A friend writes: “The Butter script was number three on the Black List and was one of the funniest scripts I’ve read in years. If the movie comes even close to the script, it will be this year’s Little Miss Sunshine.

“Plot is the story of a young black girl who doesn’t like white people (hilarious reverse politically incorrect racism), is adopted (for the one hundredth time — she never unpacks her bags) by a very, very whitebread Midwestern family

On the other side of town, the guy who wins the butter carving competition (regarded as the local Academy Awards) is asked to drop out this year because he always wins and there’s no contest. His wife, a social climbing wing nut, sees her status as Wife of First Prize Winner dropping so she decides to enter instead

The contestants sculpt butter like high art — the Pieta, the Thinker, etc. — and take

it a little too seriously, like the stage moms in Sunshine. So the big-haired wife/bitch takes on the very talented and newly discovered butter artist black orphan

“And the games begin.”

Pics from this morning’s Telluride Film Festival Patron’s Brunch, which was held on a scenic elevated pasture some 20 minutes out of town, slightly to the west of the Telluride airport. Splendid food, killer scenery, great company, gang’s all here, etc.

This guy never stops quipping, charming, posing for pictures, etc. Indefatigable smoothie. And a likely Best Actor contender, trust me, after this morning’s screening of The Descendants.

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, his son Ezra.

Pina director Wim Wenders, Into The Abyss helmer Werner Herzog.

(l. to r.) N.Y. Film Festival honcho Scott Foundas, Allan Arkush, publicist Jessica Uzzan.

Albert Nobbs director Rodrigo Garcia, Glenn Close.

Here are six or seven tweets about Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants from late this afternoon:

#1: “The Descendants, a Hawaiian family drama about death and letting go and waking up, is deep and real and true to life.”

#2: “George Clooney‘s performance as a beleagured, soon-to-be-widowed dad is touching, real, honest. He’s immediately in Best Actor contention.”

#3: “The first Telluride showing if The Descendants just broke, and I KNOW when I’ve seen a drama that doesn’t try too hard but sinks right the fuck in.”

#4: “I for one love the abrupt, subtle tonal shifts between straight drama and whaddaya-gonna-do, throw-up-your-hands, low-key comedy. Perfect.”

#5: “I read a draft of The Descendants in which George Clooney’s comatose wife comes back from time to time and hashes things out with him.”

6:: “That’s not what happens in the film, I should immediately point out. The way the film plays the emotional cards seems just right to me.”

#7: “So Best Picture contention, Payne for Best Director, Clooney for Best Actor and Shailene Woodley, as Clooney’s older teenage daughter, really delivers also, so maybe some action for her.”

Constant Telluride activity since daybreak, but no time to write about it (except for tweets). The Patron Picnic ran from 9:30 to noon (got good photos of George Clooney and everyone else, didn’t have time to post). Then a press schmooze-confab at the Sheridan, and then a 2:30 pm of The Descendants (which deserves a solid A) at the Chuck Jones theatre. And then came a 6pm screening of George Harrison: Living in the Material World, which I was half-and-half on and decided to bail on after 90 minutes (I can see the rest at the NYFF). And I’m now waiting to see a 9 pm showing of Rodrigo Garcia‘s Albert Nobbs and typing this.

“The take-off and landing are a bit bumpy,” writes The Playlist‘s Oliver Lyttleton from Venice, “but most of David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method is fearsomely smart. It’s a grown-up, absorbing film that doesn’t forget to move you even as it fires up the synapses, and one of real substance (certainly more so than the enjoyable, but somewhat hollow Eastern Promises). It examines the creative and destructive elements of sexuality in a way that very few filmmakers would dare

“If anything keeps it from quite hitting the heights that it could, it’s Christopher Hampton‘s scripting.

Variety‘s Justin Chang also admires Cronenberg’s film, but with reservations.

“Cronenberg’s career-long fascination with matters of the mind manifests itself in compelling but determinedly non-mind-bending fashion in A Dangerous Method. An elegant, coolly restrained account of the friendship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and its ultimate undoing by a brilliant female patient-student who came between them, this complex story from the early days of psychoanalysis engrosses and even amuses as it unfolds through a series of conversations, treatment sessions and exchanged letters.

“Still, the absence of gut-level impact and talky approach to rarefied material mark it as one of Cronenberg’s more specialized entries, destined for a small but appreciative audience. ”

Last night Telluride Film Festival p.r. director Shannon Mitchell declared that “no photography [will be] allowed inside the theaters at any of the George Clooney events — i.e., the Tribute and screenings, intros and q & a’s of The Descendants.” But that’s over now. Photos are okay, sez the Clooney camp. All is cool. Snap away.

Mitchell later wrote, apparently in response to joshing complaints, that “I’m getting a lot of funny comments about this but do want to be clear that this is not a request made by Clooney or his publicists. It’s a decision by festival organizers to try and keep

things sane inside the theaters and focused on the event. Clooney is still very much, as one journalist put it, a ‘man of the people!’

11:05 am update: Clooney’s publicist Stan Rosenfield just called to reiterate that he and Clooney knew nothing about this, that this isn’t how they roll, and that they’re asking the festival to “rescind” the no-indoor-photos request.

Previously: Telluride is not Cannes or Toronto. It’s low-key and artist-friendly and about the art of it. I totally respect and admire that. But at the same time Mitchell is essentially saying no shots of Clooney at any event whatsoever unless you happen to run into him on the street or in a store or on a hiking path in the hills. She’s basically saying, “Please treat his presence here as a non-physical, non-tangible thing, and focus only on his inner aspirational qualities.”

If I was Mitchell I would rephrase the edict as follows:

“During the 2011 Telluride Film Festival we are insisting upon photographic boundaries regarding George Clooney, specifically that he be treated and in fact regarded as The Un-Clooney, as a non-physical being, as The Man Who Isn’t Really There. An entity of spirit and longing and power and creative satisfaction but not molecular composition, as a kind of ghost or spectral presence…an idea in the mind of God. Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.”

Check.

Last night was just about cool mountain air and kicking back and breathing a little heavy as we walked up hills. It’s not Mount Everest, but the oxygen levels are lighter up here. I prefer to think of the Telluride air as select, rarified. I’d been told to drink only a single glass of wine, but I threw down two glasses of Pinot Grigio like I was Ernest Hemingway, like it was nothing at all.

With George Clooney (The Descendants) and Tilda Swinton (We Need To Talk About Kevin) being tributed by the 2011 Telluride Film Festival, it was fitting that Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton — in which they both star — was screened last night at the outdoor Abel Gance theatre. Swinton was standing on Colorado Ave. and posing for photos as the closing credits rolled around 10 pm.

A couple of hours earlier at 221 a few of us — Pete and Madelyn Hammond, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern, two friends/associates and myself — attended a birthday dinner for Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling. The Fox Searchlight gang (The Descendants) was sitting nearby; ditto the Sundance Film Festival team (John Cooper, et. al.).

There’s a big party tonight at Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy‘s sprawling ranch, not too many miles from here. Hammond has been invited but not me. If I was Kennedy/Marshall I wouldn’t want to many journalists there, scrounging around and mucking up the vibe.

Today’s schedule again: Patron Brunch from 10:30 to 12 noon, The Descendants at 2 pm, George Harrison: Living In The Material World at 6 pm, and finally Albert Nobbs at 9 pm or thereabouts.

Last night at 221 Oak Street (l. to r.): Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling, Dan Launspach, Pete Hammond.

World’s worst photo of Tilda Swinton (We Need To Talk About Kevin), taken last night around 10 pm on Telluride’s Main Street. (Photo by Sasha Stone.)

Telluride Fact #1: I was in a Tellluride market a couple of hours ago and ran into Elizabeth Berkley and her husband Greg Lauren. (They’re here to attend the Sunday wedding of Andrew Lauren and Lauren Bush .) And she said that Johnny Depp is here. Telluride Fact #2: A connected indie film guy told me he’s heard that Depp’s Rum Diary is one of the not-yet-announced secret screenings. Do the math = maybe.

The Patron Brunch, to which I’ve been invited, is tomorrow morning from 10:30 am to 12 noon. Tomorrow’s films: (a) The Turin Horse (2:30 pm, Palm); (b) Living In the Material World (6 pm, Palm — Martin Scorsese isn’t here); (c) Albert Nobbs (9:15 pm, Galaxy).

The 2011 Telluride slate is out, and topping the hot list are Alexander Payne ‘s The Descendants and Rodrigo Garcia and Glenn Close‘s Albert Nobbs (which I knew about but couldn’t report). Michel Hazanavicius‘s The Artist (seen it), David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method (great!), Wim Wenders‘ Pina and Steve McQueen‘s Shame are also slated — excellent news.

A Telluride tribute is set for George Clooney and they’re not going to screen The Ides of March, which he directed (and which just premiered in Venice)? The Telluride fathers must be planning on announcing March as a special surprise because to not show it would be somewhat…make that definitely weird.

Martin Scorsese‘s George Harrison: Living in the Material World — all three and half hours’ worth — has been announced as a Telluride attraction…more orgasms!

There’s also a Tilda Swinton tribute plus a screening of We Need To Talk About Kevin. (Dave McNary‘s Variety report called it Weed to Talk About Kevin, as in “we need to get high in order to talk about this effing kid or forget it.”)

The initial Telluride lineup didn’t include Butter, the Jennifer Garner-Ty Burrell butter-carving cramedy, but word around the campfire is that it might turn up as a surprise screening. (Written from a small table in the rear of a natural-foods store in Mancos, Colorado.)

Apologies to Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale for not passing along thoughts about likely 2011 Oscar contenders for the first early peek-out Oscar Index. I got hung up with the usual chores plus last-minute travel preparations, etc. Warrior is a good film, and in some respects an astonishing one, but anyone who think it’s a Best Picture contender needs to stop shooting heroin, splash water into his/her face, walk outside and smell the air.

In the view of The Guardian‘s Xan Brooks, Madonna‘s W.E. — about a lonely New York woman in the late ’90s (Abbie Cornish) obsessing about the late 1930s marriage of King Edward VIII (James D’Arcy) and Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) — is a “primped and simpering folly, extraordinarily silly, preening and fatally mishandled… jaw-dropping…the turkey that dreamed it was a peacock.”

Madonna’s direction “is so all over the shop that it barely qualifies as direction at all,” Broooks claims. “W.E. gives us slo-mo and jump cuts and a crawling crane shot up a tree in Balmoral, but they are all just tricks without a purpose. For her big directoral flourish, Madonna has Wallis bound on stage to dance with a Masai tribesman while ‘Pretty Vacant’ blares on the soundtrack. But why? What point is she making? That social-climbing Wallis-Simpson was the world’s first punk-rocker? That – see! – a genuine Nazi-sympathiser would never dream of dancing with an African?

“Who can say? My guess is that she could have had Wallis dressed as a clown, bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower to the strains of ‘The Birdy Song’ and it would have served her story just as well.”

The Telegraph‘s David Gritten, always the gentleman, is a little more deft and roundabout in his partly negative review.

“It all looks good, or at least glossy, in the manner of high-end cosmetics commercials,” he writes. “Exotic locations (Portofino, Cap d’Antibes) are visited and luxury brand names (Moet, Cartier, Schiaparelli) tossed around. Wally” — Cornish’s character — “pays repeatedly visits an auction of the Windsors’ possessions; W.E. often feels like an extended infomercial for Sotheby’s New York.

“Occasional flashes of wit intrude. ‘Your Majesty, you know your way to a woman’s heart,’ Wallis says. ‘I wasn’t aiming that high,’ the king replies. But such moments are rare.”

The Weinstein Co. is release W.E. on 12.9.

Here’s an account of Madonna’s W.E. press conference by Variety‘s John Hopewell.

The Playlist‘s Oliver Lyttleton, whose show-’em-no-mercy review of The Ides of March was posted yesterday, has stuck a knife into Carnage, Roman Polanski‘s adaptation of Yasmina Reza‘s hit play which premiered earlier today at the Venice Film Festival.

Carnage is “a film of very little ambition, a minor entry in the director’s canon. Perhaps it was just the desire to shoot something fast and quick after his brush with Swiss justice, which is certainly understandable, but he has essentially taken a pre-existing script, cast four A-listers, locked them in a room, and shot it.

“There are few directorial flourishes beyond a firmly Polanski-esque opening shot, and almost nothing to enable the identification of the movie as a Polanski picture. For once in his career, it feels like almost anyone could have directed it.

“It’s not as though the play could have been opened up much, but Polanski really might as well have stuck some cameras in the audience of a stage production. Maybe that approach would have been fine for a more substantial piece, but at best Reza’s material is targeting some fairly low-hanging fruit (upper middle-class hypocrisy, in the main) without adding much to the discussion, and at worst it’s not about much more than the set-up for the next gag.

“And that’s even ignoring the major issue with the construction of Reza’s piece — there’s no reason for the characters to stay in the room together, except that the writer decides they should.”

“The gloves come off early and the social graces disintegrate on cue,” writes Variety‘s Justin Chang, as the film “spends 79 minutes observing, and encouraging, the steady erosion of niceties between two married couples. But the real battle in Roman Polanski’s brisk, fitfully amusing adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s popular play is a more formal clash between stage minimalism and screen naturalism, as this acid-drenched four-hander never shakes off a mannered, hermetic feel that consistently betrays its theatrical origins.

“One is continually made aware of buttons being pushed, of the actors taking pains to say precisely the wrong (or right) thing to fan the flames, yet the film actually becomes less tense as it progresses. Certain repeated questions — ‘Why are we still here?’ and ‘Should we wrap this up?’ — begin to take on unwelcome meanings, despite the compact running time.”