A mother! cake arrived this afternoon. Thanks to Paramount Pictures and director Darren Aronofsky, and a tip of the hat to Charm City Cakes West (8302 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90048). I was initially queasy about tasting (it looks like something ripped out of the chest of a grizzly bear), but once I did…yummy!

If Hollywood Elsewhere was to run the Telluride Film Festival, I would make it into an actual four-day festival instead of what it actually is — a three-day if not a two-and-a-half-day festival for a good majority of out-of-towners with tight travel schedules and a pile of deadlines.

If you’re reviewing you’ve got at least 10 hot-ticket movies to see in the space of two and a half days (29 films screened during the 2016 festival, of which maybe 10 or 11 were essentials) and if you can manage to tap out more than four or five graphs per film, you’re the Six Million Dollar Man.

This year everyone will arrive on Thursday, 8.31 — two and half weeks hence. They’ll pick up their passes, square away their lodgings, pick up some groceries and have a nice dinner somewhere. With Friday morning being mainly about the Patron’s picnic, the festival won’t actually start until mid-Friday afternoon with the first Patrons’ screening at the Chuck Jones.

On top of which Telluride often schedules the highest-interest films against each other so you’re always missing out on Peter in order to see Paul. The Telluride schedulers know exactly which films are going to be the hottest tickets, and yet they always arrange things so you’ll miss the first viewings of this or that all through the festival. Shuffling around, running around.

Two or three films on Friday, three or four on Saturday and maybe the same on Sunday. Sure, you can see five per day on Saturday and Sunday, but not if you have to file. Eight times out of ten I’ll have to blow off a couple of hotties and catch them in Toronto instead.

And then it’s Monday before you know it, when everyone has to check out of their rental by 11 am. I’ll sometimes manage to catch a final film in the late morning or early afternoon before driving back to Durango or Albuquerque, but you also have to file your sum-up assessment so that’s never easy.

HE solution to Telluride gridlock: With everyone arriving on Thursday afternoon, the festival should begin on Thursday night with hottie screenings at all the venues (Chuck Jones, Werner Herzog, Palm, Galaxy, Pierre, Backlot) starting at 7 pm and then again at 9:30 or 10 pm. Hell, stage a midnight screening or two. And then more hottie screenings on Friday morning starting at 8:30 or 9 am. Those who wish to attend the Patrons picnic could squeeze it in around 11 or 11:30 am, but a full load of screenings would continue for those who’d rather catch films than eat.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick‘s The Vietnam War, a 10-part, 18-hour epic documentary about America’s greatest military tragedy, the conflict that permanently tarnished this country’s reputation internally and worldwide, will begin airing on 9.17.

Burns has been looking to match the cultural impact of The Civil War for over 25 years now — could this be it? That legendary 1990 series was a bear to get through (11 hours 30 minutes, 9 episodes) but it was eloquent and moving and musical, and six hours shorter than the current Vietnam series. Was 18 hours entirely necessary? Burns couldn’t cover the whole sprawl of it in 10 or 12 hours?

I’m much more interested in Michael Mann’s forthcoming Battle of Hue miniseries, which will run eight to ten episodes on FX. It’ll begin filming later this year and air…who knows? Maybe by the end of ’18.

9.17 is right after the Toronto Film Festival ends. I guess I could just watch The Vietnam War episode by episode like anyone else, or buy the PBS Bluray box (released on 9.19) for $83.45. But the more purposeful thing would be to attain streaming access now and work my way through it until my 8.30 Telluride departure.

The downish critical response to Matt Ruskin‘s Crown Heights (Amazon/IFC, 8.25) is shameful. At the very least it’s harsh. I know an absorbing, well-paced docudrama when I see one, and yet some of the nyah-nyahs have pissed on it. It certainly deserves an aggregate rating in the 80s, and yet it currently has a 62% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 52% on Metacritic.

This is a believable, tightly woven, emotionally engaging tale of a real-life Brooklyn guy, Colin Warner, who did 20 years in the slam for a murder he didn’t commit. The fact that it deals straight cards, that every scene counts (it runs only 94 minutes) and that it pays off with one restrained, affecting performance after another (especially from co-leads Lakeith Stanfield and Nnamdi Asomugha) are three reasons why it won the Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic Film at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.

Is Crown Heights as moody and atmospheric as HBO’s The Night Of, which tells a vaguely similar tale and which all the critics flipped for? No, but that’s partly because The Night Of ran eight fucking hours. (The always admirable Bill Camp costarred in both.) The Night Of said the same thing over and over — “If the system decides to fuck you, you’re fucked…and even if you’re freed one day you’ll still be fucked because prison life has turned you into a criminal.” Crown Heights is about shit out of luck, bad breaks, friendship, character and persistence.

For me, Crown Heights made the evils of institutionalized racism seem a lot sadder and far more disturbing than two viewings of Detroit did.

Is Crown Heights as psychologically studied and unsettling as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Wrong Man (’56), which told approximately the same tale minus the racial context and nearly 20 years of jail time? No, but the Crown Heights narrative is more gripping than the Hitchcock — it holds you on a beat-by-beat, “what’ll happen next?” basis. The Wrong Man, a dull commercial failure, is a grim slide experience — a stacked-deck, can’t-win scenario that offers little hope for a reversal of fortune. Innocent Henry Fonda is accused, interrogated, fucked over and put through hell, and it never stops. Until the clouds finally part at the very end, that is.

In the case of at least two relatively recent Criterion Blurays, Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday, the tech guys darkened images that were slightly or distinctly brighter on previous Blurays and DVDs.  Criterion has an occasional fetish for inkiness in the black-and-white realm. Two HE reviews, “Dark Angels, Black Barranca, Noir All Over” and “Inky, Grain-Smothered Friday Doesn’t Deliver Decent Bump”, complained about this.

And now, to judge by a new DVD Beaver review, the Criterion guys have gone all dark and inky on their forthcoming 4K-scanned Rebecca Bluray (due on 9.5.17).

Review quote: “Like their 2001 480p DVD, the image [on the new Criterion Bluray] is darker than [previous] digital releases. From our experience and comments from transfer specialists, ‘darker’ is usually more accurate to the theatrical presentation. You can see from the screen captures that the Criterion shows less information in the frame [and yet] the Criterion actually shows more on the top.”

Look at George Sanders‘ Jack Favell in these DVD Beaver-captured images. The lighter version is from the 2012 MGM Bluray (which I am totally happy with — thank God there’s a fine-looking Rebecca that hasn’t been inked up) and the darker, of course, is from the Criterion. What kind of sick-fuck cineaste would prefer the darker image? It looks as if heavy thunderstorm clouds are passing over Manderley, and that Favell is about to get soaked.

2017 Criterion Bluray version.

2012 MGM Bluray version.

Steven Soderbergh has said time and again that the reaction to his two-part, 258-minute Che, a brilliant, thinking-man’s epic about Che Guevara, was a downish turning point. He’s told N.Y. Times interviewer Dave Itzkoff in an 8.10 article that “he was changed for the worse” by it.

Che was critically praised, but its commercial failure “soured” him on high-minded prestige films. “Che beat that out of me,” Soderbergh says.

Posted from Cannes on 5.21.08:  I know I predicted this based on a reading of Peter Buchman‘s script, but the first half of Steven Soderbergh‘s 268-minute Che Guevara epic is, for me, incandescent — a piece of full-on, you-are-there realism about the making of the Cuban revolution that I found utterly believable. Not just “take it to the bank” gripping, but levitational — for someone like myself it’s a kind of perfect dream movie. 

It’s also politically vibrant and searing — tells the “Che truth,” doesn’t mince words, doesn’t give you any “movie moments” (and God bless it for that).

It’s what I’d hoped for all along and more. The tale is the tale, and it’s told straight and true. Benicio del Toro‘s Guevara portrayal can’t be called a “performance” as much as…I don’t know, some kind of knock-down, ass-kick reviving of the dead. Being, not “acting.” 

I loved the lack of sentimentality in this thing, the electric sense that Soderbergh is providing a real semblance of what these two experiences — the successful Cuban revolution of ’57 and ’58, and the failed attempt to do the same in Boliva in ’67 — were actually like.

Oh, God…the second half is starting right now. The aspect ratio on the second film is 1.85 to 1, but the first film was in Scope 2.35 to 1.

New photos of Call Me By Your Name costars Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer and Michael Stuhlbarg accompany Lynn Hirschberg’s W riff about Luca Guadagnino‘s film, which the headline calls “the year’s most sensual love story.” Remark #1: Slight concern was expressed yesterday about whether Chalamet’s Tom Jones shirt might cost him votes with style-conscious Academy members. HE says “naahh…it would be one thing if Chalamet was 30, but he’s only 20…let it slide.” Remark #2: When did Stuhlbarg get a buzzcut and lose the weight? I almost didn’t recognize him at first. I know he’s straight, but the new look conveys an impression that he’s not only gone through a life change (new diet, workout regimen) but has decided to reorient his identity in other ways.

(l. to r.) Call me By Your Name costars Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Timothee Chalamet.

Stuhlbarg, Chalamet.

Hollywood Elsewhere to Jennifer Lawrence & reps: That John Currin painting on the new cover of Vogue is infuriating. She looks like someone who might be mistaken for JLaw but is clearly not JLaw. Plus she looks like a model or someone else I recognize but can’t quite think of. Right on the tip of my tongue. I’ve been staring at this image for nearly an hour, and I just can’t accept that this is the same JLaw I’ve known since Winter’s Bone. I look at it and say, “Uhhmm, that’s not her…that’s a JLaw lookalike with the not-quite-right nose giving the game away…it’s almost JLaw.” On top of which that cat-fur hat…words fail.

Four observations about the just-popped teaser for Our Souls At Night, the Robert Redford-Jane Fonda romance that — surprise! — Netflix will now debut on 9.29, which is roughly two months earlier than their previously fiddled-with release date. (A month and a half ago I was told they were looking at sometime around Thanksgiving.) One, this moment says it all — it’s like the whole movie compressed into a single, silent 34-second scene. Two, a publicist who’s seen Our Souls At Night says it’s actually pretty good. (I know…trustworthy!) Three, Fonda looks great — a good 20 or 25 years younger. And four, Redford, Fonda and Netflix should man up and bring the film to Telluride right after the 9.1 Venice Film Festival debut. Incidentally: “You Must Remember This’s” Karina Longworth on Fonda and Jean Seberg.

As far as I can guess or discern, mother! (Paramount, 9.15) is a movie about monsters consuming a victim. I don’t know anything, but it may be some kind of pervy, bloody-lightbulb descendant of Rosemary’s Baby. JLaw is Rosemary, Javier Bardem is Guy Woodhouse, and Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are sexualized versions of Roman and Minnie Castevet. Could there be a vague relation to Edgar Allen Poe‘s “The Casque of Amontillado“?

Sometime in late ’18 or certainly by 2019, Amazon Studios’ Lucy and Desi, an Aaron Sorkin-written biopic with Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett playing Lucille Ball, will open in theatres. Obviously an Oscar bait thing for Blanchett and perhaps for the guy they get to play Desi Arnaz.

Married for 20 years (1940 to ’60), Lucy and Desi had a turbulent union from the get-go, largely due to the Cuban-born Arnaz being an incessant tomcatter. (Ball filed for divorce in September 1944 over infidelity, but they patched things up.) Desi’s hound-dogging when into overdrive during the incredibly successful 1950s run of I Love Lucy. She finally divorced him in ’60. Keep in mind that Lucy, born in 1911, was six years older than Desi, and that her sexy blue-eyed redhead years peaked between the early ’30s and early ’40s, and that she liked her highballs and smoked like a chimney. (As a result she developed one of the greatest female booze-and-cigarette voices in Hollywood history.) By the time she made The Facts of Life with Bob Hope, Ball’s hottie days were well behind her. Remember also that back in the prehistoric days a certain strain of Latin male considered rooster behavior to be a birthright if not a point of pride.

If you want to bask in the Lucy-and-Desi thing when things were truly hot, fresh, moist and bloomy, watch Too Many Girls.

Last weekend two manly, fully mature critics, Joe Leydon and Stephen Whitty, took Hollywood Elsewhere to task for expressing garden-variety hormonal enthusiasm over what I carefully chose to describe as a “hot lesbo” scene in Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate, or more precisely an erotic third-act scene between two lesbian nuns. Echoing the tedious viewpoint expressed last January by Glenn Kenny, Leydon lamented the adolescent associations with the term and more or less said that seasoned, worldly fellows with gray hair and commendable accomplishments should never go there. Whitty said roughly the same, arguing that “thinking like a man” means “not thinking and feeling like a boy.”

They don’t get it. When a truly erotic scene suddenly happens in the midst of an otherwise “decent but no great shakes” film, the blood warms up and the viewer is suddenly awake, alive and attuned. This is what happened when the Sundance audience saw Novitiate at the Eccles last January, and why everyone was talking about “that scene.” Leydon and Whitty can trot out their “tut-tut” and “harumph” routines all they want, but I was there. And if experiencing hormonal surges by way of a film are a mark of adolescent immaturity, and if denial or suppression of same is a mark of seasoned maturity, I’ll take the former, thanks. And if I choose not to mask said surges with harumphy, tut-tut terminology, that’s what many of us would call “acceptance.” Life is short, allow for the occasional gusto moment, let it in, etc.

Final remark to Leydon, Whitty: I didn’t write and direct the third-act lesbian scene in Novitiate — Margaret Betts did. If you have a problem with this sort of thing, take it up with her. I just sat down and watched it and shared what I shared.