Yesterday morning Toronto Star critic Peter Howell posted his annual Toronto Film Festival “Chasing the Buzz” piece. 25 critics, pundits and know-it-alls naming a special TIFF film that they really like or are especially looking forward to.

I chose Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, as you might expect. If I’d been allowed to name five I would have added Dan Gilroy and Denzel Washington‘s Roman J. Israel, Esq., Ruben Ostlund‘s Palme d’Or-winning The Square, Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billlboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (which I recently saw and can heartily recommend).

I read Howell’s article late last night, and was startled by the following quote from MCN’s David Poland about Angelina Jolie‘s First They Killed My Father: “A foreign-language film that could be a contender for Best Picture.” Is the Poland curse still potent? Time will soon tell. Here’s my opinion of the film.

During the just-concluded Telluride Film Festival, Tatyana and I stayed in a second-floor unit at the Mountainside Inn. The MI is a simple, clean, unpretentious operation, and not too pricey, at least by Telluride standards — just under a grand for four nights and a wake-up. For years it’s been known as the poor man’s solution to lodging during this excellent, world-class festival.

Our unit was fine. Okay, the shower nozzle wasn’t working very well but you can’t have everything. Well located (333 South Davis street), comfortable, no major concerns. The wifi was surprisingly excellent, and that obviously matters a lot.

I do think, however, that it was dishonest of the owner, a local attorney named Jerry, to not state in the Airbnb posting that he wasn’t subletting a presumably attractive stand-alone condo but a down-at-the-heels Mountainside Inn unit. There was no indication of this on the Airbnb profile page. Again, I wasn’t especially displeased by our stay, but Jerry should have laid his cards face-up.

A pretty local named Ilsa greeted us when we arrived. Pretty but, to be honest, a bit brittle and bitchy. After showing me the place and giving me a single room key (the MI manager graciously offered a second), Ilsa asked if I was happy with the place. I said I was feeling a bit underwhelmed, to be perfectly honest, as I’d been under an impression that the unit would be some kind of upscale condo. I said it would have to do, but that I wasn’t thrilled.

Ilsa didn’t care for the candor. Adopting an icy, officious tone, she said that if I felt that way maybe it would be a good idea if I stayed somewhere else. No fooling, she actually said that. My jaw dropped. I had just driven six hours from Albuquerque, I told her, and so I was rather tired and stressed. Plus I had paid for this unit a few months earlier and everything was set. And yet Ilsa actually suggested what she suggested.

Sensing danger, I pleaded with Ilsa not to be punitive. I all but dropped to my knees and begged. She finally took pity and agreed to honor the Airbnb contract. Thank you, I said. You’re so kind and considerate.

I am hereby nominating Ilsa for the Telluride Chamber of Commerce Hospitality award. But there’s no need to harp on this. I’ve stayed at the MI before. The sheets are clean and every unit has a little refrigerator and stove. The TV wasn’t of this era (probably made during the George W. Bush administration) but there was no time to watch it anyway.

A few hours ago a critic friend took me to task for what he regarded as a slightly-too-friendly review of Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, which I posted on 9.3. Here’s our conversation:

Critic friend: “I’m a decided non-fan of The Shape of Water, which puts me squarely in the minority. Which is fine.

“But I was struck by this paragraph in your write-up: ‘Alas, Shape isn’t perfect. It’s a full emotional meal but saddled, I regret to say, with an implausible story, even by the measure of a fairy tale. It contains unlikely occurences, curious motives and logical roadblocks, all of which have to be elbowed aside by the viewer in order to stay within the flow of it. Which — don’t get me wrong — I was totally willing to do because I so loved the overall.’

“Frankly, the qualifications you have — implausible story (even by the standards of a fairy tale), curious motives, etc. — sound much more major than your reasons for liking it. Why on earth is this glorified piece of production design “a full emotional meal”? If you found it so, go with God, but please explain.

“It doesn’t sound like you were even bothered by my #1 reason for not responding to it: The gill-man is…a blank!! A rubbery body suit in search of a single character trait.”

HE response: “I liked that GDT was once again off in his realm, confidently occupying his own patch, indifferent to the expectations of someone like you or me. He’s NEVER cared that much, never given a hoot about anything but the purely visual, the ripely sensual, the monster mash, the phantasm, the fangoria, etc.

“Seriously, I just decided early on that once again here was another GDT film that I would have to accept or reject. So I chose ‘okay, mostly yes.’ I decided to throw up my hands, shrug and accept it. I kept pushing away the bothersome stuff…push away, push away…because I fell in love with Sally Hawkins and her journey. I should have been tougher, I suppose, but I just didn’t have the heart to start chipping away and complaining.

“Remember that I also wrote the following: ‘If you ask me Guillermo has adhered too strictly to a black-and-white moral scheme here. I for one am always looking to find a couple of minor smudges or failings in a good character, and a sympathetic or slightly redeeming quality or two in a villain, but this kind of complexity is not, I regret to say, in the Shape of Water cards.”

Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird (A24, 11.10), which I finally saw last night after absorbing all the buzz and praise for the previous two days, is by far the pizazziest, wisest, smartest, most emotionally resonant and complete film I’ve seen at Telluride ’17. And it’s going to keep happening after it opens two months hence, and by this I mean it will stir the award-season pot.

Lady Bird vibrates with pluck, wit and smartypants energy, but it’s not some indie outlier that will peak in terms of awards recognition with a Spirit trophy or two. It’s a Best Picture contender if I ever saw one, and Saoirse Ronan‘s lead performance — essentially a portrayal of the young, Sacramento-imprisoned Gerwig at age 18 or thereabouts — is a locked-down Best Actress contender.

Lady Bird star Saoirse Ronan, director-writer Greta Gerwig during filming in Sacramento.

A comically anguished piece of self-portraiture in which the 34 year-old Gerwig recalls and reconstructs (and to some extent re-invents) her life in ’02, when she was finishing high school and dying to get the hell out of Sacramento, Lady Bird is the only serious Telluride break-out, the only film that has really cast one of those spells…an amusing, touching, smallish knockout that truly glistens and scores and pushes that special massage button.

Lady Bird is Rushmore’s Daughter — a whipsmart, girl-centric indie that deals emotionally rounded cards, a Wes Anderson-type deal (sharply disciplined, nicely stylized, just-right music tracks, grainy film-like textures) but without the twee, and with polish and English and all kinds of exacting, soulful self-exposure from director-writer Gerwig.

She’s passing along a half-funny, half-turbulent saga of high-school-senior angst, lust, parental friction, friendship, frustration, existential ambition and social longing.

Ronan’s performance is the take-home, for sure — a pushy, achey and vulnerable teen thing, almost but not quite in the Max Fischer-Jason Schwartzman mode. She’s also, of course, portraying the young Gerwig. You could say that Ronan is inhabiting Gerwig as much as Jesse Eisenberg played a generic Woody Allen-like figure in Cafe Society, only with more energy. In my book this is Ronan’s best performance yet, and that ain’t hay.

But Laurie Metcalf, as Ronan’s prickly and emotionally frustrated mom, is a stand-out also, and a likely contender for Best Supporting Actress.

For the next 12 hours I’ll be trying to catch the following Telluride Film Festival films and attractions: (1) A q & a between First Reformed director-screenwriter Paul Schrader and Indiewire’s Eric Kohn; (2) Chloe Zhao‘s The Rider at the Chuck Jones at 1 pm; (3) Battle of the Sexes at the Werner Herzog at 4:15 pm; and finally (4) Greta Gerwig‘s well-liked Ladybird at the Galaxy at 8 pm.

(l. to r.) Loveless producer Alexander Rodnyansky, The Shape of Water director-writer Guillermo del Toro and Loveless director Andrey Zvyagintsev prior to last night’s 11:20 pm screening of Del Toro’s film at the Palm.

I wouldn’t describe myself as head-over-heels in love with Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water (Fox Searchlight, 12.8) but I certainly approve and then some.

A sweet Guillermo fable through and through, I agree 100% that it’s definitely his best film since Pan’s Labyrinth — one of his smaller-scale creations that aims above and beyond the fanboy realm. Shape is a sci-fi period thing, a trans-species love story, a swoony romantic fantasy and an E.T.-like tale about a merging of disparate hearts and souls.

It also accommodates a darkly paranoid story about the forces of absolute badness looking to dissect and destroy an exotic life form. It’s a little stiff and overbearing at times, but generally mature and tender-hearted and ten times better than Okja, which used a similar storyline.

Sally Hawkins in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water.

This is an adult fantasy piece full of heartache and swoony feelings, lusciously and exactingly composed, painted with early ’60s period detail and production design to die for. A movie completely dominated and in fact saturated with its Guillermo-ness.

I saw Shape late last night. The screening began at 11:20 pm and ended two hours later, and I was 100% alert and wide-eyed start to finish. This is what good movies do — they wake you up and keep you in a state of anticipation until the closing credits. Oh, and the headline I went with three days ago after the first Venice showing — Douglas Sirk’s Creature From The Love Lagoon — still stands.

Set in 1962 Baltimore, The Shape of Water is about a current that quickly develops between Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute and lonely but sensually attuned dreamer who works as a cleaning woman inside a government-run scientific laboratory, and a gentle, large-eyed aqua-creature with God-like healing powers (Doug Jones) who’s recently been captured in South America and brought to the lab for study and eventual dissection.

There are serious obstructions to their love affair, of course, but you knew that going in.

I’ve just come out of Angelina Jolie’s latest innocents-being-tortured film, called First They Killed My Father.  I saw it this afternoon at the Chuck Jones. Yes, totalitarian brutality is very bad. But it’s also kinda bad when all you do is bludgeon your audience with depictions of same, over and over and over and over.

I know about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (’75 thru ’79) .  I know about the killing fields and I’ve seen Roland Joffe‘s excellent, same-titled 1984 film.  Is it okay to depict the same horrors in a 2017 film?  Sure.  Is it good to expose younger audiences to this horrific genocide? Certainly.  

But I had a very bad time with it, basically because of the lack of a decent story, which I define as one that builds and pivots and is about more than just stuff happening.  “A family and their youngest  daughter in particular went through absolute hell” is not a story.  

I found Jolie’s film deeply boring. I wanted to escape but like those captured and forced  into hard labor by the Khmer Rouge, I couldn’t. 

Jolie has a thing about brutality visited upon innocents.   In The Land of Blood & Honey — Serbs brutalizing Bosnian Muslims.  Unbroken — Japanese soldiers brutalizing American POWS. And now First They Killed My Father — the fanatical Khmer Rouge brutalizing and murdering two million Cambodians in agrarian work camps.

Willful, systemic brutality and cruelty, in and of themselves, are not engaging or stirring or even interesting. Savagery abounds in this sad world, but mere depiction isn’t enough.

No thanks.  Not for me.  To each his own.

Christian Bale was a topic of concerned chatter when he showed up at yesterday’s Telluride brunch with all of that American Hustle weight back on again, minus the goatee and the combover. Dressed in black T-shirt, black baggy shorts and black sneakers, tennis ball-length crew cut, hanging with a small kid. He’s bulked up  to play Dick Cheney in Adam McKay’s untitled Dick Cheney movie, which costars Steve Carell and Amy Adams. Bale will attend a Tellurude party tomorrow night for Scott Cooper‘s Hostiles.

I was in such an anxious, cranked-up state as I finished posting around 12:20 pm that I just grabbed my stuff and sped (i.e., speed-marched) over to the Palm for the 1 pm screening of Battle of the Sexes. What’s that? The 1 pm screening of Battle of the Sexes wasn’t at the Palm but the Galaxy, which is four blocks to the east? Yeah, I finally figured that out when Natalie Portman and two other guys took the stage just before the film began. “What does Portman have to do with Battle of the Sexes?” I was muttering to myself. I re-checked the program…fuck. I was at a 1:15 pm screening of Eating Animals. I leapt out of my seat and literally ran over to the Galaxy, but no dice. Battle of the Sexes had been playing for 20, 25 minutes, and every last seat was taken. Now I’ll have to catch it Sunday night.  I do stuff like this from time to time. I’m trying to be relaxed about this bonehead move, but it’s not working.

There’s nothing like a good Telluride deadline panic. It pushes you to the limit, makes you breathe and walk faster, cleans out the blood, cranks up the heartrate. Later…

Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour, which I haven’t time to write about because a 1 pm Battle of the Sexes screening is breathing down my beck, is partly a celebration of the fighting spirit of Winston Churchill (winningly played by Gary Oldman in a colorful, right-down-the -middle, straight-over-the-plate performance) and partly a political drama about the wavering discord and uncertainty that gripped the British leadership in the early days of Churchill’s first term as prime minister.

It’s basically the governmental deliberation side of Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, or the handling of that disaster and matters of backbone and patriotism and never-say-die in May and early June of 1940.  

It feels familiar and well-trod (how could it not be given all the recent Churchill portrayals?) but rousingly straightforward. It’s a stirringly square, well-handled audience movie. The easily impressed were cheering and clucking when yesterday afternoon’s Palm screening ended.

Will Oldman’s flamboyantly twitchy performance result in a Best Actor nomination? You betcha, but honestly? He’s given the kind of classically actor-ish, heavily-made-up turn that could have been performed 30 or 50 or even 70 years ago. There will be no ignoring Oldman’s work here, but it’s not wedded to the present-day zeigeist. It’s a golden-oldie performance, albeit delivered fresh and new with plenty of zing and punch.  Nothing wrong with that.

And that’s all I can write for now as I have to leave for the Galaxy theatre to get in line, etc. I’ll try to fill in later.

As one who was nearly euphoric about that ten-minute clip from Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing that I saw five months ago at Cinemacon, it breaks my heart and drains my soul to report that this portion of Payne’s film is far and away the most engaging, and that the rest of it is…well, certainly original and fascinating and intriguing as far as it goes. But the film as a whole doesn’t score on a jackpot level.

Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22) came into Telluride like Leo the lion, fed by those high aggregate review scores out of the Venice Film Festival and those highly admiring reviews from Todd McCarthy and Owen Gleiberman, but things quickly turned quiet and gulpy after yesterday’s 2 pm screening at the Chuck Jones theatre. 

Right now I would call Downsizing a respected lamb that no one I’ve spoken to, and I mean no one, is truly over-the-moon about. Except for Todd McCarthy, I mean.  1:05 pm update:  An older woman I just spoke to in line called it “embarrassing.”  That’s too harsh!  What it does is under-deliver.

Everyone knows the boilerplate. A futuristic setting and a dazzling, astonishing scientific discovery from Norwegian scientists that allows humans to reduce themselves to five inches tall. In so doing small volunteers live much more luxuriously and lavishly (their financial holdings are worth much more) while hundreds of thousands if not millions of carbon footprints are sharply reduced, and a far healthier environment results. Or so it seems at first.

The story is about shlumpy physical therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his shallow wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) deciding to get small and live lavishly inside a downsized tiny town. A controlled environment inside a plastic dome, safe from birds and cats and other predators.

The truth is that Downsizing starts off like a house on fire (loving it! yes! so great! Christoph Waltz is a hoot!) and then it starts to droop around the 40-minute mark, and then it really droops and sags when the movie moves to Norway. (No, I’m not going to explain what means, just that the film goes there during the final act. Read the McCarthy and Gleiberman reviews if you want specifics.)

I wanted a whipsmart social satire mixed with a sci-fi adventure about the exotic thrill of suddenly (and somewhat depressingly) being five inches tall and all that would entail, but what I got after the first act ended was a somewhat mopey, down-spirited love story between Damon and a spirited, peg-legged, often-hard-to-understand Vietnamese woman (Hong Chau) living in hand-to-mouth fashion and coping with total methane ruination of the planet.

I didn’t want a “love fuck” or a “pity fuck” (lines from the actual film) — I wanted a satirically funny excitement fuck, and that wasn’t what Payne was into when he wrote and directed.

I am not, however, “panning” Downsizing. It’s definitely a major, highly original, award-season release that everyone will have to see. It will be a huge topic of conversation during the late fall and holiday period. I am in no way saying “don’t see this” or “wait for streaming” or anything along those lines. 

Downsizing is smartly written, well acted, conceptually daring and dynamic and certainly an awesome technical achievement. It starts out as a kind of grandly visionary Preston Sturges-level social satire, then it downshifts into an occasionally amusing but sad-sacky relationship film, and then it turns soft and sappy and drearily humanistic in the final act. I never said to myself “I’m not admiring this” or “this is boring” — it’s definitely a first-rate film, and I’m very glad that Payne finally got it made — but I couldn’t get high off it. I tried but it wouldn’t let me.