SPOILERS FOR SLUGS WHO LIVE UNDER ROCKS: I’m repeating myself as I often do, but now that everyone (and I mean everyone) in every continent on the globe has seen Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, I need to again emphasize something important:

Failing to allow poor wounded Indiana Jones to remain in 212 B.C. Syracuse and in the glorious company of Archimedes was a huge mistake, as that would have been a perfect finale all around.

I wasn’t just disappointed about Phoebe Waller Bridge slugging Harrison Ford and somehow dragging him back to 1969 New York City, I was crestfallen. Hell, I was on the verge of tears — “They just blew a perfect ending!”

Posted on 12.2.11: Steve McQueen‘s Shame demands a spinach-eating looksee from all non-Eloi viewers, but hoowee, it’s a bucket of bleak.

Here’s my 9.5. Telluride Film Festival review: “Steve McQueen‘s Shame is a prolonged analysis piece that’s entirely about a malignancy — sex addiction — affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into the light.

“Michael Fassbender plays a successful Manhattan guy with a sex-addiction issue. He’s into slamming ham like a vampire is into blood-drinking, minus any emotional intimacy whatsoever. And at the end of the day, all the film does is show you how damaged and deranged he is. The guy is lost, tangled, probably doomed.

“Act One: Fassbender is one smooth, obsessive, fucked-up dude. Act Two: Fassbender really is a twisted piece of work, you bet. Act Three: Boy, is this guy a mess!

“This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do. But Shame has a point, delivered with a methodical intensity, that sinks into your bones. And part of the point is that suppressed memories of incest…I can’t do this.

“But Shame has integrity, and is one of those films, like A Dangerous Method, that you might not like as you watch it but you think about a lot in the hours and days and weeks afterwards.

“The sex scenes are grim and draining and even punishing in a presumably intentional way. Fassbender walks around with his dick hanging out and flopping against his upper thigh, and I suppose it ought to be acknowledged that he’s fairly well hung.

Carey Mulligan, who plays his effed-up sister, has (a) a longish nude scene in a shower and (b) a song-singing moment that goes on for three or four minutes.”

Chilly and clinical as it is, it’s all but impossible to not think about Shame, a lot, after it’s over. Failing to see it means hanging your head in shame the next time an intelligent film discussion occurs in your circle.

On 9.30 N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis called Shame “another example of British miserablism, if one that’s been transposed to New York and registers as a reconsideration of the late 1970s American cinema of sexual desperation (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Hardcore, Cruising, etc.).”

From 11.10: “What if Michael Fassbender’s sex-addict character was called ‘Shame’? And if everyone called him that — all the girls he picks up, his sister (Carey Mulligan), his charmless boss at the office and so on? And what he if struck up a relationship with a 10 year-old kid who lives in his building, and what if the kid found out he was a sex addict and said, ‘I’m ashamed of you, Shame!'”

…during the six-week period between the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and the film’s opening on the Independence Day weekend (6.30 to to 7.3)…whatever she and her handlers may have expected or hoped to happen, it’s fair to say that the whole promotional bandwagon didn’t bear fruit…it certainly didn’t connect with Joe and Jane Popcorn, particularly the under-35s. The whole effort amounted to a whiff. It hurts when this happens, I realize, and I’m not gloating at anyone’s failure.

I therefore won’t be seeing it until Thursday afternoon (7.6). If anyone did catch it last weekend, please share.

Earlier today Jeff and Sasha sat down and played it by ear. At first they discussed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but they didn’t have anything novel or exciting to add to the conversation. So they kicked around the new Rock Hudson doc (All That Heaven Allowed, MAX) and then pondered some Telluride ’23 possibilities and recalled last year’s assassination of Empire of Light….I don’t know. It all just kind of mashed together after a while.

Link to Michael’s Telluride Film Blog.

Happy 4th of July! And again, the link.

So the main selling points in this version, directed by Blitz the Ambassador, are the songs, which are obviously de-emphasized here (as they always are in all trailers for musical films), and the pronounced lesbian currents, which were suppressed in the 1985 Steven Spielberg version. Yes, that’s Halle (Little Mermaid) Bailey as young Nettie. Don’t let that 12.25.23 release date scare you. Okay, you can be scared if you want.

I’ve already lamented the almost certain absence of Woody Allen‘s Coup de Chance at Telluride ’23. The scolds and monsters will scream too loudly, and the nervous nellies don’t want any trouble.

And as I wrote on 6.28, I’m on pins and needles about whether IFC Films and Sapan Studios will have the moxie to screen Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu at Telluride — it would be a major aesthetic tragedy if this all-but=perfect film doesn’t play there.

I’m one of many who are 90% to 95% convinced that Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers will play Telluride. It has to. It can’t be absent. Payne is too much of a longstanding Telluride attender and supporter. The contrary view is that Focus, the film’s distributor, will want to stage a 2023 Toronto Film Festival premiere during the first five days, which TIFF wouldn’t allow if The Holdovers plays Telluride first. Does anyone remember when Green Book premiered at the Toronto fest? On Tuesday, 9.11.18 — the sixth day. Not premiering during the first five didn’t hurt that Best Picture Oscar winner a bit.

Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix) has been waiting a long time to bounce off the high board and make a big splash among the right people. Whatever happens with the Venice Film Festival, how could this Leonard Bernstein biopic not kick things off domestically in Telluride?

How could Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon, which had its big bop-shu-wop premiere in Cannes several weeks ago, not go for a conversational re-start in Telluride?

Ditto Jonathan Grazer‘s The Zone of Interest, which also launched on the Cote d’Azur.

David Fincher‘s The Killer was shot between November ’21 and March ’22. It has seemingly been hanging around for ages, waiting to strike a hot iron before the 11.10 Netflix debut. Telluride, Toronto, New York…which one of these? Okay, probably not Telluride.

Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon (Apple, 11.22) somehow doesn’t quite feel like a natural Telluride pick but who knows? One way or the other the French-playing actors probably have to speak with the same accent — I’m not saying they all need to sound like Pepe le Pew, but they can’t sound like they’re from Tarzana or Burbank.

Apparent Telluride Likelies: Emerald Frennell‘s Saltburn, Justine Triet‘s Anatomy of a Fall, Todd Haynes‘ wildly overpraised May December, Craig Gillespie‘s Dumb Money (or is the 9.22 release date too close to Labor Day?), Sean Durkin‘s The Iron Claw (A24). Not to mention Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24, October), costarring one of the most extreme height-disparity couples in motion picture history — Cailee Spaeny (4’11”) and Jacob Elordi (6’5″).