The pugnacious, raspy-voiced Jon Polito, whom I always found a distinctive if somewhat overbearing performer, particularly in his Coen Brothers roles (Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There), has passed at age 65. Sorry. I wish that just once he had played (or that I had seen him play) a calm, mellow type who never yelled. I never knew Polito was openly gay — hilarious. His career got rolling in ’81. He worked like a sonuvabitch on television. Big voiceover guy — he voiced “Conquedor” in the 2011 TV series Thundercats. I sometimes thought of him as am angrier, less thoughtful Danny De Vito. I even had an idea they were roughly the same size…wrong. De Vito is 4′ 10″ — Polito was 5′ 8″.

Having experienced the trauma of last year’s “damp, windswept, bone-chilling Telluride Film Festival patron’s brunch,” I’m thinking I might sidestep the 2016 version, which some are lining up for as we speak. It’s damp and gray out there, and it was flat-out raining an hour or so ago. The special patron’s screening, 2:30 pm at the Chuck Jones theatre, will be La La Land, I’ve been told. Added: There’s a Frank Marshall-produced doc, Finding Oscar, screening tomorrow afternoon, about a “search for justice in the case of the Dos Erres massacre of the ’80s,” etc. 11:05 am Update: Now it’s sunny — maybe I’ll hit the brunch after all.

I truly regretted missing Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle at the end of last May’s Cannes Film Festival. (It’s not like I didn’t ask repeatedly about rue d’Antibes market screenings or any chance to catch it early….stonewall.) Just about every critic loved it. Why isn’t it playing Telluride? It pops a few days hence in Toronto.

I was hugely irked yesterday afternoon, sitting on a doorstep on Telluride’s Colorado Avenue as I berated those Booking.com bozos on a Skype line. I hadn’t eaten anything, the iPhone 6 Plus couldn’t be repaired (the thought of not being able to snap any photos during this festival distress me to no end), the iPhone rental was a no-go, and I’d missed the deadline to pick up my press pass. And then a pretty lady slowed and leaned down and patted my recently bought saddle shoes and gave me a thumbs-up as she kept walking. Thank you. And then Telluride’s press rep Shannon Goodwin Mitchell walked by and saw me sitting there all cranky and pissed off and reached into a bag and gave me my Telluride pass pass…thanks! And then Sasha Stone pulled up with my wallet, which she’d retrieved at the Dolores Mountain Inn. And then four or five hours later I was sitting in Glenn Zoller‘s big, comfortable, well-lighted kitchen and enjoying a Grateful Dead track for the first time in eons. Glenn was listening to KOTO, the local cool-cat FM station, and all of a sudden Bob Weir singing “Satisfaction” put me in the greatest mood. On the worst days the nicest things can happen out of the blue.

Telluride’s vp public relations Shannon Mitchell during last year’s rain-soaked picnic.

Something about Tom Ford‘s Nocturnal Animals hasn’t quite rung Owen Gleiberman’s bell. Some tingly little itch that hasn’t been scratched in the right way. It’s not that he dislikes it, far from it, but it’s not as good, he says, as Blue Velvet or In The Bedroom. And yet he’s calling it “a suspenseful and intoxicating movie — a thriller that isn’t scared to go hog-wild with violence, to dig into primal fear and rage, even as it’s constructed around a melancholy love story that circles back on itself in tricky and surprising ways.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals.

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw, on the other hand, has totally flipped for it. “There’s a double-shot of horror and Nabokovian despair in this outrageously gripping and absorbing meta mystery-thriller,” he writes. “It’s a movie with a double-stranded narrative — a story about a fictional story which runs alongside — and it pulls off the considerable trick of making you care about both equally, something I think The French Lieutenant’s Woman never truly managed.

“Clive James once wrote that talk about ‘levels of reality’ never properly acknowledges that one of these levels is really real. That probably holds true. But in Nocturnal Animals, these levels are equally powerful, and have an intriguingly queasy and potent interrelation.

Gleiberman: “With Amy Adams as a posh, married, but deeply lonely Los Angeles artist, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the novelist from her past who finds himself trapped in a nightmare, the movie has two splendid actors working at the top of their game, and more than enough refined dramatic excitement to draw awards-season audiences hungry for a movie that’s intelligent and sensual at the same time.”

Nocturnal Animals, which apparently didn’t make the cut at Telluride but will screen in Toronto next week, “seizes and holds you — with its suspense, and its vision. It leaves no doubt as to Ford’s fervor and originality as a director, and it leaves you hoping that he’ll make his next film before another seven years passes by.”

Today the battery on my iPhone 6 Plus died. By that I mean it wouldn’t take a charge. I first noticed it during the Denver-to-Durango flight. I drove right over to a Durango cell phone repair store and bought a new battery, and then that one died. The newbie had a 48% charge when I bought it, and it went right down to less than 6% over the next 45 minutes despite constant charging. No Google Maps, no phone calls, no music…nothing. Right now the phone is sitting in a tech boutique called Hub Telluride, where they’ll be trying to fix it tomorrow morning. As a temp-save measure they put my SIM card into a $25-per-day iPhone 5 rental, but then they discovered that phone had been locked by a previous customer with “find my iPhone” software.

No iPhone in Telluride means no after-the-fact editing, not checking Twitter as much, less filing, a little behind the eight ball. Not good. If it’s truly, finally dead I can’t replace it until I’m in Manhattan on Tuesday evening or early Wednesday.

And then I temporarily lost my wallet during the drive from Durango to Telluride. I stopped at a small hotel in Dolores so I could use their wifi to make a couple of Skype calls with, and I left my wallet in the hotel lobby. I do dumb shit like this when I’m upset and distracted. I called the hotel when I got to Telluride and lo and behold they had it, cash and all. A three and 1/2 hour round trip (Telluride to Dolores and back) awaited that evening, and then I thought of Sasha Stone, who at the time was driving north in her SUV from Southern Colorado. I called and asked her to drop by the hotel (everyone drives by the Dolores Mountain Inn) and pick it up. And she did. Sasha!

But more grief was in store. The geniuses at Booking.com never sent me any instructions about how to get into the two-bedroom condo at 350 So. Mahoney, which I initially rented last March. I paid $1600 and change for this sucker, and when I got here there was no way to get in, and the Booking.com agents (who work out of China) didn’t have any good phone numbers for the condo owners. They actually sent me a letter late this afternoon stating that the owners don’t want to accommodate me and I’m out of luck. And then they tried to put me into a Red Lion hotel in Montrose, Colorado. This is what happens when your booking agent lives in Shanghai.

Producer Glenn Zoller, who has a home here, took pity and gave me a bed for tonight, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Women rarely give me the once-over when I’m roaming around Los Angeles. They duck my glances like champs. I used to be a combination of Peter O’Toole in What’s New Pussycat and Michael Fassbender in Shame, but those days are over. I’m past my sell-by date and I know it. But early this afternoon in Durango I was smiled or winked at three times, I swear, by mildly attractive 40ish women and a couple of ladies actually struck up a conversation with me in an airport diner. Women grin at no one in Los Angeles. They’re guarded and picky, and who can blame them? But today in Durango was like a time-machine visit back to 1985, and it felt kind of great. Okay, two of the smiles happened inside a Walmart. And it has to be acknowledged that Durango is kind of a downmarket place. A fair portion of the women look a little worse for wear. A little too much smoking and drinking, bad foods, not working out. Not a happy place. You can half-sense how hard it’s been. Loads of Trump-Pence signs.

10:42 pm in cool, almost chilly Telluride after waking up at 4 am in Los Angeles, and enduring a hugely stressful day. If it weren’t for a Red Bull I just chugged, I wouldn’t be able to write much. I need to crash and maybe write a bit more at between 6 and 8 am. There’s a hoity-toity Telluride hotshot party happening right now near the NE corner of Galena and Fir. Tom Hanks is here for Sully but what about Clint? Deflecting, gunshy Casey Affleck is sitting for a couple of tributes prior to screenings of Manchester By The Sea, which I don’t think I can see here. Too much going on. I’m not even seeing Sully tomorrow. The flicks start around 2:30 or 3 pm with the Patron’s screening at the Chuck Jones, followed by Bleed For This at 6:15 pm, Moonlight at 8 pm and finally La La Land at 10:15 pm. That’s a full day. Right now I feel like Peter O’Toole after he brought Gasim out of the Nefud.

It hit me a while ago that I’ve failed to post a reaction to Derek Cianfrance‘s The Light Between Oceans (Disney, 9.2). Now that I’m packing and attending to last-minute stuff I’m not sure I have the time. Or the will. Maybe on tomorrow morning’s flight to Denver? Or I could just blow it off. Okay, I’ll push something out now.

I’m not feeling much beyond what everyone else is feeling or saying — an impressive first hour or so, a bit morose but well-rendered, and then the film goes full-hurt crazy, the wrong move, tears streaming or held back, stunned, swallowed up, “oh what to do”? A guilt-and-suffer opera.

Michael Fassbender is fine (grim, fully committed, extra-solemn) but he’s still Fassbender. A heaving, pull-out-the-stops performance by Alicia Vikander that makes you want to cower at times. Rachel Weitz‘s performance is all-in but measured. She never turns the spigot on full blast.

The mesmerizing cinematography by Adam Arkapaw and the fleet editing by Jim Helton and Ron Patane are the two finest elements. You could just watch this thing without listening to it, and you wouldn’t have the slightest trouble following the story. That’s a sign of strong cinema, no?

Just because Nora Ephron owns these words doesn’t mean I can’t buy a rectangular chunk of wood with these very words stencilled with white letters (which I did at Book Soup late this afternoon) and then take it home and hang it on my wall. There are probably very few people out there who believe in these words more than I. Hollywood Elsewhere is a daily…hell, an hourly embodiment.

A 4:15 am wake-up (less than 13 hours from now), 5 am taxi (Uber?) to Burbank, 7 am flight to Denver, 11:25 am Denver to Durango flight, out of the parking lot by 1 pm or thereabouts, an easy two-and-a-half-hour drive to Telluride…no hurry or worry. Snag press pass by 4 pm, hit the local market, unpack at the condo, etc.

From Pamela Pianezza’s 8.30 Variety review: “A disturbingly relevant snapshot of contemporary tensions, Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama observes in minute detail how a small group plans and executes a series of terror attacks in Paris before retreating to a luxurious department store. These aren’t your garden-variety extremists, but a mix of people of different ages and origins, which makes this sure-to-be-controversial treatment all the more provocative.

“Working from a nerve-racking script written five years ago — long before the wave of attacks that started in France on 1.7.15, with the Charlie Hebdo shooting — Bonello replies to the news with a magnetic and purely cinematic gesture that may have frightened the Cannes Film Festival selection committee (the touchy film was ready in time for the May edition), but should spark a wide range of reactions when it screens at the Toronto and San Sebastian film festivals, following its domestic opening in France on 8.31.”