term once or twice more. Would he have walked out in protest or perhaps complained to a TFF rep about Gray’s film having agitated the audience with an unsafe word?

“Clayton Is Offended By Armageddon Time”, posted on 5.20.22:

Variety‘s Clayton Davis has posted a torpedo response to James Gray‘s Armageddon Time, at least as far as its awards potential is concerned. Scenes conveying white elitist viewpoints from three or four odious characters have rubbed Clayton’s woke sensibilities the wrong way.

In describing the film as deeply offensive in terms of said attitudes, Davis is half-suggesting that the film’s admirers are either missing something or oblivious to same.

The autobiographical Armageddon Time is a humanist, well-honed, memory-lane film about what Gray experienced as an 11-year-old youth in Queens, and the ugly elements that he encountered after enrolling in a Forest Hills private school. It’s the first really good film I’ve seen at this technically troubled festival.

Davis excerpt #1: “Armageddon Time, a deeply personal look at how the auteur became the auteur we, or at least the French, came to know and love, debuted to warm applause on Thursday. However, the film’s problematic depiction of racial inequalities in the Reagan era may turn off awards voters.”

Davis excerpt #2: “In a one-scene surprise, recent Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain plays U.S. State Attorney Marianne Trump, speaking to a sea of privileged white children at an elite private school, where [lead protagonist] Paul eventually attends, while Fred Trump (yes, Donald’s father) is present.

“[Marianne] channels the entitlement to be superior, oozing the grotesque and vile nature of a class of people in this country who are ‘the chosen ones’ for no other reason than the tint of their skin. While never named, two boys who use the ‘n-word’ when speaking about [a young Black protagonist] when he visits the school, have the narrative DNA of young Eric and Donald Trump Jr. The cringe factor may be too much to bear for more progressive voters.”

Davis excerpt #3: “Respected critics like Justin Chang of the L.A. Times were high on it, while Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian absolutely admonished it. Unfortunately, when this tale unveils itself stateside, a new racial debate will likely ensue regarding the undertones, similar to Licorice Pizza from Paul Thomas Anderson last year in the AAPI community. That may keep many voters at a distance.”

The 21st Century version of the French terror is ebbing. Okay, weakening. Those occasional “uh-oh” expressions among the fanatical faithful tell the tale. But societal cancers don’t just evaporate overnight. So for the time being, the woke brigade still holds sway, although the whole cancelling mentality is being rethought and/or downgraded by just about everyone as we speak.

I was going to say there are three kinds of cancellations, but I’m thinking the categories may actually number four.

Category #1 is owned by Harvey Weinstein…no forgiveness, no redemption….J.J. Hunsecker to Sidney Falco, “You’re dead, son — get yourself buried.” It’s been argued that Roman Polanski is in this category, but there are some (many?) extenuating circumstances. We all know that ignoring a safe word is an awful thing to do, so Armie Hammer may belong in this slot even though he’s mainly guilty of being a sexual obsessive. He certainly didn’t eat anyone’s rib or cut off a woman’s toe and put it in his pocket.

Category #2 is for middle-range offenders for whom arguments in their favor have been made, and whom many people think got an unfair deal. In my book Woody Allen is a category #2 because it’s all over one alleged incident…one…that doesn’t really add up when you consider all the particulars. Who else in this category?

Category #3 is a soft cancel…Aziz Ansari, Louis CK. The basic thing is, you were guilty of something bad but you get to inch your way back into the swing of things after a couple of years. Others?

Category #4 is an even weaker soft cancel…for people whose careers have been hurt to some extent but who never really did anything you can point to, or whose alleged offenses were due to alcohol or substance issues but are now moot because they’ve gotten sober.

This afternoon I finally saw Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking, which has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It’s not a “bad” film — just interminable.

And yet it’s a well-written, well-acted dialogue piece about eight Mennonite women (plus the wimpy Ben Whishaw) discussing whether to leave their community because of years of suffering sexual violence from several brute beast males.

Of course they should leave! And yet they spend the whole night in a barn, debating the pros and cons. And there I was, grinding it out in row #3 at the Werner Herzog theatre.

The three best performances are delivered by Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Rooney Mara.

Every critic in Telluride loves this bleak, suffocating film, and their motivation is almost entirely political. Given the political climate in this town and in other woke regions around the globe, there is no upside to rendering a negative verdict. Play it safe, go along, keep your head down.

I kept telling myself “this isn’t interminable…it’ll be over after 100 minutes and then you can get up and move on with the rest of your life.” And that’s what happened. I’m fine. My future is before me.

If this film turns out to be Best Picture nominated, I’ll be flabbergasted. But it could happen. There are plenty of hardcore types who will push for it.

A fair number of average industry Joes & Janes, trust me, are going to hate this film. (But don’t tell David Pollick.)

If my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.

I’ve been scrambling and struggling since late Saturday afternoon, trying to understand what Todd Fields‘ Tar is conveying or not conveying (is it anti-cancel culture or is it slyly condemning Cate Blanchett‘s brilliant but callous conductor and more or less saying “well, she made her bed”?), and venting with friends about how I found Field’s decision to obliquely hint at plot developments occasionally infuriating.

Key HE passage: “This movie is so beautifully made, such an immersive pleasure, and yet so infuriating I could just punch a refrigerator.”

A friend believes that “the film’s elliptical quality is one of the things I absolutely adored about it…it kept me on the edge of my seat. And it’s what made me hungry to see it again (and I hardly feel that way about movies anymore).”

I feel the same way — I’m so upset by my negative reactions to aspects of Tar (while loving so much of it) that I want to sit through it again so I can (hopefully!) settle some of my issues.

Another friend insists that “the information you need is all there. It’s elliptical…but it’s not ambiguous. Some might disagree about this or that, but I think you’d find viewers disagreeing on what happened in many scenes in Bardo, a movie you seem to be cutting a thousand times more slack than this one, even though — sorry — it is borderline unwatchable.”

The focus in Tar is (a) the magnificent work and lifestyle of Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar — I wanted to move into this movie and live there and never come out — but primarily (b) the fanatical determination of “Millennial robots” (as Lydia calls them) to destroy careers of people they see as cruel and abusive.

It’s mainly about a faintly alluded to, stubbornly non-dramatized relationship between an ambitious student and Lydia, a powerful God-like figure in her realm, and how it went wrong and why, and how this resulted in a kind of blood feud — a deliberate act of career assassination and a form of sexual harassment.

But who rejected who exactly, and why do reasonable intelligent viewers of Tar have to argue about this hours later and still not be certain about what happened?

All kinds of exposition is deliberately left out of Tar, and it’s triggering. I’m sorry but Tar takes forever to get going (at least 45 minutes if not longer), and once it does it’s too elliptical, too fleeting, too oblique, too teasing and (I guess) too smart for its own good. It made me feel dumb, and I really hate that.

But I loved the flush world of brilliant, arrogant, confident Lydia. Not to mention the textures, the autumnal Berlin atmospheres, the perfect scarves, the dinners….I wanted to live in it forever.

The bottom line is that Field can’t be bothered to tell a story in a way that most people would find satisfying. He doesn’t show the stuff that we’d like to see and be part of, obviously because he feels that’s the most interesting way to deal the cards. But not for me. Elusive narrative games and coy hintings and teasings and dingle-dangle maneuvers…nope. Maybe if I watch it again it’ll somehow come together?

I’m terribly unhappy about how Tar played for me. It’s made me almost miserable.

A friend lucked into a screening of Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, which just premiered in Venice. Reaction #1: “It pains me to say this, but it just doesn’t work.” Reaction #2: “It’s just too stagey,” which is to say, I gathered, too visually confined, too static. But how can an adaptation of a play about a 600-pound guy who never leaves his apartment be opened up?

Let’s be fair and free — let the air and sunlight in — let’s see what develops.

Oh god it’s happening The Whale lived up and Fraser is coming pic.twitter.com/XjsaYYFi3X

— The Oscar Expert (@expert_oscar) September 3, 2022

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich is trashing the finest, most exquisitely composed, most emotionally moving film I’ve seen thus far at Telluride ‘22 — Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light (Searchlight, 12.9). Olivia Colman is 100% locked for yet another Best Actress Oscar nom; handsome and gifted newcomer Michael Ward is also amazingly effective. Utterly exquisite Roger Deakins cinematography. Extra–fine supporting turns by Colin Firth and Toby Jones.

Light will absolutely be Best Picture-nominated — I’ll make bets with anyone. I thought it might be some kind of woke interracial romance, but it transcends all that shit. I agree about Belfast but otherwise Ehrlich knows nothing…trust me! (And you can dismiss David Poland‘s reaction also,.)