The mark of an insufficiently skilled singer is to allow your listeners to hear you suck in air before your phrasings. Singers need huge lungfuls of the stuff, of course — the point is to not make a lot of noise as you acquire it. If you’re singing “The Star Spangled Banner,” as Amber Riley just did before the Democratic Convention in Charlotte, you don’t want to start with “Owayghh!…oh-hoh say can you see…?”

I felt moved but irritated and occasionally infuriated by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s The Central Park Five, a PBS-funded doc about the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case and the five Harlem youths who were wrongly found guilty of the crimes and imprisoned for years — a travesty. I saw the two-hour film yesterday afternoon at the Telluride Film Festival and subsequently discussed it during yesterday’s Oscar Poker podcast.

I could write thousands of words about this but let’s just deal with the basics and my problems with the doc.

The Central Park Jogger case was about (a) an assault and rape of Trisha Meili, at the time a 29 year-old Wall Street worker, on 4.19.89, and (b) five coerced and nonsensical video-taped confessions by four innocent black males in their mid teens — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise. (A fifth suspect, Yusef Salaam, “made verbal admissions but refused to sign a confession or make one on videotape,” the Wiki page says.)

There was no proof that the youths were guilty, certainly not from any DNA. The guilty party, a convicted rapist and murderer named Matias Reyes, confessed to the rape in ’02. But the kids having idiotically confessed (even though they recanted a few weeks later) sealed their fate, and they all did serious prison time and had their lives half-ruined. If anyone deserves to be financially compensated for a perversion of justice, it’s these guys. Their lawsuit is currently unresolved. But I was still bothered by the following:

Question #1: It was one thing when one mentally challenged defendant in the West Memphis Three case confessed to having killed three boys, but the mind reels at the idea of four guys who weren’t mentally challenged confessing to the Central Park rape, and with their parents or guardians in the room! Four kids plus four guardian/parents — that’s eight instances of massive stupidity. The kids had been grilled and pressured by NYPD detectives because they’d been involved in a “wilding” incident that same night in which a gang of about 30 kids from their general neighborhood had randomly attacked and beaten up a couple of victims inside the park. But the absurdity of four kids confessing en masse to something they didn’t do because they were tired and wanted to go home is mind-boggling. And the filmmakers barely touch this. It is simply explained that the confessions were coerced. Madness.

Question #2: Why the hell was the victim, Trisha Meili, jogging in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm? I know New York City and that is flat-out insane. A sensible single woman shouldn’t jog in Central Park after dusk, period, much less above 96th street, much less above friggin’ 100th street. The only thing she didn’t do was drape a sign over her jogging outfit that said “attack me.” Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. And no one in the film, not a single soul, even mentions this.

Question #3: The five unjustly convicted youths were not blameless angels, although the film tries to indicate this. They were part of a roving gang that was harassing and beating the crap out of anyone they happened to encounter. The five say in the film that they were just watching this activity and going “wow,” but I don’t believe in my gut they were just onlookers. It was the metaphor of a sizable gang of black kids hurting victims at random and the inflaming of this by the media and politicians that got the five convicted as much as anything else, and I resented the film trying to sidestep the likelihood that they were bad-ass teenagers at the time who were up to no good.

Question #4: Not only does Trishna Meili not speak to the filmmakers, but a photo of her isn’t even used, despite her having written a book, “I Am The Central Park Jogger.” Her injuries were so severe and traumatizing that she’s never been able to remember the incident, but to not even explain the whys and wherefores of her absence from the film seems strange. She may not have wanted to be in the film, okay, but why not at least explain that? And why wouldn’t she want to be in the film if she’d written a book about the attack and her recovery? The film doesn’t even run a pertinent quote or two from her book. Incomplete and irksome.

I wasn’t initially enthusiastic about visiting the Telluride Film Festival. Concerns about work and other problems made it difficult to settle down about flying to a secluded canyon town, seven hours southwest of Denver, to watch movies for three days that only included one “sneak” (which turned out to be Argo). I couldn’t understand why hundreds of people from around the world would put up with 45 minutes of air-pocket turbulence in a tiny plane for this festival. But then I arrived.

Telluride doesn’t feel like Sundance or Toronto. There aren’t any flashing cameras, red carpets or lavish parties; just flocks of rich white people in North Face clothing enjoying themselves. It’s also beautiful and serene every time you walk out of a theater and gaze at the arching peaks a mile or so away. That said, I saw ten movies, and came out really bananas for only five.

I had a wonderful time with Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha and Ziad Douieri‘s The Attack, but for completely different reasons. I didn’t know anything about Douieri, and a critic we spoke to confided that he sensed in Frances Ha a slightly possessive boyfriend element, as Baumbach and star Greta Gerwig are a couple. But that didn’t materialize, and Gerwig’s lead performance felt like the most genuine I was ever going to see from her — it was perfect.

Frances Ha has a floating Brooklyn mumblecore pace and vibe, and is about a 27-year old dancer (Gerwig) who is lost when her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner, daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler), falls in with a rich boyfriend.

You can’t help but compare to HBO Girls, but it’s not that at all. It’s not about gross, uncomfortable-to-watch-sex; Baumbach already accomplished that with Greenberg. The writing is sublime, really tight and filled with pockets of hilarious improvised dialogue. The whole house was giggling and adoring Gerwig despite dealing with a 20-minute delay wen the film began without the center dialogue track.

The Attack, on the other hand, hits you in the gut and opens you up to perhaps the most heartbreaking story you could imagine, which is tied to the fundamental dynamic behind the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Perhaps most affecting about the film was Douieri’s pre-film speech about how he almost lost confidence in himself during fundraising and pre-production. Knowing this and following this story of an Arab-born Tel Aviv surgeon trying to find out why his wife became a suicide bomber made this film, for me, a real triumph.

Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers: A riveting documentary about Israel’s anti-terrorism organization, Shin Bet, told by former directors of the program over the last 40-odd years. It’s amazing the kind of access Moreh got with this documentary as it really sheds light on how even the biggest war hawks in Israel’s government feel how assassinations are ultimately pointless and/or self-defeating

Pablo Larrain‘s No: A great true story about how an influential advertising campaign led to the ouster of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988. But Larrain’s decision to use a 1983-era video camera (or a simulation of same) to convey the atmosphere or the times and to blend with 1988 ads and newscasts was, I think, risky. It got in the way. While No provides a compelling story, it would be seen by many as an even greater film if it had been shot with top equipment.

Ben Affleck‘s Argo: This was a really tight Hollywood thriller with a kick-ass cast that blended nicely with the Arab-esque theme of this year’s festival. As everyone else points out, the film really takes you home during the final 20 minutes. Affleck is getting better as a director.

Bill Murray and his Hyde Park on Hudson pallies — costar Laura Linney, director Roger Michell, screenwriter Richard Nelson — took a bow before last night’s screening at Telluride’s Chuck Jones cinema.

Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson (Focus Features, 12.7) is a mildly appealing, well-finessed historical parlor piece, subtle and dryly comedic and aimed at older audiences. It’s a movie for your moms and dads. But apart from one richly affecting scene between President Franklin D. Roosevelt (engagingly played by Bill Murray) and his guest, King George VI (Samuel West), it feels mild and trifling and slight. Not offensively or dismissively, mind. It’s just nothing to get riled about either way.

Richard Nelson‘s script is basically a presentation of two disparate tales involving FDR — his intimate (i.e., faintly sexual) friendship with Margaret “Daisy” Suckley (Laura Linney), which apparently began sometime in the late 1930s and lasted until his death in 1945, and FDR having received King George VI and his wife Elizabeth at the Roosevelt retreat in Hyde Park in June 1939.

These two story lines do not intersect in any meaningful or corresponding manner. We are shown that FDR’s thing with Daisy is pleasantly underway as the King and Queen arrive for their visit, and it’s soon evident these twains will never meet or combine in any way that will amount to bupkis, nor should they.

What occurs? FDR clearly likes Daisy and vice versa. Daisy gives FDR a handjob. Daisy is hurt and shocked (in a rather trying, adolescent and tantrum-y way) when she realizes she is not Roosevelt’s only girlfriend — Missy LeHand (Elizabeth Marvel) has also been his “friend.” (This in addition to FDR’s longstanding relationship with Lucy Mercer.) But she gets over it. The King feels nourished and soothed by a boozy, late-evening chat with FDR — truly the film’s centerpiece. The King and Queen agree to be good-humored guests at an outdoor picnic, at which the King eats a mustard-basted hot dog.

The Queen is very bothered by the prospect and the metaphor of hot-dog consumption. The film brings it up..what, three or four times? No motion picture in history has ever paid so much attention to red weiners on a bun. No, that’s not a double entendre.

And everybody smokes cigarettes. Trust me, his movie is as much about the presence of constantly lighted and inhaled cigarettes as anything else. Literally every five or six minutes somebody lights up and takes a nice deep drag….yessss. Hyde Park on Hudson is one of the most persuasive advertisements on behalf of the tobacco industry to come along in a long, long time.

Hyde Park on Hudson is Murray’s show, for the most part. He doesn’t deliver an impersonation of FDR as much as a conveyance of his personality, manner and assured vibe. I wasn’t knocked out as much as pleased that he got through it by feigning smooth, old-world charm with a hint of melancholia.

But forget any kind of performance laurels thrown to Linney — she’s playing a very slight person, and hasn’t much to work with. (Those Gold Derby subscribers who predicted Linney would get awards heat need to be taken outdoors and spoken to. Tom O”Neil? That’s your job.) The always enticing Olivia Williams has very little to say or do as Eleanor Roosevelt, which was the way it was in real life as Eleanor and Franklin’s marriage had, by 1939, been mostly about appearances for a couple of decades. West is vulnerable and appealing as King George, but Olivia Colman‘s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth is a portrait of a joyless prig…sorry.

Tomorrow morning I’ll again try to riff through the last three days of Telluride Film Festival viewing (10 films since Friday morning) without getting all bogged down. Frances Ha, The Central Park Five, The Attack, the wifi dead zone that is Mountaintop Village, etc. I got a decent video of Bill Murray tossing off remarks before this evening’s screening of Hyde Park on Hudson , a settled but slight film made with obvious craft and modest ambition, but YouTube uploads take forever where I’m staying so I’ll post it tomorrow morning.

Today Sasha Stone and I recorded a special Telluride-centric Oscar Poker with four guests — Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg, Jett Wells, renowed cinematographer Svetlana Cvetko (Inside Job) and editor-screenwriter David Scott Smith. We discussed Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns‘ Central Park Five (major criticism), Noah Baumbach‘s Francis Ha, Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers, Pablo Larrain‘s No, Ben Affleck‘s Largo, etc. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

Scott Tobias tweet: “Fair warning Toronto press folks: If you boo the Malick, I will punch you in the back of the head. Rhetorically.”

Wellshwood reply: “Don’t let Tobias intimidate you, Toronto press corps! If To The Wonder is a meandering, airy-fairy wank then boo at will. Slap it down.”

As with all film festivals, Telluride chatter is constantly about what everyone’s seen and felt and heard. After two days of this I’ve heard too many people say that a given film is “really good” or that he/she has “heard really good things” about it. Your brain turns to chewing gum after hearing this 30, 40 times. Last night I began asking chatters to try and express their reactions with a bit more specificity. I don’t think that’s asking too much. I try to gently draw them out.

Best buzz so far: Ben Affleck‘s Argo, Pablo Larrain‘s No, Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers, Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires, Ken Burns‘ The Central Park Five. Good buzz: Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha, Christian Petzold‘s Barbara. Flat or downish buzz: Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson, Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa, Ramin Bahrani‘s At Any Price.

It’s 8:50 am, and I have to so much to write about yesterday’s screenings and 90 minutes to do it in before leaving for Pablo Larrain‘s No, which is screening at the Chuck Jones at 11:30 am…I’m stalled, choking, frozen in my tracks. So to get the engine started, two worthless asides. If you write about something, anything….

Since my mid teens I’ve always carried at least two combs and occasionally three. I never want to walk around with just one comb because if I lose that I’m fresh out, hence the two-comb rule. But I don’t even want to be faced with a two comb situation because if I lose one then I’m down to one so it’s better, really, to have three. Then if I lose one I at least have two left.

If you wear glasses for reading (like me) it’s usually impossible inside a low-lighted shower to differentiate between the shampoo, the conditioner and the body wash containers because the labels are always subtly worded. So I have to keep the glasses near the shower and then open the shower door and half step out into the light and put the glasses on to read the labels, but the steam is so intense at that point that the glasses fog up and I can’t see anything. So you also have to keep a small wash rag near the glasses in order to wipe them off. But if the steam is really opperessive you’ll have maybe four or five seconds to read the label before the fogging occurs.

Obvious solution: Read the labels before turning the water on, but that takes a certain organizational discipline and clarity of mind that’s hard to summon when you’re half awake at 6:30 am.

Saturday, 9.1 was the slowest festival filing day of my Hollywood Elsewhere life. No column riffs (and precious few tweets) about Christian Petzold‘s Barbara, Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha, Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers and Ramin Bahrani‘s At Any Price — all seen today plus attendance at a swanky Sony Pictures Classics dinner party at La Marmotte and then a late-night gathering at 227 South Oak.

Rust and Bone star (and apparent Best Actress contender) Marion Cotillard, Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg at Saturday evening’s Sony Picture Classics dinner party at Telluride’s La Marmotte.

Yesterday morning was about roaming around, picking up the passes and attending the brunch, and then the highly engaging Argo happened at the Chuck Jones at 2 pm. And then it was back to town to try to get into Sony Classics’ Israeli Shin Bet documentary The Gatekeepers…nope. Sold out, locked down. I recounted this yesterday, I know. It’s 7:45 am and the day’s first film — Christian Petzold‘s Barbara — starts in two hours.

We saw three films yesterday and got shut out of a fourth. Two of the films, Argo and The Attack, were quite good, the former more conventionally entertaining and the latter more thoughtful and lamenting.

A pit stop at a cafe happened around 5:30 pm, and then we walked over to the Palm for Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa, which runs only 89 minutes but felt like two hours. Set in 1962 London, it’s not so much about Rosa (Alice Englert) as her best pally Ginger (Elle Fanning, visually luscious with her fair skin and dyed red hair) and states of emotional frustration and entrapment. The action is mainly about Ginger’s soured relationship with her mom (Christina Hendricks) and her comng to know her boho-writer dad (Allesandro Nivola) and an obsession that Ginger and much of the London left has with nuclear proliferation — a big deal at the time but not so much from a 2012 perspective.

I’ve always respected Potter and am fully acknowledging that Ginger and Rosa is a well-made, carefully focused character piece, but I felt trapped — I didn’t want to be there.

One tiny quibble: Nivola wears a five-day unshaven look throughout, and guys simply didn’t do that in 1962. Hip-grubby GQ fashion whiskers didn’t start to happen until the mid ’90s. The only guys who wore beard stubble in 1962 were street winos and those growing a beard.

Next came a 9:45 pm showing of Ziad Doueiri‘s The Attack, which is unmistakably strong and penetrating — perhaps the most eloquent and moving pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli drama I’ve seen since…I can’t remember what but I was thinking back to portions of Costa-Gavras‘ Hanna K at times. There can be no peace between Israelis and Palestinians — the latter have been nudged, barricaded, pushed and shoved out of territory that was once theirs for the last 60-odd years, and the Israelis, once you get past their aggressive dominance, feel they have no choice but to protect themselves from the acts of rage that have resulted from this.

The Attack, based on Yasmin Khadra‘s novel, is about a Tel Aviv-based Israeli-Arab surgeon (Ali Sulaman) whose wife, he gradually comes to learn, had secretly bonded with Palestinian terrorists and finally decided to commit a final act of martyrdom. It’s one of those “I can sense right away what happened but I need to go through denial and then investigate it on a step by step basis” movies about a shell-shocked protagonist, etc. But it’s rendered carefully and completely, and the final 20 minutes or so are quite devastating.

My only beef is that Sulaman reveals himself at the very beginning as a man who despised Israeli authority in his youth, and so it seems curious that his wife wouldn’t have made any attempt to share her growing feelings of loyalty and support for the Palestinian cause.