Jeffrey Wells

Telluride Fact #1: I was in a Tellluride market a couple of hours ago and ran into Elizabeth Berkley and her husband Greg Lauren. (They’re here to attend the Sunday wedding of Andrew Lauren and Lauren Bush .) And she said that Johnny Depp is here. Telluride Fact #2: A connected indie film guy told me he’s heard that Depp’s Rum Diary is one of the not-yet-announced secret screenings. Do the math = maybe.

The Patron Brunch, to which I’ve been invited, is tomorrow morning from 10:30 am to 12 noon. Tomorrow’s films: (a) The Turin Horse (2:30 pm, Palm); (b) Living In the Material World (6 pm, Palm — Martin Scorsese isn’t here); (c) Albert Nobbs (9:15 pm, Galaxy).

The 2011 Telluride slate is out, and topping the hot list are Alexander Payne ‘s The Descendants and Rodrigo Garcia and Glenn Close‘s Albert Nobbs (which I knew about but couldn’t report). Michel Hazanavicius‘s The Artist (seen it), David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method (great!), Wim Wenders‘ Pina and Steve McQueen‘s Shame are also slated — excellent news.

A Telluride tribute is set for George Clooney and they’re not going to screen The Ides of March, which he directed (and which just premiered in Venice)? The Telluride fathers must be planning on announcing March as a special surprise because to not show it would be somewhat…make that definitely weird.

Martin Scorsese‘s George Harrison: Living in the Material World — all three and half hours’ worth — has been announced as a Telluride attraction…more orgasms!

There’s also a Tilda Swinton tribute plus a screening of We Need To Talk About Kevin. (Dave McNary‘s Variety report called it Weed to Talk About Kevin, as in “we need to get high in order to talk about this effing kid or forget it.”)

The initial Telluride lineup didn’t include Butter, the Jennifer Garner-Ty Burrell butter-carving cramedy, but word around the campfire is that it might turn up as a surprise screening. (Written from a small table in the rear of a natural-foods store in Mancos, Colorado.)

Apologies to Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale for not passing along thoughts about likely 2011 Oscar contenders for the first early peek-out Oscar Index. I got hung up with the usual chores plus last-minute travel preparations, etc. Warrior is a good film, and in some respects an astonishing one, but anyone who think it’s a Best Picture contender needs to stop shooting heroin, splash water into his/her face, walk outside and smell the air.

In the view of The Guardian‘s Xan Brooks, Madonna‘s W.E. — about a lonely New York woman in the late ’90s (Abbie Cornish) obsessing about the late 1930s marriage of King Edward VIII (James D’Arcy) and Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) — is a “primped and simpering folly, extraordinarily silly, preening and fatally mishandled… jaw-dropping…the turkey that dreamed it was a peacock.”

Madonna’s direction “is so all over the shop that it barely qualifies as direction at all,” Broooks claims. “W.E. gives us slo-mo and jump cuts and a crawling crane shot up a tree in Balmoral, but they are all just tricks without a purpose. For her big directoral flourish, Madonna has Wallis bound on stage to dance with a Masai tribesman while ‘Pretty Vacant’ blares on the soundtrack. But why? What point is she making? That social-climbing Wallis-Simpson was the world’s first punk-rocker? That – see! – a genuine Nazi-sympathiser would never dream of dancing with an African?

“Who can say? My guess is that she could have had Wallis dressed as a clown, bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower to the strains of ‘The Birdy Song’ and it would have served her story just as well.”

The Telegraph‘s David Gritten, always the gentleman, is a little more deft and roundabout in his partly negative review.

“It all looks good, or at least glossy, in the manner of high-end cosmetics commercials,” he writes. “Exotic locations (Portofino, Cap d’Antibes) are visited and luxury brand names (Moet, Cartier, Schiaparelli) tossed around. Wally” — Cornish’s character — “pays repeatedly visits an auction of the Windsors’ possessions; W.E. often feels like an extended infomercial for Sotheby’s New York.

“Occasional flashes of wit intrude. ‘Your Majesty, you know your way to a woman’s heart,’ Wallis says. ‘I wasn’t aiming that high,’ the king replies. But such moments are rare.”

The Weinstein Co. is release W.E. on 12.9.

Here’s an account of Madonna’s W.E. press conference by Variety‘s John Hopewell.

The Playlist‘s Oliver Lyttleton, whose show-’em-no-mercy review of The Ides of March was posted yesterday, has stuck a knife into Carnage, Roman Polanski‘s adaptation of Yasmina Reza‘s hit play which premiered earlier today at the Venice Film Festival.

Carnage is “a film of very little ambition, a minor entry in the director’s canon. Perhaps it was just the desire to shoot something fast and quick after his brush with Swiss justice, which is certainly understandable, but he has essentially taken a pre-existing script, cast four A-listers, locked them in a room, and shot it.

“There are few directorial flourishes beyond a firmly Polanski-esque opening shot, and almost nothing to enable the identification of the movie as a Polanski picture. For once in his career, it feels like almost anyone could have directed it.

“It’s not as though the play could have been opened up much, but Polanski really might as well have stuck some cameras in the audience of a stage production. Maybe that approach would have been fine for a more substantial piece, but at best Reza’s material is targeting some fairly low-hanging fruit (upper middle-class hypocrisy, in the main) without adding much to the discussion, and at worst it’s not about much more than the set-up for the next gag.

“And that’s even ignoring the major issue with the construction of Reza’s piece — there’s no reason for the characters to stay in the room together, except that the writer decides they should.”

“The gloves come off early and the social graces disintegrate on cue,” writes Variety‘s Justin Chang, as the film “spends 79 minutes observing, and encouraging, the steady erosion of niceties between two married couples. But the real battle in Roman Polanski’s brisk, fitfully amusing adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s popular play is a more formal clash between stage minimalism and screen naturalism, as this acid-drenched four-hander never shakes off a mannered, hermetic feel that consistently betrays its theatrical origins.

“One is continually made aware of buttons being pushed, of the actors taking pains to say precisely the wrong (or right) thing to fan the flames, yet the film actually becomes less tense as it progresses. Certain repeated questions — ‘Why are we still here?’ and ‘Should we wrap this up?’ — begin to take on unwelcome meanings, despite the compact running time.”

Sasha Stone and I met last evening around 6:15 pm at the Albuquerque airport’s baggage retrieval area. But the car rental took longer to figure out than expected plus we experienced a 40-minute wipeout due to missing the 550 north turnoff. So we didn’t really get going until 7:40 pm. But we arrived in Durango, Colorado around 11 pm, and that was with a 20-minute Subway stop. We dropped our bags at the Siesta Motel, and then hit a local bar and drank hard stuff.

A young female bartender told us about two Durango-to-Telluride routes — the standard way through Dolores and up the winding 145, and a more scenic way by driving up to Silverton “and then you go to Ouray.” I couldn’t quite hear with the bar noise and all, but I mostly heard the “aaay!” sound. A town? A cousin of Uday Hussein’s? “Oorraay! You go to Oorraay!”

I checked this morning with Glenn Zoller, a longtime Telluride Film Festival visitor, and he said “that’s bullshit…that way you have to go all the way up to Ridgeway and wrap all the way around…if you’re on a motorcyle and you have all the time in the world, great…but it takes forever.”

The Telluride Film Festival lineup will be revealed sometime around noon or so. I’ll try to announce the big surprises, if any, via Twitter. Twitchfilm posted a rumor last night about Carnage and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy being part of the lineup. Nobody knows anything, but I’m told this is absolute bullshit and that neither of these films will play here.

“George Clooney is here,” Zoller reports. “And Ralph Lauren‘s son” — Andrew Lauren — “is getting married Sunday to George Bush‘s niece” — model Lauren Bush — “up at Lauren’s Double RL Ranch, between here and Ridgeway. From what I hear George Bush and Bill Clinton are attending.”

I just bought this the other day. Excellent visual and sound values for a 1960 film. But they should have called this western semi-classic The Magnificent Six. Because Robert Vaughn‘s aloof, relentlessly self-regarding gunslinger does nothing throughout the entire film. He talks incessantly about his issues and how he has to prove he’s still got it. But does he even shoot his weapon? He pulls it out, yes, but does he fire? At anyone or anything?

Hollywood Elsewhere is currently sitting in Las Vegas’s McCarran Airport, waiting for a 3:05 pm flight to Albuquerque. Expecting a four-hour drive (6 pm to 10 pm) from AB to Durango, Colorado.

I understand Jack Daniels & ginger ale. I understand vodka and grapefruit juice. I understand boilermarkers. I even understand mixing clam and tomato juice. But beer and clamato? Who would even sample this, much less buy it?

The first thing you see in Las Vegas’s McCarran Airport every time you get off a Southwest flight from LAX/Burbank…every time.

The theological view of one Antonio Raimundo Montana. Which I happen to agree with.

A friend has asked for a quote about the apparent sleeper-hit status of Gavin O’Connor‘s Warrior (Lionsgate, 9.9), and specifically about whether it’ll be getting any award-season action. “Not a chance in the world for Oscar impact,” I answered. “Forget it. It’s a good film, but not that kind of film.

“It’s an emotionally rousing MMA sports flick, very intensely acted and atmospherically believable as far as it goes, but it’s very calculated. You can see and feel the buttons being pushed and the levers being cranked. It’s Gavin O’Connor making another Gavin O’Connor movie. A good one, yes, but straight off the assembly line. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

“But as I wrote on 8.2, Tom Hardy is astonishing. He really is the new reigning macho-stud tough guy, the new Schwarzenegger-Stallone-Norris-Van Damme, the charismatic big fuckin’ musclebound ape with the soul of a poet, and British to boot.

People have been talking about Nick Nolte for Best Supporting Actor, I said, but he isn’t given enough material to work with, I feel. “Please forgive me, I’m sorry, lemme be your dad again,” etc. Nolte finds this guy and gives a heartfelt performance, but there’s not enough dimension to the role. Sorry.

Hotshot Connecticut-based columnist Scott Feinberg has just signed on with The Hollywood Reporter to provide awards-season coverage. His deal was only cut a couple of days ago because Feinberg was scrambling yesterday to figure out flights to the Telluride Film Festival. Wait until 72 hours before the start of an influential, very-hard-to-get-to film festival in a remote Rocky Mountain hamlet to buy the pass and get it together? Spend top dollar to arrange transportation and lodging at the very last minute? Only way to roll.

Reviewing from the Venice Film Festival, The Playlist‘s Oliver Lyttleton has given George Clooney‘s The Ides of March a solid B. “We had a blast,” he says. “It’s not as accomplished and impassioned as Good Night and Good Luck, but unlike Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, it’s tonally assured, and unlike Leatherheads, it’s, well, watchable. Very watchable in fact.

“Whether wider audiences enjoy it as much [as I did] remains to be seen. We’re fairly sure that its early annointment as an Oscar front-runner will disappear quickly , but it at least happily confirms that Clooney-the-director is here to stay.

“Ryan Gosling caps off an extraordinary twelve months with another top turn. It really is his show, the film’s riffing on idealism really a feint for a picture about the loss of a soul.

“The script, with Clooney sidekick Grant Heslov rewriting Beau Willimon‘s play Farragut North is, if nothing else, a model of how to open up a piece of theater for the big screen. It’s witty, though lacking the zip of, say, a Sorkin, and, for all its instant messaging and Chris Matthews cameos, oddly old-fashioned, right down to the jazz singer who scores an early scene.

“Clooney makes it work here, thanks undoubtedly to dp Phedon Papamichael (Sideways), who gives a real chill to the Midwestern landscapes, and makes effective use of some Gordon Willis-esque silhouettes — although it should be said that the director overplays his ‘let’s frame the characters in front of the American flag’ a little in places. But it never feels small-scale, and fully embodies the addictive chaos of the campaign trail, something that keeps people like Gosling’s Stephen ‘married to the job,’ and that’s certainly a victory for a film like this.”

From Variety‘s Justin Chang: “Ho-hum insights into the corruption of American politics are treated like staggering revelations in The Ides of March. George Clooney’s fourth feature as a director observes the inner workings of a Democratic presidential campaign through the eyes of a hotshot press secretary who isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. Something similar could be said of this intriguing but overly portentous drama, which seems far more taken with its own cynicism than most viewers will be.

“Still, despite general-audience aversion to topical cinema, a top cast led by Ryan Gosling and Clooney could swing adult viewers in the Oct. 7 release’s direction.”