Jeffrey Wells

In his debut Deadline posting, Pete Hammond reports that he ran into Alexander Payne, director of the forthcoming The Descendants, during his trip to the Telluride Film Festival, and that Payne said “he was coming back this time as a fan just to ‘see movies.'”

George Clooney, Alexander Payne during shooting of The Descendants, in a photo taken last March.

Hammond apparently didn’t ask Payne about The Descendants, his Hawaiian dysfunctional family drama starring George Clooney, or decided not to report this if he did. I’d been holding out hope that The Descendants might be given a last-minute December release by Fox Searchlight and — who knows? — become this year’s Million Dollar Baby. 2010 is regarded as a weak year, Payne was finished shooting last April or so and there’s plenty of room for a last-minute December entry to dive in and snag attention.

If I was Payne I would be slaving away 18 hours a day with my two editors and trying to talk Fox Searchlight into a late-inning release instead of galavanting around Telluride with all the lah-lahs. That’s what you do after you’ve finished your work, not before. Life is about what you can man up and accomplish in the short time you have on this planet, and not what you can…whatever, kick back and enjoy. That’s the dilletante’s approach.

The fact that Payne is in a kick-back mode tells us The Descendants will almost certainly not be coming out this year, but I wonder if any strong films are going to parachute into the awards race four or five weeks before the end?

Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere, which will have its Venice Film Festival premiere this evening, has received its first review from the Evening Standard‘s Derek Malcolm, and it’s basically a “hmmm”-type response.

Somewhere‘s Elle Fanning, Stephen Dorff.

“Anyone expecting fireworks from Sofia Coppola after the lavish and controversial Marie Antoinette will be disappointed with Somewhere,” he begins. Fireworks?

“This quiet and restrained portrait of Hollywood star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) and his on-off relationship with his 12-year-old daughter Chloe (Elle Fanning) is not the noisy showbiz chronicle other directors might well have made it.

“Johnny, divorced, lives in a suite at the Chateau Marmont Hotel. He drives a Ferrari, can pull any girl he likes, drinks a bit too much and takes the usual pills. We first see him in bed as two nubile blondes perform a pole-dancing number. He’s too tired to do anything but watch with a lazy smile.

“He is, however, not a brash or a bad man. He accepts his life of luxury with a shrug of his shoulders, doing what’s asked of him politely and never losing his temper. When Chloe comes to visit, he tries to keep her out of harm’s way, especially when they go to Italy for a dreadful junket culminating in a Berlusconi-type TV show.

“Coppola suggests the burgeoning relationship between the two, and Johnny’s basic discontent. [But] the film has no big dramatic moments, just a series of sequences gradually making the watcher aware of just why there’s a text on Johnny’s phone stating: ‘Why are you such an arsehole?'” I’ll bet money here and now that the spelling is different in the film.

“Dorff and Fanning play naturally and well — Coppola gives them every chance. It’s an unexpected change of gear for Francis’s daughter, who says her childhood is mined in the film.” Unexpected? It’s been fairly well telegraphed that Coppola is a fan of Michelangelo Antonioni, and that Somewhere was at least somewhat influenced by his early ’60s films.

Malcolm suspects that Somewhere “may last in the memory a little more than Marie Antoinette, if not quite as long as Lost In Translation.”

The Telluride Film Festival kicks off today, but for whatever reason the website doesn’t offer a schedule. There’s a PDF slate, but it’s from last year.

“It’s thundering in Venice,” Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson tweeted a couple of hours ago. “Torrential downpour. Folks in the press room are looking out the windows as a driving storm hits the Lido. I guess I’m not taking the ferry [to the] San Marco district in the near future. I did not bring an umbrella or a raincoat.”

If I was in Venice you would see video of this rainstorm up right now. And I would buy an umbrella and go wherever I wanted. One of my best Venice memories of all is taking the Lido-to-San Marco ferry in the middle of a rainstorm. The boat was rocking, rain sprays were hitting the passenger windows, you had to grab something to keep from falling. Jett went outside to see the waves and got soaked when one splashed over the deck. It was half Michael Mann-Ernest Hemingway and half Jacques Tati .

Thompson 10:10 am Update: “[Venice Film Festival] press office was closed due to huge rain leak before I filed my Somewhere review. Doing it now.”

This is the Jerry Lewis I know, as opposed to the guy who nearly wept with gratitude when he accepted his special Oscar. The octogenarian World War II generation and the Lindsay Lohans of the world generally don’t get each other, and guys as old as Lewis (84) are usually dismissed when they talk about spanking whippersnappers. But he’s not without perspective. He’s been there, used to get loaded and chase tail, knows what goes.

Michael Joseph Gross‘s profile of Sarah Palin in the new Vanity Fair strikes me as careful, scrupulous reporting. It confirms, of course, that this woman is ugly, bestial, etc. She is Gregg Stillson, the raging nutter politician played by Martin Sheen in David Cronenberg‘s The Dead Zone. Will her followers read the piece, reconsider, etc.? Get outta town.

I was nodding at Bilge Ebiri‘s 9.2 “Vulture” piece about Steven Seagal‘s bad guy performance in Machete, which inspired thoughts of a comeback and “hey, he almost seems cool again.” I was thinking the same thing too, except I got hung up on Seagal’s hair. The guy’s 58 years oid and he’s dying it inky black, and he seems to have at least 50% more hair today than he did in the late ’80s.

I’m not saying Segal has to pull the hair plugs out, but if you don’t let a little bit of your age in when you get older you look like a putz. Smart guys tell their hairdressers to let the natural gray grow in around the temples and sideburns. And they don’t color their hair the same shade of black that Elvis Presley started going for in 1957. They let it get a little bit lighter. The basic idea is not to look like you’re dying your hair, or that you’ve got plugs that are denser than a piece of rubber off a Michelin steel-belted radial. And why do older guys’ fake hairlines get lower as they get older? They should recede a bit, no? For realism’s sake, I mean.

Set stills are one thing, but Seagal’s hair looks like a solid helmet in the film, all colored and gunked down with hairspray.

Warner Bros. will stage a Boston premiere of Ben Affleck‘s The Town at Fenway Park on 8 pm on Tuesday, 9.14. A 50-foot-tall screen out in center field, one presumes, plus digital projection and sound that can be heard as far as Revere. Affleck and costars Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Blake Lively and Chris Cooper will walk out on the diamond and take bows like the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

I’m posting Ayz Waraich‘s This Place I Hurt To Be, a six-minute short, because it’s well made and compellingly acted by Stephen L. Sullivan and Jessica James, and nicely shot by Drew Suppa. But it’s also cool that Vimeo is now providing embed codes that are viewable on iPhones and iPads. 5:32 pm Update: I just checked and it works on my iPhone.

THIS PLACE I HURT TO BE from Ayz Waraich on Vimeo.

The 70mm Todd AO version of Oklahoma! (top) was shot separately from the 35 mm version, which is what most general audiences saw when it was released in 1955. The Todd AO version, shot in 30 frames per second, looked pretty good on the old laser disc, but the elements had gone south by the time the 2005 DVD came out. For some reason a DVD rendering of this version was included, and it looks like hell.

The responsibility for this long-gone loss is with 20th Century Fox home video, although it wasn’t Shawn Belston‘s fault. (He wasn’t running the show back then.) The elements of 30-frame Todd AO version of Around the World in 80 Days are also deteriorated and shot to hell. Therefore the only two films in mainstream Hollywood history that were shot in 30 frame Todd AO are complete toast. Congratulations to those responsible.

The menu for the new Forbidden Planet Bluray is the most stirring thing about it. I’ve seen never actually seen this sci-fi cult classic start to finish, only portions here and there, but to go the distance is to tap your fingers and roll your eyes. Okay, it’s mildly arresting now and then. The docs and extras pick up the slack to some extent.