The mileage estimate websites claim that the drive from Albuquerque to Telluride is 207 miles. Yeah…as the crow flies. But if you’re driving it’s more like 310 or 320 miles. The more scenic eastern route (Albuqerque, Santa Fe, Chama, Durango, Dolores, Telluride) is 309 miles; the western route (Albuquerque, Gallup, Dolores, Telluride) is 320, but the roads are a bit flatter and faster.

Scenic route (heading to Telluride Film Festival, beginning on 8.31): Albuquerque to Santa Fe: 54 miles. Santa Fe to Chama: 92 miles. TOTAL: 146 miles (or 2 1/2 hrs.). Chama to Durango, CO: 76 miles. Durango to Dolores: 37 miles. Dolores to Telluride: 50 miles

TOTAL: 163 miles (or 3.5 hours). Grand Total: 309 miles = 6 hours.

GOING THERE: Lap #1 — Wednesday, 8.31, starting at 6 pm. Albuquerque to Santa Fe = 54 miles, or maybe 60 minutes. Take 25 east from ALB to Santa Fe. Go NORTH on 84 to Chama. Lap #2: Santa Fe to Chama = 92 miles, or maybe 90 minutes. North on 84, then take 17 north to Chama.

Lap #3 — Thursday, 9.1, starting at 9 am: Chama to Durango, CO = 76 miles or about 75 to 90 minutes. West on 84/64, then due north on 84 to Pagosa Springs, CO, then West on 160 to Durango (47 miles from Pagosa Springs). Lap #4: Durango to Dolores = 37 miles. West on 160 to Mancos (about 24 miles), then NORTH on 184 to Dolores (about 15 miles from Mancos). Then NE on 145. Lap #5: Dolores to Telluride, or 50 miles. NE on 145, maybe an hour.

RETURNING: Lap #1 — Monday, 9.1., starting around noon: Telluride to Dolores, or 50 miles. SW on 145, maybe an hour. Lap #2: Dolores to Gallup, or about 129 miles or two hours. Due south on 491. Lap #3: Gallup to Albuquerque, or about 140 miles east on Interstate 40. Or roughly another two hours. TOTAL: 320 miles, or about 5 hours. Averaging 70 mph would make it a four and 1/2 hour trip…we’ll see.

I was half-watching a DVD last week of Alan Parker‘s Evita (1996), and it looks like hell on a 50-inch screen. For its upcoming 15th anniversary, Hollywood’s best all-singing musical opera (yes, better than Sweeney Todd) needs to be Bluray-ed. For me Darius Khondji‘s widescreen cinematography is compositional heaven — each and every frame has an exquisite painterly balance, and is lighted to perfection. And Gerry Hambling‘s lively cutting is a perfect compliment to the musical rhythms and rhymes.

And it’s a very fine film for what it is, and the music is entirely catchy and hummable and pizazzy. The kids and I used to sing the songs together when they were seven and eight. “So what happens now? / where am I going to? / you’ll get by, you always have before.”

I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that Evita may be Alan Parker ‘s best film ever.

No, Madonna’s performance isn’t triple or even double grade-A because she’s not a gifted actress, no argument, acknowledged, but it’s certainly the best thing she’s ever done or will do acting-wise, and I truly respect her work here because Parker got her to do nothing except sing (and I think she fully honors Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s score) and emphasize feelings and needs with her face and body and wear great clothes and look dazzling and forceful. She’s playing a grasping, conniving operator, but yet there’s something common and shared in her eyes and voice. She gives it hell and brings it home.

Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Pryce are exactly right in their phrasings and flavorings and emotings. Honestly? I can’t think of another American-made film in which I’ve enjoyed either actor more. Banderas was better in his early Almodovar turns in the late ’80s, but that’s another realm.

Evita is probably my all-time favorite Hollywood musical — yes, more so that Singin’ in the Rain or Cabaret or you-name-it. It just gets the snap and brio and excitement of being a unified opera that sings and breathes with one voice, one truly Latin spirit. And it’s just too beautiful-looking not to upgrade it to Bluray. Okay, I’ve said it.

“I want to be a part of BA, Buenos Aires, Big Apple…”

As might be expected from a 8.19 release that was press-screened for people in my short-lead realm for the very first time yesterday morning (i.e., three days before opening), Lone Scherfig‘s One Day (Focus Features) is getting badly beaten up over at Rotten Tomatoes (27% positive) and somewhat less so at Metacritic (47%).

The writing has been on the wall for several months. In a 5.30 posting called “Oy! Dumb Girls!,” I wrote that “‘destined to be together but indecisive and unable to pull the trigger for 20 years’ is not my idea of an engrossing concept. It’s my idea, actually, of a repellent one. The narration in trailer #2 (‘…but life got in the way’) is very cliched, and the British narrator’s speaking style has that same ‘talking down to idiots’ tone that the last trailer had.”

How could the gifted and respected director fo An Education and Italian for Beginners have made a film like this?

I missed yesterday morning’s screening, but will catch it tomorrow, courtesy of Ginsberg-Libby and Focus Features.

This group shot from Bruce Beresford‘s Love, Peace and Misunderstanding, a family relationship drama in which Jane Fonda plays an ex-hippie grandma, is presumably meant to resemble the cover of Crosby Stills & Nash’s first album, or at least the yellowish eggshell paint on the clapboard exterior of the home plus the light green windowsill trim.

Set to play at the Toronto Film Festival, Love and Misunderstanding sounds like like a right-down-the-middle, straight-across-the-plate family confection in a Golden Pond-ish vein. Neurotic attorney (Catherine Keener) brings her teenage kids (one of them played by Elizabeth Olsen) to visit her estranged and eccentric mom (Fonda) and yaddah-yaddah. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Nat Wolff, Marissa O’Donnell, Chace Crawford, Kyle MacLachlan and Rosanna Arquette costar. It’s slated to open later this year.

Two days ago I asked about when Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Impossible might be released. Sometime next year, yes, but spring, summer or fall? This morning Bayona responded: “I can only say that we’re on schedule and working really hard on the editing and visual effects. We didn’t wrap last fall, as you metioned in the article. We finished in February and did three weeks of technical shooting (scale models and water) in June. The film will be completed early 2012, but there’s still no release date from Summit.” It’s my understanding that Bayona will screen a rough cut for friend and Orphanage producer Guillermo del Toro sometime next month.

Last Saturday morning I reported that (a) a March 2009 draft of Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott‘s The Lone Ranger script was about Native American mysticism and a werewolf predator that tore men into pieces, and that (b) the CG needed for the werewolf stuff was at least one of the reasons for the film’s $250 million budget, which Disney execs felt was excessive and led them to shut the movie down.

Now The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kim Masters is reporting that the spirits-and- werewolf stuff has been “jettisoned” and that “sources who have read recent drafts” say they contain “three massive action set pieces involving trains remain, including one described as the biggest train sequence in film history.”

Okay, fine — werewolves out, trains in. Does anyone have a draft with these three train sequences? Not that it matters much now. Honestly? If I was Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinksi, I would’ve kept the werewolves and put them on the train (make them into the owners or engineers or whatever) and called the movie The Lone Ranger Meets The Werewolf Train.

Yesterday’s rug-peeing incident involving Gerard Depardieu whizzing on the floor of a Paris-to-Dublin CityJet was completely avoidable. And almost predictable. Flight attendants, security guards and other uniformed functionaries who try and tell movie stars what to do and what not to do will always lose. The same lesson has been taught a million times and they won’t listen. Don’t fuck with the Godz because the Godz have been taught that they can always sidestep rules if they need or want to. That’s the way the world works…hello? If a swaggering, big-bellied, larger-than-life French actor and winemaker needs to slip into the can for a quick one, let him! So stupid.

Last night I watched Jane Fonda‘s appearance on Charlie Rose. It was about plugging her just-released book “Prime Time“, which is about living and aging well in what she calls “the third act of your life.” It was an open, honest interview. But what got me is her face. She’s had “work” done, of course, and she looks great for someone born in 1937, no question. But there’s something a bit strident in her face now. It hasn’t been “stretched,” thank the Lord, but she does look super-sculpted.

(l.) Jane Fonda on last night’s Charlie Rose Show; (r.) during the 2009 run of 33 Variations.

I saw Fonda on-stage two and a half years ago in 33 Variations and I thought she looked perfectly fine. But she wanted more. The general rule of thumb, I suppose, is “as long as you don’t look like a freak, have at it.” We all make decisions to make about how we look, etc. It’s become the norm for older women with money. Their hair used to go gray and their neck sagged and their eyes got baggy, etc. Now they get robo-cized. That’s the way it is now.

The final 49th New York Film Festival choices have been announced, and the big news is the selection of Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants (which boasts a very well-written script) for the closing night gala. So that’s it for poor Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy despite Gary Oldman‘s willingness to attend the gala. Whatever, water under the bridge. I’m also glad that several major Toronto Film Festival entries have been included as it’ll take the strain off. Several Cannes and Berlin entries also buck up the slate.

George Clooney in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants.

Also to be shown at NYFF: (a) Abel Ferrara‘s Mel…sorry, 4:44: Last Day on Earth, a sex-and-art “apocalyptic trance” movie; (b) George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Martin Scorsese‘s 208-minute doc on the late Beatle, singer-songwriter, filmmaker, etc.; (c) Michel Hazanavicius‘s The Artist, the black-and-white silent about Hollywood moviemaking in the late 1920s; (d) Joseph Cedar‘s Footnote; (e) Mia Hansen-Love‘s Goodbye First Love; (f) Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne‘s decidedly minor The Kid With A Bike; (g) Aki Kaurismaki‘s Le Havre (which I missed in Cannes due to over-sleeping and then being shut out of a Salle du Soixentieme screening); (h) Lars von Trier‘s 4:44…I’m sorry, Melancholia; (i) Gerardo Naranjo‘s Miss Bala; (j) Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia; (k) Wim Wenders‘ 3D Pina; (l) Ruben Ostlund‘s Play; (m) Nadav Lapid‘s Policeman; (n) Steve McQueen‘s Shame; (o) Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation; Jafar Panahi‘s This is Not A Film; and Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky‘s The Turin Horse.

This in addition to the already announced Carnage, A Dangerous Method, My Week With Marilyn and the resored 2.76 to 1 Ben-Hur. This is going to be an exceptionally strong festival. Excellent job and a tip of the hat to Scott Foundas, Richard Pena, Todd McCarthy and the gang.

The main problem with Fright Night (Touchstone, 8.19) is the title. They might as well have called it Generic ’80s Horror Film That They Remade in 3D. But it has two selling points: (a) an above-average script, as indicated by the trailer, and (b) Anton Yelchin and Colin Farrell costarring. The HE downside is that Touchstone p.r. hasn’t invited me to squat. This morning I wrote Fright Night producer Mike DeLuca and said, “Hey, Mike, can you help me out?”

This looks good — The Others, The Innocents, The Nightcomers, etc. You might think that with the Harry Potter franchise over and that carte blanche effect at an end, Daniel Radcliffe ‘s markedly short stature may be an issue from time to time. But he’s about the same height as Al Pacino, and he’s got Mickey Rooney beat by a good three inches.

Friend-of-HE Nick Clement — a.k.a. “Action Man” — just got out of a Connnecticut screening of Jonathan Levine‘s 50/50 (Summit, 9.30) “and wow, I was not prepared for how accomplished it was,” he says. “Holy shit, what a great movie! Powerful. Sad but oddly uplifting. And funny. Genuinely funny.

“Joseph Gordon Levitt kills it — very understated, never going too hard for the emotions, always feeling 100% natural. And say what you will about Seth Rogen, but he’s perfect in this movie — and for the film to work at all, it needed a lot of humor, as there’s nothing funny about the situation that JGL’s character is facing. Rogen is basically capable of doing one thing — playing the rude, crude stoner who always has something funny to say — and that’s fine with me. He’s the best at this particular kind of comedy, and for me he never disappoints.

“My wife just got over a cancer-related illness where chemo was required (six months of it), and while she was never at risk with losing her life during her ordeal, I really related to a lot of what I was looking at tonight on the big screen. There’s a moment in the film where JGL makes a confession to his therapist (the fucking awesome Anna Kendrick, who just exudes confidence and smarts and warmth) that he just wants people to stop bullshitting him and tell him straight-up that he’s going to die. It’s a brilliant moment of acting and direction, and it was then that the movie grabbed me by the heart.

“Who the hell is Jonathan Levine? The Wackness? That still-unreleased Mandy Lane horror thing? There was a seriously talented hand guiding this movie, and it’s all the more impressive to learn that Levine was a replacement at the last minute for another filmmaker who apparently left the project over creative differences. Terry Stacey‘s intimate and measured cinematography is stylish but never show-offy, and the editing is sharp as a tack.

“And the soundtrack — I don’t remember a collection of semi-older-pop songs as good as this one. Michael Giacchino‘s score is subtle yet highly effective, and that right there is why 50/50 works as well as it does. It never hammers you over the head with how inherently sad the entire scenario is, and because Levine doesn’t wallow in anything for too long, nothing ever becomes maudlin in the way that lesser movies dealing with this subject have been.

“And still, the best strength of the entire piece is Will Reiser‘s screenplay. While predictable in some respects, he gets so much right in the little details (as this apparently happened to him in some fashion), and for the first time in a long time, I felt that the voices of the thirtysomethings in this film were honest and real depictions of actual people living in the here-and-now. All the lines sounded organic and the frequently colorful (and often times laugh-out-loud-funny) vulgarity was just what friends would say to each other.

“Confusing and stressful interactions with doctors were spot on and tearful and painful discussions with parents are examined (Anjelica Houston nails a few scenes as JGL’s mom). Plus, there’s this great scene where JGL, Rogen, Philip Baker Hall (really good in an uncharacteristic role) and Matt Frewer all get high on medicinal marijuana, and I swear, the way it’s shot and cut — you feel like your getting a contact high. And I loved the bit with JGL walking out of his first chemo session…

“I don’t want to oversell this film but I’m afraid I already have. It’s going to be a tough sell with the general populace I think at the box-office, which is a shame, because it’s the sort of film that totally wins over its audience. I saw the film in a sold-out theater at a free screening sponsored by various websites and radio stations. Mixed demographics and people of all ages. You always worry with free movies as you never know what kind of winners are gonna show up, but with 50/50, nobody spoke, texted, or acted up — everyone was consumed with what they were watching. They laughed in all the right spots, choked up when the moment was right, and quiet during all of the big moments.

“It’s gonna become known as ‘that cancer movie’ but my hope is that the Rogen brand brings people in on opening weekend, because once word gets out, it will be a film that will be impossible not to reccommend to anyone you know. Without spoiling anything, the ending is fair and earned and completely believable. Expectations play a large part in how one reacts to any given film, and I never expected to be as moved as I was by 50/50. I hope that somehow it gains some awards traction because its one of those little movies that deserves everything thrown at it.”

Update: “The screening happened at Rave Cinemas in Manchester, CT — best multiplex in the state. No focus group. They didn’t even give out cards. They had some marketing people from Summit in the lobby asking people what they thought and they were writing things down in journals, I got the pass from www.gofobo.com — very cool, free movies.

I saw friends with benefits this way

“I’m still crying from this film. Everyone was. Very effective filmmaking.”