The L.A. Times headline for John Horn‘s 8.29 Telluride story asks if “another Juno” — a breakout indie hit that winds up in the Oscar derby — might emerge from this small but influential film festival now unfolding in the Colorado Rockies.

Horn mentions three possibilities — David Fincher‘s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which was previewed last night via a 20-minute reel that was part of a Fincher tribute), Marc Abraham‘s Flash of Genius and Danny Boyle‘s Slumdog Millionaire.
The Fincher footage encountered unexpected sniper fire last night, but it’s silly to say “no” or “don’t think so” to Benjamin Button (which is running about 2 hours and 45 minutes as we speak) based on a 20-minute taster reel so let’s just ignore what some people were saying. Goldfinger ejector seat!
And I don’t know anything about the Boyle film. Beyond the generic, of course. Scruffy Indian street kid from Mumbai wins a bundle and is then suspected of cheating, etc.
But I’ve gotten a sense of Abraham’s Flash of Genius (Universal, 10.3), and my basic impression, to go by the trailer and the stuff I’ve read online about Robert Kearns, the character played by Gregg Kinnear in the film, is that it’s an intermittent windshield wiper version of Francis Coppola‘s Tucker: The Man and His Dreams.

Gregg Kinnear, Dermot Mulroney in Flash of Genius

Brilliant nice-guy maverick with pretty wife dreams up great technological innovation, the corporate guys steal his work and try to blow or buy him off, but he tenaciously fights back and stands proud at the end, having lost this or that battle but won the ultimate war, yaddah yaddah.
The trailer tells you everything…every last thing about this film (90% of the story, how the performances play, the look and tone of it) except the question of whether or not Kearns will accept the $30 million go-away money offered by the bad guys.
Tucker came out 20 years ago, yes, but we’ve seen this story told so often that it just feels worn down. (Aaron Sorkin has written yet another variation, based on his play The Farnsworth Invention, for the screen.) I’m not saying the Flash current isn’t there; only that I’m not feeling it as I sit here in West Hollywood, absorbing the data bursts as they shoot out from cyberspace and Telluride and the planet Trafalmadore.
Of course, it’s not the story but the telling that matters, so let’s see how it plays this weekend in Telluride and then at the Toronto Film Festival.

If Sarah Palin is only on [the Republican] ticket to try to get disaffected Clinton supporters to cross over, it’s a bad choice. Joe Biden may already be practicing his drop-dead line for the vice-presidential debate: “I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton.” — from Gail Collins‘ 8.30 N.Y. Times column, titled “McCain’s Baked Alaska.”

My all-time favorite Dan Quayle political cartoon, from a 1992 issue of Newsweek.

I just heard from two friends who came out of this evening’s David Fincher tribute at the Telluride Film Festival. They were mainly calling to share impressions of the 20-minute reel shown from Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount, 12.25), which was shown as part of a two-hour presentation that included a q & a with Fincher.

To my displeasure and irritation, their reactions to the Button footage, and frankly the reactions of others they spoke to as they left the theatre (including a couple of journo-critics and a respected director of an ’07 political documentary), were not all that good. Wait…what? This is supposed to have Oscar heat, this thing. Fincher’s possible home run, payback for the Zodiac diss, whatever.
My friends had one unqualified positive reaction, which was to the performance by Taraji P. Henson (Hustle and Flow) as Brad Pitt‘s adoptive mother. But beyond that, the Button footage felt vaguely underwhelming, they said.
It just wasn’t particularly exciting or engrossing, one explained. Excellent visual effects (old Pitt as a baby, etc.) and fine cinematography but with a kind of enervated, waiting-for-something-to-happen quality. The footage showed portions of the entire film, the other friend said, but in a way that kept you from getting into it with cuts coming too abruptly. And so people were kind of…whatever, grunting and muttering on the way out.
I didn’t like hearing this, of course, because I’m a fan of Eric Roth‘s script as well as an overall Fincher fan so I started arguing with these two. What were people looking for? I asked. What is it that people wanted to happen? It’s just a reel, a taste of a feature film.
They only repeated that whatever it was that the Button reel was trying to sell, they didn’t get it or get into it, and some others they’ve spoken to since it ended feel the same way.
One of them actually said that the Button reel had convinced him that Fincher has “peaked” and that “it’s all downhill from here on.” Oh, give me an effin’ break!
The Fincher tribute footage ran about an hour (or just under an hour) altogether, with 20 minutes for Button and 35 or 40 minutes showing pieces of past Fincher films (Zodiac, Fight Club, Se7en, etc.) The q & a between Fincher and Variety‘s Todd McCarthy ran another hour, they said.

Posted on Wonkette at 3:55 pm today by Jim Newell.

Final Telluride photo of the day, snapped earlier this afternoon. The screenings at this much-beloved festival are finally beginning this evening. I for one am getting impatient. Will someone please review something…anything? I’ll settle for street talk, restaurant reviews, scenic descriptions.

THINKFilm president and co-founder Mark Urman, a good guy with a bad brief, has jumped off his once-proud but recently foundering, debt-plagued ship (due to David Bergstein‘s derelict financial dealings since buying Thinkfilm in late ’06) and swam through heaving, white-capped seas over to the good ship Senator, which threw him a line by prior arrangement.
As of 10.1, Urman will officially be president of Senator Entertainment, a newly formed distribution outfit. The idea will be to make English-language films and establish a beachhead as a U.S.-based distributor. The company recently purchased U.S. rights to Public Enemy No. 1, which will be shown at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival. It costars Vincent Cassell and Gerard Depardieu. This French gangster film is on my list of gotta-sees.

This morning I linked to a clip of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann comparing aspects of Barack Obama‘s big Denver speech last night to Michael Douglas‘s third-act speech (written by Aaron Sorkin) at the end of The American President. This idea is brought full circle in a q & a in the current GQ between Sorkin and Mickey Rapkin.
Rapkin asks, “Have you met Obama? What do you make of him?” And Sorkin says, “The first time I met Barack Obama — I should say the only time I’ve met Barack Obama — was a year ago, when he was doing fifty-person-cocktail-party fund-raisers. He flattered me by saying, “My intention is to steal a lot of your lines.”

Pics taken two or three hours ago by renowned director of photography Svetlana Cvetko, who’s attending the Telluride Film Festival for the first time.

The world is waiting with bated breath for Telluride reactions to Paul Schrader‘s Adam Resurrected in which Jeff Goldblum plays Adam Stein, an entertainer who once performed for the condemned in a concentration camp, and Willem Dafoe plays Commandant Klein. Klein and Stein — a vaudeville act from the 1920s.

Screen Daily‘s Lee Marshall has strongly praised Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Burning Plain at the Venice Film Festival, and the Telegraph‘s David Gritten has written that “only three days into the festival, a front-runner for the Golden Lion best film award has emerged.”

Variety‘s Derek Elley, on other other hand, has given the “spaghetti-structured” drama the old back-hand, calling it “an elaborate writing exercise with few emotional hooks.” But I don’t trust Elley due to his belief that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Amores perros, 21 Grams and Babel — all based on Arriaga scripts — were “hit and miss.”

La Opinion‘s Josep Pareda interviewed me yesterday (or was it Wednesday?) for a piece posted today about Che‘s distribution troubles.

The piece is in Spanish, of course, so I managed a rough English translation via Google language tool. The headline — Che busca distribuidor — obviously means “Che looking for distributor,” and the subhead says that “the film with Benicio del Toro arrives in Toronto with no release date in U.S.”
Here are the portions that deal with my comments:
“After its showing at Cannes, critical reactions varied between flattery — manifesting in the film’s absolute defense by Jeffrey Wells, one of the most prominent scholars of cinema on internet thanks to its essential page Hollywood Elsewhere — and skepticism.
“Wells told HolaLA! “I was not bored by a single minute [of Che]. This is not a traditional drama. There is no emotional revelation. It does not employ any of the conventional tricks or cathartic moments: Where’s the girl, where they crying? None of this happens. The film is operating on a higher level than that. It basically lets you feel what it was like to hang with Che during the two most intense chapters of his life.”
But “the idea is to absorb both as if it were a feast. I knew this when I read the two scripts and realized it was an up-and-down epic like Lawrence of Arabia. The first part is the triumph and the second is when [the character] loses common sense . Now, could one see Lawrence of Arabia in two parts? Theoretically yes, but why? It was not made with that intention. ”
And yet dividing Che into two parts “seems to be consensus,” said Wells, who at the same time assured that while this wasn’t director Steven Soderbergh‘s intention or current wish, “It would not be the end of the world.”

The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez “just got an interesting tip” from a friend who got an early look at Gus Van Sant‘s Milk (Focus, 11.26). But I don’t know why he’d call it interesting since the guy doesn’t say if the biopic was any good or not.

All the tipster said is that (a) it’s much more “old school” Van Sant in the vein of the assured and economical days of Good Will Hunting or Drugstore Cowboy, rather than his recent experimental phase (Elephant, Last Days, etc.); (b) the editing was fantastic; (c) the use of old, archival footage rather seamless and adroit and (e) that the film “pops” with vibrant color.
That’s it? Earth to tipster: Did you like it? Is it well made? How good is Sean Penn? How did it make you feel? Does it…you know, deliver anything close to the emotional impact of The Times of Harvey Milk? Who are the standouts supporting players? Is it a derby movie?
Milk is about gay super-martyr Harvey Milk (Penn) — the first openly gay man elected to office (i.e., San Francisco city supervisor) in U.S. history, but who was later killed by a disturbed ex-supervisor named Dan White (Josh Brolin) who also shot SF mayor George Moscone on the same day.
James Franco and Diego Luna costar.