I observed three and half years ago that Douglas Sirk was mostly dismissed by critics of the ’50s and early ’60s for making films that were no more and no less than what they seemed to be — i.e., emotionally dreary, visually lush melodramas about repressed women suffering greatly through crises of the heart as they struggled to maintain tidy, ultra-proper appearances. I said this in a short piece called “Respectful Sirk Takedown,” but only because I felt that the cultists had taken things too far. I respect the bright fellows who claim that Sirk’s films deliver covert social criticism along with the trademark grandiose emotional sweep (or whatever you want to call it), but that ’50s soap-opera vibe sends me into spasms and I really can’t stand spending much time with the older, drearier versions of Lana Turner or Jane Wyman.

After arriving in Telluride around 4pm I checked into the Mountainside Inn — the only poor man’s hotel in this almost oppressively upscale resort community — and watched two or three hours of the coverage of the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. A deeply moving occasion in many ways. I was half-watching and half-writing, but I somehow began to melt when one of the MSNBC guys played this tape of Peter, Paul and Mary. There’s something so touchingly innocent and open-hearted and Llewyn Davis-y about this song, and the way they sing it. Especially Mary Travers. I didn’t even know she’d passed. Complications from lukemia in 2009.

Tomorrow starts with the Patron’s Brunch in the mid-morning. (Unless it gets rained out.) The first film of the day will be J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost (which I can’t wait to see again) at the Werner Herzog cinema. Then it’s a toss-up between the 6:30 pm Robert Redford tribute at the Palm at 6:30 pm or The Lunchbox at 6 pm. The final screening is Errol Morris‘s The Unknown Known at 9 pm at the Sheridan Opera House.

Thursday and Friday screening rundown for the 2013 Telluride Film Festival.

I’m not saying that Telluride ’13 is going to be as monsoony as Cannes was three and a half months ago, but a thunderstorm is coming down now and the Friday-to-Sunday forecast is for scattered showers. I’m just sitting here by an open window inside my cramped unit at the Mountainside Inn, digging the rain and watching Rachel Maddow and…whatever, thinking about taking a walk and maybe getting some dinner. No pressure. Where will tomorrow morning’s elite outdoor brunch happen if the rain continues?

This morning Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg posted a rundown of leading Oscar contenders in the major categories. The usual suspects, nothing that new, an underlining of conventional wisdom. The subhead boasts that Feinberg’s early-bird 2012 projections “foresaw 8 of the 9 eventual best picture nominees, as well as the eventual best actor and best actress winners.” The thing that stood out for me is Feinberg’s stabbing poor Fruitvale Station between the ribs by calling it one of the Best Picture “possibilities.” Please, Mr. and Mrs. Academy Member — don’t let the conventional wisdom crowd take this little movie down. The fact that it hasn’t earned all that much from Joe and Jane Popcorn doesn’t mean squat in the overall scheme.

I read about the Telluride lineup when I touched down in Pheonix, but there wasn’t time to plug in and post a riff. Almost every film I predicted would be here is playing here (All Is Lost, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Gravity, Inside Llewyn Davis, Labor Day, Nebraska, The Invisible Woman, Under the Skin). The exception is 12 Years A Slave, but that’ll be one of the three TBA add-ons — trust me. There’s also Errol Morris‘s The Unknown Known, the Donald Rumsfeld doc. Plus Ritesh Batra‘s The Lunchbox, Gia Coppola‘s Palo Alto, Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa‘s Milius, the opening of the Werner Herzog theatre, tributes to Robert Redford and T Bone Burnett and the Coen brothers, conversations between Bruce Dern and Leonard Maltin. Plus Don DeLillo, author of Libra and one of the great American novelists, is here…wow.

There’s no relation between the fact that I’m sitting inside a McDonald’s (free wifi!) at Burbank Airport at 5:20 am, and the fact that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity has premiered to rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival. But there’s no harm in just stating facts. Here’s Justin Chang’s Variety review…over the moon. Significant sentence: “As visual an experience as the film is, it would be far less effective without the exceptional sound work by production mixer Chris Munro and sound designer Glenn Freemantle, which makes especially potent use of silence in accordance with the laws of outer-space physics.” Dozens if not hundreds of second- and third-rate filmmakers who’ve worked on mediocre space-adventure flicks are scratching their heads as we speak. A potent use of silence, observing laws of outer-space physics? This might work for a high-falutin’ film festival movie like Gravity, but generally speaking popcorn-eaters want to hear stuff in space movies. You know…booms, whushes, pyoom-pyooms.

It’s a little bit ballsy, I think, of Focus Features to approve this one-sheet for Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyers Club (11.1) as the blurry image of what I presume is Matthew McConaughey‘s face obviously flirts with the macabre. The film is a true-life tale about a guy (Ron Woodruff) who saved himself from an AIDS death for years by smuggling non-approved medications into the U.S. McConaughey is wearing black shades, of course, but he looks like the man who’s found dead in his pajamas in Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds with his eyes pecked out. Big black sockets. The poster is clearly saying “whoever and whatever this cowboy-hatted guy is, he’s got one foot on the gallows and the other on a banana peel.”

I’m told it’s not going, but this would also be a good choice for the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, which kicks off the day after tomorrow. An obvious Best Actor push for Matthew McConaughey could obviously use Telluride buzz to start things off. The Jean-Marc Vallee-directed drama will play the Toronto Film Festival for sure, and then Focus Features will release it on 11.1.

A friend has just passed along talk about Jonathan Glazer‘s Under The Skin playing the 2013 Telluride Film Festival. Maybe. Possibly. Who knows? The film will definitely play at the Venice Film Festival on 9.3, or a day after Telluride wraps.

Scarlet Johansson plays a dark-haired alien who dresses like Bayonne mall trash circa 1983. If you want to talk superficials Johansson’s character — Isserley is her alien name, Laura her earth name — has more kinship to the Kanamits in the famous Twilight Zone episode called “To Serve Man” than to David Bowie‘s character in The Man Who Fell To Earth. But the themes, derived from Michael Faber’s 13-year-old novel, are allegedly more complex than just “alien hottie looking to scoop up hitchhikers so they can fattened up and eaten by her employers.”

In a 5.2.12 Variety interview, Johansson told Stephen Schaefer that “I’ve never been in a movie where the logline of the movie, where the plot has been so twisted. It’s crazy. ‘Are you eating people on the side of the road?’ I’m like, ‘No, no!’ Okay, yes, I do play an alien who is wearing my own skin. But it’s actually not a science-fiction film. It’s sort of a film that asks existential questions and much more complex than the logline.”

Closed Circuit (Focus Features, 8.28) is an intelligent, moderately suspenseful, British-made melodrama (and not really a “courtroom drama”, despite what some reviewers are saying) about domestic terrorism and morally derelict higher-ups. The latter prove their dastardly mettle in Act Three by pursuing the once-romantically-linked barristers (Eric Bana, Rebecca Hall) who are onto the Big Secret that no one can know about…all right, no spoilers. But the fact that these two get chased down some dark streets underscores the basic movie maxim that (a) if you stumble onto some Really Shocking Information and (b) indicate that you may spill it, the bad guys will definitely try and ice your ass.

We all know the name of that tune, don’t we?

It’s conceivable that three 2013 films about the African-American experience in this country will snag a Best Picture nomination — Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (which runs 134 minutes), Lee Daniels‘ The Butler (technically known as Lee Daniels’ The Butler) and Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale Station. But it’s more likely that only one will really compete. Because there’s an assumption out there, possibly influenced by a benignly racist mindset, that only one black film can be nominated for Best Picture and that if all three push hard they could end up cannibalizing each other.

Maybe it’s not such a racist thing. If there were three big-scale superhero films opening this year that were thought to be as good (or almost as good) as The Dark Knight, only one would make any headway as a Best Picture contender…right? (People would say, “Oh, come on…we can’t have two superhero movies competing for Best Picture…please!”) Same thing if there were three first-rate dramedies about women involved in tough competitive urban careers — only one would be singled out for possible Best Picture consideration. And so on.