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.
