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So what have we learned so far from the dual unfoldings of the Venice and Telluride film festivals? Neither has ended, of course, and there are always different perspectives and views, of course, and no one senses finality, of course, but here’s a stab:

At today’s Sunday panel at Telluride Film Festival (l. to r.): Real-life arm-slice guy Aron Ralston, 127 Hours director Danny Boyle, James Franco, moderator Annette Insdorf, The Way Back director Peter Weir, Werner Herzog. (Photo by Glenn Zoller)

(a) Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan may or may not be more of a favorite among impassioned dweeb critics (i.e., the Guy Lodge contingent) than a staunchly consensus-propelled Best Picture contender, but red-eyed Natalie Portman is apparently close to the front of the pack for a Best Actress nomination.

(b) Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours is a very possible Best Picture contender, and James Franco is looking like a close-to-locked Best Actor contender…maybe. Depending on visceral reactions to the red-arm factor.

(c) Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech is an audience-pleaser and an awards contender. Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush are looking at possible acting award noms. “No doubt Harvey’s already got one of the ten Best Picture slots locked up for this,” Deadline’s Pete Hammond wrote yesterday.

(d) Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go is apparently going to encounter divided reactions, half of them having kitten litters in the David Poland mode (“masterpiece”) and half of them saying “but why don’t they rebel or run for it?” in the Kris Tapley-Anthony Breznican-Roger Moore-ish view of things.

(e) A consensus is forming that Peter Weir‘s The Way Back, which many if not most critics admired or at least respected, needs to be at least platform-released at the end of 2010. Newmarket is reportedly planning to release the survival drama in early 2011 without any kind of minimal awards-qualifying release in late 2010. (And why, by the way, isn’t The Way Back showing at Toronto?)

(f) Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere, generally regarded as a minor effort compared to Lost in Translation, is out of the awards game altogether (although Stephen Dorff‘s performance is the best career move he’s managed in a very long time).

(g) Errol Morris‘ Tabloid has a better-than-decent shot to finish as one of the five Best Feature Documentary nominees…maybe.

(h) Shlomi Eldar‘s Precious Life, “the agonizing story of a young Gaza woman who goes to an Israeli hospital to save the life of her five month old son Muhammad suffering from the same genetic disease that took the lives of her other two children,” may also become a Best Feature Doc contender by way of the industry factor.

(i) No one is going to pay any attention to Kelly Reichardt‘s Meek’s Cutoff, in part because Meek’s Cutoff is one of the worst movie titles ever imagined by anyone in the history of dramatic presentation. I mean, it’s worse that Winter’s Bone.

Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours “has been expertly brought to the screen by [a] director who finds a way to put ‘urgency’ in every frame,” Deadline‘s Pete Hammond writes from Telluride, “despite the fact that the entire film is basically one man vs. the elements.”

The film is “a tour-de-force for James Franco,” he adds, noting how the 32 year-old actor “is virtually never off screen in the same way Spencer Tracy triumphed in the similarly spare The Old Man And The Sea (1958). Franco’s performance could put him in contention for a best actor Oscar nod just as Tracy’s did over 50 years ago.”

Hammond notes, however, that “Franco’s ‘farewell to arm’ scene is graphic and not for the squeamish.”

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Jay A. Fernandez reported yesterday that the real-life character played by Franco “went to the extreme to free himself from the boulder that trapped him for five days, and the climactic scene of his escape generated groans and squirming from the audience.

“At the end of the screening, paramedics were called in to assist an unidentified man” at the 127 Hours screening. “Festival press representative Shannon Mitchell told The Hollywood Reporter that she had no information on whether the man’s illness had to do with 127 Hours‘ escape scene or an unrelated medical condition.”

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson reports that “Telluride correspondent Meredith Brody [saw] ‘somebody being taken out on a gurney from the Galaxy’ showing of 127 Hours and later that night at a second screening of the Danny Boyle film, ‘ambulances with multicolored flashing lights pulling into the Palm.'”

I attended one of the earliest L.A. screenings of The Bourne Supremacy (’04), the second Bourne film that is easily the most shaky-cammy of the three. A woman threw up on the floor about halfway into it. I was sitting on the other side of the room, and noticed a little commotion. I honestly didn’t connect this with the rapid cutting and crazy-cam photography, but a publicist with Universal publicity did. She howled and brayed and threatened me with death if I reported about the vomiting.

I’ve sat and chilled at The Bean (1st Avenue and 3rd Street) three or four times. A week and a half ago I got out the laptop and did some work there for 90 minutes. Early this morning some jackass yellow cabbie hit another car and crashed into The Bean, injuring five and seriously maiming one guy in particular.

I used to drive a cab in Boston. I can guess what that cab driver was thinking and doing.

This kind of thing happens in urban action films from time to time, usually for comic effect, but it’s a different deal when it actually happens. If I’m not mistaken, something similar to this occured in Richard Rush‘s Freeebie and the Bean (1974).

The Toronto Film Festival is offering one press screening of Darren Aronofsky‘s hotly anticipated Black Swan, which pulverized nearly all discerning critics at the Venice Film Festival. It happens on Friday, September 10th, at the Scotiabank theatre at 9:30 am — great.

But wait. Another highly anticipated film, Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech, which excited many viewers yesterday at the Telluride Film Festival, is also having its one and only press screening at nearly the exact same time — 9 am — on the very same morning, and at the same venue.

Each film has at least two open-to-the-public showings, but further into the festival grid and conflicting, naturally, with other important films and events. So there’s no catching both of them early, press screening-wise. It’s one or the other.

But why? Why not press-screen them on 9.10 so they don’t conflict? What could have motivated Toronto Film Festival programmers to show two films to journalists that they knew were going to be hot tickets right up against each other with no alternatives except for two subsequent, hard-to-crack public viewings each? They had to know they’d be causing problems.

If you miss a press screening of a major film in Cannes it always shows the next day at the Salle du Soixantieme. And there are always…okay, usually two or three press screening opportunities to catch a must-see at Sundance.

Filing from Telluride, Cinematical‘s Eugene Novikov says that Peter Weir‘s The Way Back “enters the canon of survival films as perhaps the most sadistically intent on making you feel as much of its subjects’ physical agony as possible. Despite its impeccable awards pedigree and prestige pic status, it may be too straight-up harrowing to get much traction, either with the Academy voters or at the box office. [But] for those with the fortitude to take the plunge, it offers an intense, morally thorny exploration of the limits of human endurance.”

HE reader Terry Woods calls it “a hugely harrowing experience. The first half is better than the second half, which covers more of the journey the escaped prisoners make, but the film is never less than totally absorbing. I’ll go so far as to say the first half is the best work that Weir has ever done in my opinion, and the second half is still better than most Hollywood product churned out today.

“Jim Sturgess is excellent here. I haven’t been a huge fan before but there’s a scene near the beginning where Sturgess doesn’t utter a word but says everything with his eyes — it took my breath away. And the cinematography is award-worthy. Really try and catch this one, Jeff. A big-scale movie for adults, although commercial prospects may be dicey due to the overall darkness in tone and unflinching portrayal of the subject matter. It needs to be released in December to gather some awards momentum.”

But apparently that’s not in the cards. I’m reading from Deadline’s Pete Hammond that Newmarket, the film’s distributor, isn’t going to open The Way Back in December…right?

A studio’s weekend projection says that by Sunday night Anton Corbijn‘s quiet, meditative and art-housey The American will triumph (very slightly) over Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis‘ Machete, a “funny” cheeseballer about blood, babes and Tex-Mex immigration politics. The George Clooney assassin-in-Italy drama will end up with $15 to $16 million, it says here, and the Danny Trejo taco-stud comedy will end up with $14 to $15 million.

I wasn’t expecting this. I thought Average Joes would run in the opposite direction from an austere Antonioni-ish minimal-action flick and flock instead to a lowbrow entertainment with a Grindhouse attitude. Instead they evenly split. My guess is that audiences thought twice about a movie starring a 67 year-old bulldog-faced Latino and figured that hanging with Clooney, even if he spends the whole movie looking like his pet pig has just been run over by a truck, might be slightly more appealing.

How else to explain it? Is it that a sizable bloc just doesn’t feel that enthused about wink-wink Rodriguez schlock? Is it…what, that Trejo has much thicker arms and bigger man-breasts than Clooney, and people are a tad uncomfortable with blatant Hispanic machismo? Did audiences just look at that orange American poster and go “Clooney, gun, cool, let’s go” without reading a single description? Or did all the glowing American reviews have an effect? I’m asking.

The third place Takers, down 59%, will end up with $14 to $15 million also. The Last Exorcism, down 76%, will come in fourth with $8.7 to $9.2 million. Going the Distance will finish with $8.5 to $9 million and a fifth=place ranking. The bottom five will be The Expendables, The Other Guys, Eat Pray Love, Inception and Nanny McPhee.

Dan Mecca‘s “The 25 Most Memorable Opening Scenes In Film” article on thefilmstage.com (which I found via Awards Daily) slightly angered me on two counts:

(1) The opening of Antichrist is not especially good. (Mecca ranks it as #23 among 25 he singled out.) The tragedy of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg‘s young son falling out of a bedroom window to his death as they madly copulate in a nearby bathroom is simply not absorbing or believable. The child’s fall doesn’t seem accidental — it seems cinematically fake and laboriously pre-ordained. The snowfall and slow-motion only worsens the effect. It was this opening that told me I’d soon be feeling extremely irritated by Antichrist, and damned if I wasn’t.

(2) The title at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey — “The Dawn Of Man” — also foretells, in Mecca’s view, “the dawn of violence.” No, it’s not about the dawn of violence. The struggle for survival among species within a given environment and finite resources has always been fraught with conflict. The fittest will survive and the less fit will not, etc. In 2001 the violence that results when the lesser apes (i.e., the ones who were initially muscled away from the small pond of water by the meaner snarlier apes) are awakened by the monolith and soon after discover the aggressive use of animal bones is not presented as a moral lament. It is presented as a triumph, the igniting of their fate — they are now on the path to becoming homo sapiens, the dominant race. It infuriates me that anyone would interpret this section of 2001 as any kind of comment on (choke) something as mundane as mere violence.

An HE reader from Portland who saw a rough cut of Matt Reeves‘ Let Me In last June says that the murder-and-chase sequence (which I posted here yesterday) goes on a bit longer without cuts, and actually warrants comparison to the extended sequence in Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men that begins with the van ambush and the shooting of Julianne Moore‘s character.

Reeves’ camera “is in the locked-down position, and it remains there for another minute or so as the car gets hit and then rolls off the road to the bottom of a ditch,” he reports. “We see the destruction of the vehicle internally before cutting away to [turmoil involving Richard Jenkins’ character].”

In the clip “there are shots from inside the convenience store, while in the background of the shot we can observe the violence occurring. There are a few other scenes like this — a scene unfolds in the foreground with two characters conversing, and at the same time there is some very important visual information occurring in the background of the frame. It’s not blurry, but slightly visible while not being so flashy.”

Let Me In “is a fine remake in maintaining the tone and visual look of Tomas Alfredson‘s original, and that specific era of the early to mid 80s, but moving the setting to another geographical location.”

“The visual and tonal approach of the film, which is much different than Alfredson’s. It felt more subdued in places and in the way the action unfolds. At times the camera will maintain a lower visual perspective, trying to convey that of the main character, but not so obvious in a brow beating fashion that makes you think, ‘oh, it’s from his perspective.'”

If the legend of the Poland Curse still means anything, MCN’s David Poland may have stuck a shiv into Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go (Fox Searchlight, 9.15) by calling it “a masterpiece…a film we’ll be discussing, frame by frame, in schools, 20 years from now.” He also praises it as “smart and demanding and emotional and rigorous and profoundly artful. It is more than ‘a good story well told’ [but] humanity on a screen. And it trusts us, as thinking, feeling adults, to do the work.”

I say this as someone who (a) is looking forward to seeing and possibly loving (really) Never Let Me Go — I really have no argument or bone to pick, and yet (b) someone who has noticed time and again that early unbridled Poland enthusiasm = “uh-oh, your movie is fucked.”

I say this as someone who has also seemed to curse films — commercially, that is — with love and enthusiasm. I was afraid all along that all my ecstatic Greenberg postings earlier this year might somehow seal its fate as a box-office dud. I once wrote that my love for Alexander Payne‘s Election was probably a guarantee that it would do poorly with general audiences. But the Poland Curse is different. I know it sounds cynical, but I consider it an absolute red flag whenever he calls any film a “masterpiece.”

Past Poland Curse victims: Rachel Getting Married (which Poland called “the best American film of the last 15 years“), Munich, Dreamgirls, Phantom of the Opera, Quills, Finding Forrester and the Reverse Poland Curse trio of The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Zodiac and There Will Be Blood (all of which Poland panned as “the trilogy of Critical Onanism,” and therefore provided an awards-season headwind).

Plot-thickener: Time‘s Richard Corliss has called Never Let Me Go “a superb, poignant film about love unto death.”

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley has joined the ranks of the frustrated regarding Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go, and for the same simple reason. He can’t understand (and is perplexed that the movie fails to satisfactorily explain) why the lead characters, all trapped in a situation that threatens their lives, don’t try to escape.

Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “kept me at arm’s length from frame one,” he writes. “There is a distance here, a cold sense of removal from what would otherwise be an extremely moving narrative. I wanted desperately to feel for the characters and their plight, but I felt nothing…at all. I wanted them to rage against their circumstances and show an ounce of the spirit they in one instance even set out to prove they have, but there was, again, nothing.

“Perhaps that’s a subtle point of the piece, but I don’t think so. Romanek seems to have David Fincher‘s tendency toward coolly registered emotional tones. And it does him no favors here. Of the cast, I was most responsive to Carey Mulligan‘s nearly catatonic state of inward consideration and turmoil, but Keira Knightley gets plenty of time to shine, while Andrew Garfield develops a unique character that nevertheless remained elusive when a sense of connection was sorely needed.”

Update: USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican has tweeted agreement: “Never Let Me Go made me ask why don’t these doomed people run, fight, resist?”

HE reader Josh Shelov has suggested the following for discussion, to wit: Quentin Tarantino‘s entire reputation rests on his having delivered six variations of a single scene, which could be called “The Torturer’s Monologue.” Michael Madsen vs. tied-up cop in Reservoir Dogs, Samuel L. Jackson vs. Frank Whaley in Pulp Fiction, Jackson vs. Tim Roth in Pulp Fiction, Chris Walken vs. Dennis Hopper in True Romance, Christoph Waltz vs. French farmer in Inglorious Basterds, and Nazi soldier vs. Michael Fassbender‘s British impostor in restaurant/tavern scene in Inglorious Basterds.

In the view of HE’s Telluride correspondent Glenn Zoller, Errol Morris‘s Tabloid, which screened late last night, is “the equivalent of a normal-seeming documentary, handsomely shot and edited, that has dropped a tab of acid. What a trip! Morris fielded a few questions at 1:15 am and seemed almost as shell-shocked as the audience (and the subjects) from this wacky but intense memory-lane fever dream.”

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley also attended, and has given Tabloid three and a half stars. “It’s a great year for documentaries at this year’s fest and Errol Morris’s latest is right at the top,” he says. “[It’s] a masterful work with Morris’s trademark sense of humor splattered all over it…one of his best films in years.”

Tabloid “tells the twisted story of beauty/tabloid queen Joyce McKinney who, in 1977, was accused of kidnapping her one-time Mormon sweetheart, Kirk Anderson, sequestering him in a cottage in rural England, tying him to a bed and ‘raping’ him for days. The case set UK tabloids alight and was dubbed ‘The Mormon sex in chains case.’

“It sounds too sensational to believe, but it is, every bit of it, absolutely true. And McKinney makes for as fascinating a subject as Morris has ever documented — a deranged, somewhat monstrous woman who you find yourself loathing and pitying with equal measure. And just when the story seems to have been fully unveiled, Morris takes us in a completely different direction in a ‘wait, it gets better’ sort of denouement.”

How does a woman forcibly rape a guy? If McKinney raped Anderson in a hetero-missionary way, he’d obviously have to “participate” by getting and sustaining an erection during each violation. If McKinney didn’t like the idea of being forced into sex, he could have used the ultimate trump card — i.e., flaccidity. So I’m not getting how this happened. Unless McKinney made Anderson “the woman,” so to speak, and penetrated him with a cucumber or something. Certain specifics need to be addressed.