Last Saturday afternoon I sat and wrote a bit at Telluride’s Butcher & Baker Cafe (201 Colorado Ave.). I consumed two cans of La Croix sparkling water, for which most retailers charge $2 each, give or take. The Butcher & Baker guys charged a total of $13.68. High rent and all that, but you’d think that an exorbitant per-can price would be more in the vicinity of $4 per can, not $5.50 or $5.75.

Due to pressing work issues and whatnot, Tatiana insisted Monday morning that we drive all the way from Telluride to West Hollywood (858 miles, 13.5 hours) in a single daylight-to-darkness marathon. We left at 11:30 am and arrived at the WeHo homestead around midnight, or 1 am Telluride time. Two (or was it three?) gas-ups. No meals or leg-stretching time-outs. The worst part was the endless uphill trek between Needles and Barstow.

Most long-distance drivers succumb to acute exhaustion after seven or eight hours. Tatiana drove the first seven; I took over in mid-Arizona. Any way you slice it 13 and 1/2 hours inside a VW Beetle at 80 mph is grueling.

I’ve been through one similar experience — a coast-to-coast, Los Angeles-to-NYC marathon that lasted 52 hours. Meals and one roadside snooze but no motels. The fastest potential time is 42 hours, but the pace would be inhuman. The most agreeable way to drive long distances is to bag 400 to 500 miles per day. Less if you can afford it and have the spare tine.

Kenneth Branagh’s wildly over-praised Belfast is similar to Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma in three respects — black-and-white cinematography, focus on a family, violent political conflict affecting the basic climate.

The difference is that Branagh seems afraid of turning off the cinematic low-brows with a sudden plunge into monochrome, so he begins his 1969 tale in the glorious digital present, showing Belfast’s brilliant colors and upgraded commercial center, all spiffy and rockin’ to some punchy tune.

Only after the audience has been sated with the colorful safety of now for two full minutes does Branagh summon the resolve to commit to black-and-white and the Belfast that once was.

Cuaron, of course, started his film in monochrome from the get-go and stayed with it.

Initially written during Monday’s 858–mile marathon, re–edited and tweaked in West Hollywood on Tuesday morning: On Sunday night (9.5) I finally caught Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and there’s no question that it’s brilliant and (I mean this respectfully) oddly hateful in a chilly sort of way.

It’s a visual knockout on a shot-by-shot basis. but except for a scene or two featuring Jeffrey Wright it refuses to provide any sort of narrative tissue or emotional connection with the characters. It’s all arch attitude, snide-ironic voice-overs and deadpan expressions, and after a while it makes you intensely angry. That or your spirit wilts or you become weak in the knees.

The French Dispatch is a bullwhip immersion in hardcore, doubled-down Wes. It’s not that there’s no way “in” as much as there isn’t the slightest interest in offering any kind of common humanity element.

So much so that I began to wonder if Wes might be going through a phase vaguely similar to Jean-Luc Godard’s Marxist-Maoist revolutionary period (‘68 to ‘79). I ask because it’s a pure head-trip objet d’art — there’s no sense whatsoever that Dispatch is looking to engage on any kind of semi-accessible level, even to the extent of reaching people like me.

It’s so mannered and wry and rapid-fire ironic that it sucks the oxygen right out of your lungs.

That said, I loved the boxy (1.37:1) cinematography. I was also kind of wondering why Wes didn’t use 1.66:1 more often. (I’m actually not sure he used it at all.). It seemed to be about 85% boxy and 15% widescreen scope (2.4:1).

For me the most humanly relatable moment doesn’t involve Wright’s character. It happens, rather, during the 1968 sequence that costars Frances McDormand as a Dispatch staffer writing about the fevered climate of French student revolt. Asked if writing is a lonely, isolating profession, McDormand answers “sometimes.”

There’s no chance that anyone this fall will even flirt with the concept of Dispatch being worthy of above-the-line Oscar noms — at best it could land some for production design, costumes, makeup, editing.

Again, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond:

Pretty much all of your sharper, tougher Telluride critics have problems with Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. The more obliging middle-of-the-road types (critics, columnists and industry folk alike) have oddly fallen for it.

You can’t grab people by the lapels and order them to have a sense of taste about such matters. If someone likes Belfast or finds it Oscar-worthy, okay — shrug and throw your hands up. But when someone says Belfast is “one of the best films [they’ve] ever seen,” all kinds of crazy reactions come to mind. Because it’s fair, I believe, to compare Belfast’s family dynamic with that of Fred Savage and The Wonder Years, as IndieWire’s David Ehrlich did today.

Either you’re the type who can tolerate or, God forbid, embrace cloying emotionalism, or you aren’t..

From a 9.5 Deadline column by Pete Hammond:

Jean-Paul Belmondo has passed at age 88. No strenuous sorrows as he persevered for nearly nine decades, and lived a much fuller and more colorful life than the norm.

Belmondo’s career was launched by his starring role in Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless (’60). How good is that 61-year-old film, really? I would say more “fleetingly iconic” than great. The adoration that Belmondo’s character, Michel, felt for the tough-guy manner of Humphrey Bogart — that’s what sticks in the mind. Particularly his Bogartian facial expressions as he lies dying on a street in Paris. Right before he’s shot, Michel says “I’m tired…I want to sleep.” An odd sentiment at such a young age — a natural or not unexpected thing to say at age 88.

Jane Campion‘s interesting but doleful, somewhat irksome The Power of the Dog (Netflix, 11.17) is a respectable smarthouse effort. An intelligent, solemn, very well acted (especially by Benedict Cumberbatch), at times fascinating period drama.

In a nutshell, it’s a somewhat rugged, rather grim 1920s western about repressed homosexuality. No fist fights, no gunshots, etc. And clearly the work of a gifted filmmaker.

But it wasn’t for me. I knew that within minutes. Netflix will begin streaming it on 11.17.21.

I wish I had more time but I don’t. Two more films today — The Automat (a doc) and The French Dispatch.

Cumberbatch is really quite the self-torturing closet case, but he and Jesse Plemons are cast as brothers, and there’s really no way to believe this. They’re both red-haired (Plemons is more of a lighter carrot shade) but there the vague resemblance ends. The common genetic heritage simply isn’t there. Was one adopted?

Cumberbatch is lean and sinewy; Plemons is a moon-faced marshmallow with small eyes, and conveying a certain patience and gentleness of spirit. But he and BC don’t even look like second cousins.

As the film begins the Burbank brothers (Phil and George) share a bedroom in their mansion-sized home…curious.

Plemons is bulkier than Phillip Seymour Hoffman in The Master and slightly less ample than John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. He’s playing a wealthy cattle broker, but there’s no believing that plump Plemons could be part of any aspect of the cattle business. The trust factor goes right out the window.

The older-looking Kirsten Dunst, 39, delivers the second best performance, right after Cumberbatch.

To me watching this felt like work; it made me feel vaguely trapped. I walked out scratching my head and muttering “what?” I wrote three friends who’ve seen it to try and clarify a third-act plot element.

That’s it, time’s up, gotta go.

Bernard McMahon’s Becoming Led Zeppelin, which I saw late last night, is a pleasing, at times rousing doc about a great ’60s and ’70s band. It plants a grin on your face, gets your foot tapping and delivers ecstatic memory throttles from time to time. Speaking as a longtime Zep fan, I was happy fine with it as far as it went.

Twenty words: It’s highly enjoyable but a bit under-nourishing due to control-freak conditions imposed by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

Becoming starts out fine and then it gets really good once the band starts playing gigs. But then the lack of texture and honesty by way of varied viewpoints becomes more and more noticable as it goes along and especially during the last 20 or 25 minutes.

This is an agreeable, enjoyable rock doc, but it’s too sanitized. Dishonest by way of omission. But I still liked it.

The first hour relates the individual paths of the three remaining Zeppers, and straight from the mouths — Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones (all currently in their 70s and in good spirits) as well as the late John Bonham, who is heard speaking to a journalist about this and that.

The second hour is about the launch of Led Zeppelin — the early play dates, the creation of the first two albums, the acclaim, the power and the glory. It’s basically about good times, and there’s nothing “wrong” with that.

The problem is that it doesn’t dig in. It’s not even slightly inquisitive. It’s way too obliging, almost feeing like an infomercial at times. It offers, in short, a really restricted portrait, and around the 110-minute mark I started to mind this.

From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review:

I still haven’t seen William Greaves’ Symbiopyschotaxiplasm, but I’d honestly like to. Has anyone?

Filed yesterday by World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy:

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