I got up early Sunday morning and sat down and chatted a bit at the kitchen table, and then I slowly tapped out a longish, decently-phrased review of Birdman. I didn’t feel like writing about anything else because nothing else had really knocked me out except for The Imitation Game, but that operates on a much more conventional (and yet wholly satisfying) level than Birdman. I finally finished and was ready for my screenings around 1:30 pm. But my energy was really flat. The switch that was on during my Thursday travels and Friday and Saturday screenings, filings and schmoozings was suddenly sitting in neutral, and I couldn’t get going again. I went through the motions like a zombie. On top of which stiff winds were blowing and I hate having to grim up when wind assaults my face and blows my hair all over the place.

I’m sorry but I was just feeling pissy about everything, although I repressed that for the sake of social serenity and harmony with the people I ran into. But I strangely wanted to escape from Telluride and all this sparkling mountain air. I wanted to be on the streets of Manhattan or Toronto or Los Angeles…odd.

I saw Ramin Bahrani‘s 99 Homes, a passable if occasionally tedious drama about the oppression and exploitation of middle-class people who’ve lost their homes. I have plenty of sympathy for everyone who took it in the neck when the economy collapsed in late ’08 but I felt next to nothing for the folks in this film. Never borrow big-time to live in a place you really can’t afford and which is much bigger and splurgier than you really need. Too many Americans don’t get the value of spartan, spiritually-oriented lifestyles. They want indulged, abundant, pig-out diets and lives. They want their big pots of food and spending binges at the mall and big SUVs and all the rest of it.

I didn’t see all Xavier Dolan‘s Mommy at the Cannes Film Festival (roughly 75 minutes worth) but enough to understand two things. One, it’s a highly original, presumably personal dysfunctional-family-combat movie, primarily distinguished by Anne Dorval‘s performance as the feisty titular character, a woman of unflagging tenacity who’s burdened with a hyper-manic teenage son from hell (Antoine-Olivier Pilon). And two, I had to see the whole thing (114 minutes) sooner or later, even though I didn’t particularly look forward to suffering through Pilon’s bullshit a second time.

Well, I saw all of Mommy last night in Telluride, and I have to be honest and say I think less of the film now. I’m just going to cut to the chase and post a conversation that transpired this morning between myself and a female Mommy admirer.

Me: “Not that great in the end, too long, story doesn’t build to any kind of finality or profound thematic resolution except for the cliche about how we all gave to keep going and have hope blah blah. Mom has hope while the kid makes a break for it inside a mental hospital?”

Her: “It’s not your thing. Still a great flick.”

Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman (Fox Searchlight, 10.17), an audacious, darkly hilarious serving of snap-crackle brilliance and psychological excavation par excellence, blew the roof off the Werner Herzog theatre last night. I was giddy, ecstatic, swooning as I half-stumbled into the night air…so was almost everyone I spoke to about it over the next two or three hours. Okay, not everyone but those who were hungry and adventurous and receptive enough to revel in a work of reaching, swirling genius…pig heaven!

Like I said on Twitter last night, it’s an all-but-guaranteed Oscar nominee in several categories — Best Picture, Best Director (Inarritu), Best Actor (Michael Keaton), Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Edward Norton), Best Supporting Actress (Emma Stone), Best Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki), Best Editing, etc.

Birdman is not just a visual groundbreaker — not actually a single seamless, roving Steadicam shot from start to finish but a wonderful illusion of this. It’s more profoundly a searcher, reacher and a mad leaper of a film with one live-wire, mad-rodent performance after another. Everyone sings and dances and somersaults in this tag-team circus but Keaton is the leader and the daddy. He opens himself up and slices in like a surgeon in an awesome, at times unsettling tour de force. Whether he wins the Best Actor Oscar or not, you can absolutely call him the Comeback Kid.

For the sheer immersive pleasure of it I saw Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan this morning at Mason’s Hall Cinema. Not quite as cool as seeing it all big and wowser at the Salle Debussy last May, but certainly good enough. It’s 2:50 pm now. At 4 pm I’m seeing Robert Kenner‘s Merchants of Doubt at the Nugget. At 6:45 Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman (allegedly a big one) screens at the Werner Herzog. And then a Sony Pictures Classics gathering at La Marmotte; also a Fox Searchlight party at the Sheridan. Three films, two parties, three or four hours of filing time…that’ll do for today.

This year’s “Saturday Seminar” topic was “The Forty Year Pendulum” and the legacy of the ’70s. (l. to r.) Moderator Annette Insdorf, Alejandro Gonzelez Inarritu (Birdman), Volker Schlondorff, Francis Coppola, Ethan Hawke (Seymour: An Introduction).

(r.) Leviathan director-writer Andrey Zvyagintsev, (l.) producer Alexander Rodnyansky during q & a at Mason’s Hall Cinema — Saturday, 8.30, 12:25 pm

To my surprise, Morten Tyldum and Graham Moore‘s The Imitation Game (Weinstein Co., 11.21) works quite well. Although mostly a tale about the personal, bureaucratic and old-school morality issues that interfered with and ultimately shut down the beautiful mind of Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing, The Imitation Game nonetheless conveys the melancholy alone-ness and heartache that colored Turing’s personal life, and as such slams a solid triple.

True, it downplays or more accurately nudges aside Turing’s secret life as gay man during World War II and the early ’50s, and in place of this focuses on a close platonic relationship between Turing and Keira Knightley‘s Joan Clarke (obviously a strategy embarked upon to appeal to and engage mainstream straights), but it’s a sharp, well-ordered thing — a movie that knows what it’s doing and how to make it all cook and simmer in just the right way.

I’d been presuming that material this familiar and well covered — the ’86 BBC drama Breaking The Code, the Turing-related (if not Turing-specific) Enigma, a documentary called Codebreaker — might come off as a bit ho-hummish, but this is a classy, handsome show. All the required elements are here. Crisp directorial discipline, Moore’s impressively honed, well-ordered script, Oscar Faura‘s first-rate cinematography, Alexandre Desplat‘s stirring score and particularly Benedict Cumberbatch‘s wholly lived-in, subtly fascinating performance as Turing — a knockout job that will almost certainly land him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

This is a sad but fascinating tale about the lonely fate of an eccentric, exceptional genius-hero, and how 1940s and ’50s Britain gave him grief every step of the way. Over and over the powers-that-be (with the exception of Winston Churchill) and the sense of morality that existed in mid 20th Century England conspired to darken, confine and repress Turing’s life, and I must say that you find yourself wondering after an hour or so if there was anything to his amazing man’s life other than shadows and strife and the oppression of assholes.

I returned an hour ago from tonight’s first-ever Telluride screening of Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater, an entirely honorable, you-are-there absorbing political melodrama — well-honed, believably acted, tightly crafted. Prior to that evening (which began just after 9 pm) a packed Werner Herzog Cinema audience saw Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game, which struck me and everyone I spoke to afterwards as a Best Picture contender; Benedict Cumberbatch‘s performance as Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing will definitely land a Best Actor nomination. The day’s first screening was Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Wild [see below]. It’s 12:30 am and I’m too beat to write anything. I’ll give it another go tomorrow morning from 7 to 9 am before catching a 9:30 am Leviathan screening.

Jon Stewart introducing Rosewater at Telluride’s Galaxy theatre — Friday, 8.29, 9:05 pm.

Stewart, “Then They Came For Me” author Maziar Bahari, Gael Garcia Bernal during post-Rosewater screening q & a.

I take the exact same shot every time I attend the Telluride Patron’s Brunch so why stop now?

(l. to r.) Laura Dern, Reese Witherspoon, Wild author Cheryl Strayed prior to this afternoon’s Wild screening at Chuck Jones Cinema.

Scrappy, despondent, somewhat resourceful Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) goes on a thousand-mile journey-of-self-discovery hike in Wild , another in a long line of solo survival-in-the-wilderness tales (127 Hours, All Is Lost, Gravity, Tracks). Witherspoon handles herself pretty well. Okay , quite well — it’s one of those “watch me get down and pull out the stops” award-season performances. But the movie…I don’t know, man. It didn’t feel right at first — emphatic, hasty, tonally off in some way — and then it felt moderately okay and then better-than-half-decent in a tapestry-weave sort of way during the last half hour or so. I’m sorry but Wild is…well, some (many?) women will like it. That was my take-away from the Chuck Jones screening that broke around 4:30 or 5 pm. Some women and some guys, I guess (two were weeping during the screening). But smart-ass guys like myself are going to be checking their watches. I think it’s somewhere between (a) an earnest mixed-bag — a hit-and-misser that starts out poorly but gains as it moves along, and (b) a shortfaller. I didn’t hate it. It didn’t annoy me but I didn’t empathize a great deal with Witherspoon’s Strayed. I admire her determination and to some extent her survival skills but much of the film is about her depending on the kindness of strangers, at least a few of whom are nursing fantasies of getting sexual favors. On top of which she’s not the best prepared hiker. (Planning for ways to replenish your water supply helps.). On top of which Reese/Cheryl experiences far too many dream-flashbacks of her late mom, played by Laura Dern. It felt to me like there 30 or 35 Dern flashes. I was starting to go “later” when the 20th appeared. (Written on iPhone while waiting in line outside Werner Herzog theatre to see The Imitation Game.)

I remember darkness from my childhood and teen years. You’d go outside around 9 or 10 pm and you’d either have enough moonlight to make out certain shapes or it would be so dark you could barely see your hand. There were streetlights, of course, but I’ve got myself convinced that they weren’t as bright as they are today. Darkness has been all but presently eradicated in urban and suburban areas. Everything under the stars is lamped up and flooded with glare. But not in Telluride. There’s darkness all over, and it’s wonderful. The moonlight is low right now so it’s even better. The stars are amazing. And the crisp piney aroma and the cool, flirting-with-cold night air (you needed jackets and scarves last night)…this is really a place that’s been excused (or has escaped) from the 21st Century in all the best ways.

This, from my perspective, is an exceptional, quite brilliant trailer. This is it — the mini-version, the bullets, the sex, the snippets, the all of it, the bottles and bottles of vodka, the Phillip Glassyness, the symphonic smack…wow.

You can walk right into a little downtown Telluride store called the Green Room and buy a modest amount of potent weed. Out-of-staters don’t get to buy the same quantity as Colorado residents but so what? This is 21st Century Colorado, and nobody blinks an eye. I haven’t turned on in decades but as a pot smoker in my 20s I almost regarded myself as a kind of outlaw. I completely accepted this identity back then — everyone did. But I still had a few friends who were popped for possession and two or three who were busted for weight and did time.

From the website: “Telluride, Colorado’s leading medical and recreational marijuana dispensary in variety and quality. We are the provider of the finest, most reasonably priced, diverse marijuana medicines and products to serve your medical needs. In addition to our medicine we have a selection of books and artwork to educate and enlighten you.”