The menu for the new Forbidden Planet Bluray is the most stirring thing about it. I’ve seen never actually seen this sci-fi cult classic start to finish, only portions here and there, but to go the distance is to tap your fingers and roll your eyes. Okay, it’s mildly arresting now and then. The docs and extras pick up the slack to some extent.

No big wows or mild surprises, even, at this year’s Telluride Film Festival, which announced its slate about an hour ago. The title that has my interest most of all, frankly, is Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones‘ Letter to Elia , a documentary about Elia Kazan that will be discussed in a panel consisting of Todd McCarthy, Michael Barker (whose presence presumably confirms that Sony Classics will distribute?) and Jones.

Photos by HE correspondent Glenn Zoller.

The selections include Mike Leigh‘s Another Year (played at Cannes), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful (ditto), Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, Olivier Assayas‘ 330-minutes Carlos (Cannes), a doc called Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (narrated by Werner Herzog, directed by Dimitry Vasyukov), Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job, Peter Weir‘s The Way Back (allegedly problematic but the basis for a Weir tribute), Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go, Lee Chang Dong‘s Poetry, Errol Morris‘s Tabloid, Stephen Frears‘ Tamare Drewe (why on earthy would Tom and Gary they invite this film to Telluride?), Ken Burns‘ The Tenth Inning, Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech and Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours.

Variety‘s Justin Chang is throwing the same intifada stones as Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson at Julian Schnabel‘s Miral. Who’s standing up for this film? How about the British critics? These reviews are fairly brutal.

The thrust of Chang’s criticism is that while Schnabel is obviously drawn to and engaged by a militant Palestinian perspective on this decades-old conflict, he lacks the stones and conviction to really go to town with it and risk giving offense in some quarters.

“While any film addressing the Israeli-Palestinian divide can expect a measure of controversy, few hearts or minds are likely to be stirred by Schnabel’s inoffensive, well-intentioned Miral,” Chang writes. “Schnabel’s signature blend of splintered storytelling and sobering humanism feels misapplied to this sweeping multigenerational saga of four Arab women living under Israeli occupation, the youngest of which, Miral, emerges a bland totem of hope rather than a compelling movie subject.

“Set to open this month in Europe, Miral will go out in the U.S. on 12.3 through the Weinstein Co., making it the rare film to favor a Palestinian p.o.v. and also be presented under the auspices of Harvey Weinstein, a vocal supporter of Israel.

“But while the film doesn’t shy away from portraying everyday Israeli abuses of authority, its approach to the conflict is calculated to offend as little as possible; the predictable, can’t-we-all-just-get-along coda would be easier to swallow were it preceded by a more politically engaged or personally engaging narrative.”

Who would’ve expected Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson, a sage industry reporter not exactly known for dispensing blunt or blistering film reviews, to bitchslap Julian Schnabel‘s Miral (Weinstein Co., 12.3), a pro-Palestinian drama about compassion for orphans and growing anti-Israeli militancy?

While calling Miral “heartfelt” and confessing to crying during the film’s bookend sections, Thompson, filing from Venice Film Festival, says that Schnabel “tells the wrong story,” that the film is “earnest agit-prop” with a likely “narrow art-house niche,” and that star Freida Pinto, playing the title role of an orphan who grows into a militant, is “not an expressive actress.” Opaque, she means. Fetching but lacking the necessary chops.

What exactly could the term “the wrong story” mean? I understand that agit-prop films can feel like a lecturing harangue. But could Thompson be alluding to a suspicion that a pro-Palestinian drama is a politically untenable thing as far as award-season politics are concerned?

“The harshness of the Israeli occupation — and continued mutual hatred and distrust — make the rise of the Intifada, which Miral joins, inevitable. She is arrested at 17, brutally caned and released after 24 hours. The movie ends in 1994, a year after the signing of the Oslo Middle East Peace Accord creating two separate states, which the film points out, has still never been honored. Miral goes on to become a reputable journalist working in Italy.

“Her story remains expositional and flat, filled with long debates with her boyfriend Hani (Omar Metwally) about alternative routes to a Middle East solution. ‘What they really want is all of Palestine without Palestinians,’ says Hani. ‘With them here there is no future for us.’

“Schnabel needed a more proficient dramatist to pull this off,” Thompson writes. “He’s an elegant, visual director — he and cinematographer Eric Gautier adopt an unusual blurry technique for the more intense scenes — but this movie, while filmed on authentic Jerusalem locations, too often devolves into dull talking heads.”

She notes that “it’s possible” — i.e., dead certain — “that the Weinsteins will fan flames of controversy around this film’s highly-charged subject. Nonetheless Miral — which will also play Telluride and Toronto — will likely remain within a narrow art-house niche.”

Okay, now I want to see this. I finally realized it’s Son of Planes, Trains and Automobiles — Robert Downey, Jr. as Steve Martin and Zach Galifianakis as John Candy. Which may be doubly enjoyable as I’ve never liked Galifianakis (he turned me off in The Hangover…bearded anal retard) and will enjoy seeing him get treated like a bad dog.

There’s been a bit of an upstate rumble about my 8.20 “Gulag Archipelago” piece, which criticized Rochester, N.Y., as being a strange place for a film director to reside. I was interviewed about this twice today. Here’s the result of a chat with Jim Stinson, business reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

Here’s another chat with WNEC’s Pat McGonigle.

Rochester-area resident to yours truly (direct quote): “Your [sic] a complete douche. Rochester rules and Hollywood is for phoney dick-wads such as yourself.” Another one: “You are wrong, Mr. Wells, for trashing Rochester. Perhaps your impressions of our wonderful city is [sic] colored by your obviously failed (ex) marriage.”

There’s a bit in George Lucas‘s THX-1138 that makes me chuckle every time. A group of social undesirables — shaved-head baldies, dressed in white — have been put into an asylum of some sort, and while one of them (Donald Pleasance) rants on about some political or philosophical issue, a fellow misfit a few feet away begins assaulting a droid robocop, and then beats his skull in.

Maggie McOmie, Robert Buvall in George Lucas’s THX 1138, available on WHV Bluray on 9.7.

Pleasance turns around, notices, stops talking for three or four seconds, doesn’t know how to process it (“Oh…someone is destroying a droid”) and continues to rant as if very little has just happened.

DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze says the following about Warner Home Video’s THX 1138 Blu-ray, which comes out early next week: “The film has a grandness of scale that is never overwhelming, but I often felt like I was in a ‘cinema’ as I progressed through my viewing. This 1080p transfer exports the film’s incredible visual power, and seems to get the absolute most out of antiseptic aura of snow-driven, impersonal whiteness.

“Despite the early 70’s stock, the film is clean, precise and the HD rendering still retains the underlying depressed ‘feel’. It has grain and some infrequent noise, but this Bluray has captured so much of what makes this a great viewing experience. Lucas digitally restored THX 1138 at his own Industrial Light & Magic facility and he also included the roughly five minutes of footage that Warner removed for its brief, initial theatrical run.”

It’s a bit unusual for a Toronto Film Festival party to go 14 hours straight. The hosts will be obliged, of course, to serve not only breakfast but also lunch on top of a gargantuan amount of alcohol. What festivalgoer would want to revel this hard? I’m not identifying the hosts, of course, but I’d give the idea a re-think if I were them.

I don’t exactly “like” Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis ‘ Machete. I found it mildly agreeable because of three or four factors that I’ll explain in a second. But it left me persuaded all the more that Rodriguez lacks the sensitivity to be an A-level director. His movies are always about blood, bullets, hot babes and primitive emotions. He really does seem to lack the wit and the savoir faire to do anything else.

You’re not a serious director unless you can see, feel or otherwise sense the presence of invisible things. As a director (and probably as a man), Rodriguez has shown an interest and/or focus in the obvious physical stuff. He’s gone “within” exactly once, and that was some 17 or 18 years ago in El Mariachi (and particularly via the performance of Carlos Gallardo). Since then the man has pretty much been a shameless whore.

Machete, however, is half-tolerable because it’s an out-and-out comedy as opposed to a Grindhouse-style genre wallow, and as such is probably Rodriguez’s best (certainly least offensive) film since El Mariachi. It also pushes a pro-Latino, pro-immigration, screw-the-racist-Arizona-haters political theme that is very much to my liking.

On top of which it’s vaguely surreal to watch 67 year-old Danny Trejo strut around as Mr. Latino Stud with women 50 years younger licking their lips. And it’s mildly amusing to see Lindsay Lohan (a) playing a druggie, (b) doing a Lady Godiva topless scene (blonde hair covering certain regions) and (c) shooting a bunch of baddies during the big bloody finale while wearing a nun’s habit. And Robert De Niro, playing a sleazy right-wing Texas politician, delivers one great line near the end about how he’s “not even from here.” And there’s a reasonably decent slapstick bit involving the use of a body part. (No further details.)

That said, Machete is one of those sloppy B movies that throws as much gooey stuff at the walls as it can in hopes that some of it will stick. It’s the kind of film that makes the lower-end-of-the-gene-pool guys feel hip, so It’ll probably generate decent word-of-mouth. But the relentless emphasis on blood, sadism, slicing and limb-severing has a nauseating effect, and after a while you just want Machete to end. You feel like taking an Alka-Seltzer after it’s over.

On top of which two characters are shot and seemingly dead, and then it turns out they’re not for reasons that don’t add up. I hate that. If you’re going to kill someone, kill them and send them to kingdom come. Permanently. No reprieves.

Is it okay if I bypass Will Gluck‘s Easy A (Disney, 9.17) and proclaim Emma Stone as the next big thing — a sassy Michelle Monaghan-resembling actress-comedienne in the Elaine May-Eileen Brennan mold — on the strength of this trailer? Or do I have to actually go to this afternoon’s 4 pm screening and sit through it? Because the trailer makes me feel as if I’ve pretty much seen it.

if you were Quentin Tarantino, currently serving honcho of the Venice Film Festival jury, why would you be walking around with an emotionally vivid black cowboy hat? He’s never worn one before. Some kind of gesture of support and solidarity for fellow genre-wallower Robert Rodriguez?

Last night Michael Douglas told David Letterman that he has Stage IV throat cancer. Is that “not where you want to be?” Letterman asked. “Uhm, no,” Douglas said. “No, you like to be down at stage one.”

“The big thing you’re always worried about is it spreading,” the 65 year-old Douglas explained. “So I am head and neck. I am above the neck, so nothing’s gone down, and the expectations are good.” He said his chances of recovery are 80 percent “and with certain hospitals and everything, it does improve.”