My first impression of Tom Harper‘s The Aeronauts (Amazon, 12.6.19) was one of dismay and disappointment. Why, I asked myself, is Telluride screening an implausible, broad-brush fantasy adventure, based on an actual 19th Century hot-air balloon feat but nonetheless fictionalized to showcase the bravery of an imagined female lead…why is Telluride screening this for serious cineastes when it was obviously made for the family crowd?

Everything about The Aeronauts seems tailored to the lowest-common-denominator ADD demo. Every line and scene is aimed at the peanut gallery. Every potential risk and thrill element (almost falling out of the passenger basket, climbing up the side of a balloon in frigid weather) struck me as cartoonishly crude and exaggerated. The recreations of early 1860s London felt about as genuinely atmospheric as the depictions of mid 1930s London in Mary Poppins Returns, which is to say “pass the crackerjack.” It all feels like a movie — a show for the shmoes.

The Aeronauts is, however, based on a historic 1862 balloon voyage by James Glaisher (played by Eddie Redmayne) and Henry Coxwell.

Departing from Wolverhampton in England’s West Midlands district, the team broke the world flight altitude record that day by reaching about 11,887 meters, or 38,999 feet. Glaisher blacked out somewhere around 29,000 feet. The cold caused Coxwell to lose all sensation in his hands, but he nonetheless managed to pull the balloon’s valve cord with his teeth before losing consciousness. The balloon landed safely in Ludlow, about 34 miles southwest of Wolverhampton.

Harper’s film, co-written with Jack Thorne, sticks to the basic story but jettisons Coxwell for a fictionalized female balloonist, Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones). Except Wren isn’t that fictionalized as she’s based on two 19th Century adventurers — French aeronaut Sophie Blanchard and the British-born Margaret Graham.

Wren’s relationship with late husband Pierre (an Aeronauts backstory) is chiefly based on Sophie Blanchard’s flights with husband Jean-Pierre Blanchard, while Pierre’s death is inspired by that of Thomas Harris on 5.25.24.

I hadn’t done much research before seeing The Aeronauts, but since the greatest perils that befall the voyage are thin air and frigid temps, the viewer naturally wonders why the balloonists decide to ascend six or seven miles into the heavens. They had to know they’d be venturing into harm’s way.

I’ve just come out of what may have been the most uncomfortable screening of my entire theatrical moviegoing life.

I’m not talking about the film I saw — Fernando Meirelles‘ The Two Popes, an engagingly thoughtful, well-written, occasionally comedic relationship drama about Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) and Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce). I’m talking about the arctic frigidaire climate inside Telluride’s Galaxy theatre.

The house was filled with warm bodies, but I was all but unable to focus on the film because I was trembling and hugging myself to death. I was half watching the Popes while my other half couldn’t stop dreaming about pleasuring myself with a winter coat and scarf, or a goose down quilt. I’m sorry but that’s what happened.

I finally caught Noah Baumbach‘s Marriage Story Saturday evening. With all the buzz I was more or less expecting the moon, I suppose, but I wasn’t disappointed. It didn’t quite melt me down like Kramer vs. Kramer did 40 years ago, but it sure softened me up. Which it to say I felt “met” on adult terra firma, and within a fully recognizable realm.

It’s more Ingmar Bergman than Robert Benton-esque. But sensibly so. Like all fine, steady, smart films that open between October and December, Marriage Story delivers the goods in a way that seems to fundamentally apply. It’s “one of those.” And I didn’t think of it as Black Widow vs. Kylo Ren. Well, if their defenses were considerably lessened.

I felt vaguely unsure where it was going or what it was up to a couple of times, but I mainly felt like I was in good, safe hands — gripped, touched, respectful, comfortable (because it never goes crazy or overly dark, it never breaks the trust) and always recognizing the truth of what’s on the plate.

Marriage Story is easily Baumbach’s best film, above and beyond The Squid and the Whale, and surely contains the best, most fully felt, deep-from-within performances that Adam Driver and Scarlet Johansson have given thus far. It’ll be really, really difficult for them to top this.

Best Picture nom, Best Director/Original Screenplay noms (Baumbach), Best Actor and Actress (Driver, ScarJo) and maybe a Best Supporting Actress nom for Laura Dern because of a single, third-act rant she delivers about society’s unfair attitudes toward women in terms of idealized “male gaze” expectations, and probably a nomination for composer Randy Newman.

The costar performances are just right — Azhy Robertson as Henry, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta as attorneys with radically different styes, Merritt Wever, Julie Hagerty, et. al.

It’s an honestly felt, emotionally complex (and sometimes convulsive) marital-downswirl drama, but with a rather middle (moneyed) class attitude…acrimony tempered by sensible sensibilities. Fundamentally decent people with the usual issues and shortcomings, but nobody’s a raving lunatic Nobody throws up or gets busted in some lewd, embarassing infidelity or throws a frying pan or drives a car off a bridge or runs naked into a traffic jam.

Driver and ScarJo are the married, Brooklyn-residing Charlie and Nicole, the latter a successful theatre director and the former his star performer who feels overshadowed by Charlie’s egocentric attitudes and looking to possibly re-launch her acting career in Los Angeles with a promising TV series.

From this point on, no semi-hip person will be able to contemplate, discuss or even tap out a tweet about Joker without dealing with the side-issue that stubbornly refuses to go away…incels!

The only disappointment of Telluride ‘19 that comes to mind is Tom and Julie’s curious decision not to screen it. Seriously, why didn’t they? It’s the thing to see right now.

(a) …that I’ve missed the 1 pm Chuck Jones showing of Fernando Meirelles‘ The Two Popes. Now, if I want to be vigilant, I’ll have to catch it tomorrow morning at 9:30, except that’s when I need to file;
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(b) …that every time a hurricane approaches the news networks always insist upon trying to amplify or otherwise whip up the fear over actual threat levels. It’s partly about responsibility (people should know the hard facts and act responsibly) and partly selling fear. People always tune in when afraid, and the news guys are always ready to sell the shit out of the possibility of death and destruction;

(c) …that I have a hole in the left pocket of my tight black jeans, and that when I forget and drop some coins in regardless (because I’m absent-minded) it always seems to take a good ten minutes for all the coins to work their way down my leg and out onto the sidewalk;

(d) …that all three of my pocket combs (primary plus two back-ups) fell out of my rear pocket of my unlucky white jeans yesterday, and now I’m combless until I can find a store that sells them (which is no easy feat if you know Telluride).

(e) …and for this:

“Many have asked, and with good reason: Do we need another Joker movie? Yet what we do need — badly — are comic-book films that have a verité gravitas, that unfold in the real world, so that there’s something more dramatic at stake than whether the film in question is going to rack up a billion-and-a-half dollars worldwide.

“Joker manages the nimble feat of telling the Joker’s origin story as if it were unprecedented. We feel a tingle when Bruce Wayne comes into the picture; he’s there less as a force than an omen. And we feel a deeply deranged thrill when Arthur, having come out the other side of his rage, emerges wearing smeary make-up, green hair, an orange vest and a rust-colored suit.

“When he dances on the long concrete stairway near his home, like a demonic Michael Jackson, it’s a moment of transcendent insanity, because he’s not trying to be ‘the Joker.’ He’s just improvising, going with the flow of his madness.

“And when he gets his fluky big shot to go on TV, we think we know what’s going to happen (that he’s destined to be humiliated), but what we see, instead, is a monster reborn with a smile. And lo and behold, we’re on his side. Because the movie does something that flirts with danger == it gives evil a clown-mask makeover, turning it into the sickest possible form of cool.” — from Owen Gleiberman‘s 8.31.19 Variety review.

Adam Sandler is completely immersed in the manic mode of an insatiable edge-junkie gambler in Josh and Benny Safdie‘s Uncut Gems. For this is a hyper, hammerhead experience that, unlike Karl Reisz and James Toback‘s The Gambler or Abel Ferrara‘s Bad Lieutenant, has zero interest in looking or reaching beyond the hustling mood-rush aspects of his character’s wildly self-destructive addiction.

It’s all frenzy, all movement, all “no, wait…you know I’m good for it” or “no, man, c’mon…I put the bet down before that shit happened.” He owes, he bullshits, he runs around, he bullshits some more….homina homina bullshit bullshit junkie highs flashing as the walls move in closer and closer.

If you know anything about the gambling disease you know it’s never about winning — it’s about the rush journey…the bolt, the buzz and the tasting of doom and salvation in the exact same breath. It is therefore hugely exasperating to sit through because the Safdies don’t want to go anywhere. A certain thing happens at the very end, and when it did I immediately muttered “thank God.”

Rupert Goold‘s Judy is a servicable, mildly approvable portrait of a major talent in decline and disarray, but a lot some of it feels a bit slow and middling. But Renee Zellweger‘s performance as the withered but still spirited songbird Judy Garland, who tragically passed in London from an accidental drug overdose at age 47, will almost certainly result in a Best Actress nomination. The film is worth seeing for Zellweger and Zellweger alone.

Judy star Renee Zellweger during yesterday’s Telluride Film Festival brunch.

Ford v. Ferrari director James Mangold may not want to admit this but his film, which roars into highly pleasurable third-act overdrive during its depiction of the 1966 Le Mans race, owes a huge nostalgic debt to Steve McQueen‘s Le Mans (’71).

Shot in the summer and early fall of’70, Le Mans was an all-around calamity — box-office failure, critically drubbed (the atmosphere and versimilitude are top-notch but it’s a frustrating film in other respects) and a kind of spiritual end-of-the-road experience for McQueen himself.

Nonetheless the annual Le Mans races during that era (mid ’60s to early ’70s) are owned and imprinted by the McQueen legend, and if I’d been in Mangold’s shoes I would have inserted a very quick, very fleeting glimpse of McQueen’s Michael Delaney character…maybe driving, maybe hanging around, maybe watching from the stands. Just a little tap-on-the-shoulder acknowledgment.

Posted on 10.1.15: “Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans may seem at first glance like a standard nostalgia piece about the making of McQueen’s 1971 race-car pic, which flopped critically and commercially. (I own the Bluray but I’ve barely watched it — the racing footage is authentic but the movie underwhelms.) Yes, in some ways the doc feels like one of those DVD/Bluray ‘making of’ supplements, but it soon becomes evident that Clarke and McKenna are up to something more ambitious.

“What their film is about, in fact, is the deflating of McQueen the ’60s superstar — about the spiritual drainage caused by the argumentative, chaotic shoot during the summer and early fall of ’70, and by McQueen’s stubborn determination to make a classic race-car movie that didn’t resort to the usual Hollywood tropes, and how this creative tunnel-vision led to the rupturing of relationships both personal (his wife Neile) and professional (McQueen’s producing partner Robert Relyea, director John Sturges), and how McQueen was never quite the same zeitgeist-defining hotshot in its wake.”

Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg on Christian Bale and Ford v. Ferrari. “If Fox can convince its stars and Oscar voters that [Christian] Bale is actually a supporting actor in the film, then he could be a contender. If Bale and Matt Damon wind up pitted in the same category, however, my hunch is neither will make it.”

HE reply: If Academy voters can be convinced that Olivia Colman was delivering a lead performance in The Favourite and (reaching back almost four decades) that Ordinary People‘s Timothy Hutton, whose psychologically burdened Conrad Jarret character was the be-all and end-all of that film and who appeared in each and every scene, gave a supporting performance…if they buy this horseshit, they can be convinced of anything.

But there’s another angle here, and that’s that Bale’s Ken Miles, the late British race-car driver, is not doing anything especially new or head-turning here. He’s playing yet another variation of the same asocial skeezy guy that he played in The Fighter and The Big Short. Bale is constitutionally incapable of playing smooth, measured, steady-as-they-go guys who don’t glare or twitch or scrunch their face up or bulge their neck veins…okay, maybe this isn’t fair as Bale does turn it down here and there in Mangold’s film. But Bale will always exude a kind of curious, facial-flicky weirdness, and I’m saying this as a huge, hyuuuge admirer of his Dick Cheney.

Sidenote: Bale’s all-time biggest career mistake was wearing mandals in The Big Short. When I saw his big, protuberant man-toes in that film I went “ohhhh, no…please!!!”

Spot-on Feinberg: “Not to suggest all car racing movies are the same or will be regarded as such in the awards season, but I suspect that Ford v. Ferrari will ultimately enjoy a trajectory fairly similar to Ron Howard‘s Rush (’13), for which a supporting actor (Daniel Bruhl) got a lot of heat, including Critics’ Choice, BAFTA, Golden Globe and SAG noms, but ultimately came up a bit short with the Academy in all categories.”

Grind it all down, hash into mulch, throw into blender, add hamburger helper, make into spicy vegetable patties.