“This is the lamest Telluride Film Festival I’ve ever been to,” a guy told me a few minutes ago from the streets of this beautiful Colorado mountain town. “It’s gorgeous up here if you can stand the altitude — it’s 9500 feet above sea level — but where’s the excitement? Where are the Oscar contenders? Where is No Country for Old Men? Where is Atonement? Where is Elah? Where is The Assassination of Jesse James? Where’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, the Sydney Lumet film? It’s really esoteric. Is this something to do with the tastes of Gary Meyer? They’re going to show 40 minutes of There Will Be Blood…that I’ve heard….but not the whole film.”

Uh-oh….Variety‘s Derek Elley is pissing all over Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution from the Venice Film Festival. (You can trust Elley on this one — no ethnic or nationalistic loyalities in play.) The Elley quote being heard ’round the world is a real stinger: “Too much caution and too little lust squeeze much of the dramatic juice out of…a 2 and 1/2 -hour period drama that’s a long haul for relatively few returns.

“Adapted from a short story by the late Eileen Chang, tale of a patriotic student — who’s willing bait in a plot to assassinate a high-up Chinese collaborator in Japanese-held WWII Shanghai — is an immaculately played but largely bloodless melodrama which takes an hour-and-a-half to even start revving up its motor.

“A handful of explicit sex scenes (in the final act) have earned pic an NC-17 rating in the U.S., where it goes out in limited release Sept. 28. But beyond the notoriety of a Chinese-language picture with full-frontal female nudity, pic lacks the deep-churning emotional currents that drove Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and his best other works. B.O. in the West looks to be modest, once the initial ballyhoo has died down.”

Here’s an mp3 of the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” number from the Young Frankenstein musical, presumably recorded in Seattle. At first it sounds exactly like the the same bit 1974 Mel Brooks film, then it expands all to hell. I don’t mean in a bad way — I mean extensively.

A major disagreement is shaping up over The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.21), and it’ll break wide open next Tuesday morning (9.4), which is when the trades and certain web columnists will be running their reviews. (Me included.) I’m a friend of this film — a big one. Two journalists I’ve spoken to this morning (one of them being CHUD’s Devin Faraci) feel the same way. But I’ve also heard that a certain guy hates it. This strikes me as somewhere between deranged and blasphemous by the standards of the Church of the Good Movie Lover. (A friend who attended last Tuesday night’s screening says this guy seemed to be in a state of discomfort as Jesse James unspooled, looking around every so often and eyeballing other viewers as if to say “you’re actually absorbed in this thing?”) Father, forgive anyone who trashes this film without reservation or qualification. Because I won’t.

The slate for the 34th Telluride Film Festival (Friday, 8.31 through Monday, 9.3) has been announced, and while there are many smart and stirring selections made by men of good taste, there are also no major pulse-quickeners or mind-blowers. It’s basically a bunch of Cannes stuff along with a few Toronto ’07 selections.

The idiosyncratic standouts for myself (if I were attending, that is) are a Norman Lloyd documentary (Matthew Sussman‘s Who Is Norman Lloyd?, a look at Lloyd’s 70 years as an actor-producer-writer) and a digitally remastered version of Richard Lester‘s Help!

The only thing that could save Telluride ’07 from “meh” status will be if that rumored-but-later-denied showing of a There Will Be Blood reel (as part of the Daniel Day Lewis tribute) turns out to be real.

The slate includes…

Todd McCarthy‘s Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema, about the influential publicist, sometime film distributor and film buff who discovered talent such as Jane Campion and Abbas Kiarostami.

Lee Chang-dong‘s Secret Sunshine, which “stars Jeon Do-yeon, winner of the Best Actress prize at Cannes, as a young woman trying to adjust to a new life with her young son amidst tragedy.”

Who Is Norman Lloyd?

Rails and Ties, Alison Eastwood‘s directorial debut [which] stars Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden in a story about two families in physical, emotional and psychological collision.

Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Cristian Mungiu‘s film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

Eran Kolirin‘s The Band’s Visit

Wayne Wang‘s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Stefan Ruzowitzky‘s The Counterfeiters.

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud‘s adaptation of Satrapi’s graphic novel of the same name.

When Did You Last See Your Father?, David Nicholl‘s adaptation of poet-novelist Blake Morrison’s memoir, directed by Anand Tucker, tells the story of a son’s conflicting memories of his dying father.

Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There.

Barbet Schroeder‘s Terror’s Advocate.

Sean Penn‘s Into the Wild,.

Baltasar Kormakur‘s Jar City.

Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen‘s Jellyfish.

Li Yang‘s Blind Mountain.

Sarah Gavron‘s Brick Lane.

Kevin Macdonald My Enemy’s Enemy, a documentary “that tracks Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, a.k.a. the Butcher of Lyon.”

Aleksei Balabanov‘s Cargo 200.

Noah Baumbach‘s Margot at the Wedding.

Werner Herzog’s Encounters At The End of The World, an exploration of “the vast empty splendor of Antarctica and the meaning that Herzog, with the help of physicists, biologists and volcanologists, tries to extract meaning from it.

Khuat Akhmetov‘s Wind Man.

Mark Kidel‘s Journey with Peter Sellars.

Mark Obenhouas‘s Seep!, a doc about extreme skiing.

Halloween is tracking at 83, 40 and 17, which makes it a candidate for $20 million this weekend, maybe a bit more. Balls of Fury is running 73, 35 and 10….a likely $7 or $8 million, certainly not more than $10 million. Kevin Bacon‘s Death Sentence is looking low — 40, 31 and 2.

3:10 to Yuma has improved — 43, 32 and 5. And this is an urban sample, which is significant in that westerns always play better in shit-kicker territories. Shoot Em Up — the other big actioner opening on 9.7. — is now lagging behind Yuma with 38, 32 and 2. Why is it eating Yuma‘s dust at this stage? Because Shoot ‘Em Up star Clive Owen “is a very good actor but he’s very cold and he’s not a star,” a marketing guy said this morning. “No following, doesn’t sell tickets.”

The Brothers Solomon is at 27, 20 and 1…sluggish.

The Brave One, the Jodie Foster vigilante movie, has improved since the last report, and this is from a combined male-female sample. It’s now at 48, 31 and 3. Urban women seem to be the core market. The general tendency with role reversal movies is that they attract the same sex as the lead player.

Dragon War is at 27, 21 and 1. Mr. Woodcock is running 40,.25 and 1 Across the Universe isn’t tracking at all…..10, 32 and 2.

David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises (Focus Features) is at 15, 23 and 0. But the ad campaign only began today.

Good Luck Chuck is at 54, 32 and 3….not bad for a film three weeks from opening. That’s probably due to Dane Cook ebing in the lead.

Resident Evil is at 62, 36 and 5. And Universal’s Sydney White is at 25, 29 and 2.

Balls of Fury (Rogue, 8.19) opened yesterday on 2810 screens and took in $1,700,000 — that’s $605 a print. If there was any real heat on this film it would have done about double this. Plus it going to start losing to Rob Zombie‘s Halloween on Friday.

Wall Street Journal reporter Thaddeus Herrick wrote yesterday (8.29) that “some” in the real-estate industry “believe that real-estate swashbuckler Sam Zell, who is in the process of buying the Tribune Co. (i.e, owner of the L.A. Times), could sell its properties, including the Los Angeles Times building.” Zell declined to comment for the piece, and “most real-estate experts acknowledge that the value of the Tribune Co.’s real estate is minimal compared with the company’s overall assets,” Herrick reported.

If I were Zell I would go all Genghis Khan on the L.A. Times. No one half-complicit in deadwood dilletante-ism would be safe from my terrible swift sword. I would slash the people who are holding on just to hold on (including as many sacred-cow upper-level execs as possible) and unload the Spring Street building and move the staff into some less pricey warehouse space in Flintridge or La Canada. I’d have a lot more reporters work from home and maybe come into staff meetings once a week, if that.

You don’t need lavish central headquarters. You don’t need all the flush perks. You don’t need highly-paid editors driving big fat SUVs out to their McMansions in Westlake Village. It’s time for everyone to start living like Parisians (I’ve been there — they ride to work on buses or the Metro, or on scooters) and live outside of the lazy corporate-comfort membrane. It’s time to downsize and get rid of the apparatchiks and gravy-train riders.

We all know the heyday of the L.A. Times is over. I love all the Calendar reporters and critics (Horn, Goldstein, Turan, et. al.) but everyone I know hates the big messy thing itself, particularly those awful , brightly-colored pull-out promotions and the feeling that you’re contributing to the decimation of the Northwest forests every time you buy it. I don’t know a single soul who really loves the L.A. Times, and I’ll bet thousands hate it as much as I do. (A friend just told me the other night she’s cancelling her subscription…good!) I know this will be painful for employees, but the sooner that this messy and flatulent lump of a newspaper is finished the better it will be for Los Angeles because something new and more vibrant and essential will take its place. On to the new and off with their heads.

A four-story building was blown up and incinerated in Chicago today — at around 2 pm, or about six hours ago — for a scene in Chris Nolan‘s The Dark Knight, the latest Batman movie that’s been shooting in and around Chicago for the last few months. The demolition/ implosion/explosion happened at the old Brach’s Candy Factory in western Chicago. The building, vacant for several years, was dressed to look like “Gotham General Hospital,” blah, blah.

There is nothing in the world more boring that big explosions in action movies, but the live video footage taken today — here’s one angle, here’s another — is actually fairly cool. [Thanks for HE contributor and HollywoodChicago.com columnist Adam Fendelman for passing this along.]

Paul Willner has written a nicely descriptive L.A. Times piece about a special screening of William Friedkin‘s Cruising (1980) that was held Monday night at San Francisco’s Castro theatre. The screening was a promotion for a Cruising deluxe-edition DVD that Warner Home Video is bringing out out on 9.18.07.

Cruising director William Friedkin

This once-controversial film was despised and protested against by hip Manhattan gays back in the day. They were angry that the film’s hunt-for-a-serial-killer story not only used the world of downtown Manhattan gay bars (and the anonymous sex that was routine in these places in the pre-AIDS era of the ’70s) as a backdrop, but as a creepy-atmospheric thing that suggested that guys who went to the Mine Shaft on weekends were flirting with an element that was on some level malevolent and not at all healthy.

27 years later, Friedkin is still saying stuff like (a) “I didn’t set out to make a movie that would be offensive to people [but] a murder mystery set against the backdrop of this particular milieu” and (b) “I could see why some people felt like it was not the way to put the best foot forward at the time, but I also felt I had the right to make a movie, not a political statement.”

Except he was making a kind of political statement, and Friedkin damn well knew this all along. if Cruising wasn’t fastidiously political it was obviously a cultural statement that said, “Eewww, look at what these leather-clad gay guys are doing with each other in skanky downtown bars…..eewwww! Amyl nitrates, fist-fucking, golden showers….how perverted is that? Is it any wonder that in a scene as dark and kinky as this that a serial killer — a guy in denial about latent gay tendencies, perhaps — might be attracted to the nocturnal intrigue and wander into it and start stabbing gay guys to death?”

Cruising was a thriller first and foremost, but it was obviously a straight-male, straight-culture message flick that was going “tsk tsk” at an exotic culture. It was eyeballing something within the downtown gay-sex scene that, to some at least, seemed possibly self-destructive. The irony, of course, is that there was something self-destructive going on back then. If thousands of guys weren’t fucking each other left and right in backroom bars coast to coast, it’s certainly plausible that the AIDS virus might not have spread as quickly as it did.

The thing that always bothered me about Cruising was that the voices of the killer didn’t match. We hear (but don’t see) a shadowy baritone-voiced killer in the beginning, and then the killer is identified as Stuart Richards (Richard Cox) in Act Three and his voice is nowhere near as deep, and then we hear the voice of his father (i.e., the guy he’s really trying to kill) and it’s still not quite the same as the original baritone killer’s voice. I could never figure this out.

And I could never really figure the ending as far as Al Pacino‘s cop character was concerned. The film’s second-to-last shot is of his girlfriend (Karen Allen) trying on a gay-bar leather jacket and hat in their apartment, and the last shot is of a tug boat on the Hudson. Abrupt cut to black and mass confusion.

But I always liked Paul Sorvino‘s line to Pacino at the beginning, when he’s giving him his undercover assignment: “Have you ever been corn-holed?” And I remember that Pacino looked a little beefy in this film, and that I took to calling him “Porky Pacino” when I was discussing the film with friends.

Derek Elley is one of Variety‘s finest critics — a guy who knows his stuff all around the race track and the rodeo — but he’s also a British citizen who’s probably susceptible to feelings of national pride, and so you can’t fully trust his rave review of Joe Wright‘s Atonement, which was shown at the opening-night attraction at the Venice Film Festival just a few hours ago.

Knightley, McAvoy in Joe
Wrights’ Atonement (Focus Features, 12.25)

I feel, in other words, that the British film industry has been a nearly moribund thing for so long that you have to process any seasoned British critic reviewing Atonement — a thoroughly British film that was shot with British actors, crew and money on English soil — with at least a half grain of salt. Elley may be speaking God’s truth 80% or 90% of the time in his review, but a little voice is telling me “watch it…hold your horses…deep down he may be cheerleading for the home team.”

That said, Elley is doing cartwheels and somersaults over this Focus Features release which will also play next week in Toronto before debuting in December.

“Rarely has a book sprung so vividly to life,” he begins, “but also worked so enthrallingly in pure movie terms as Atonement, a smart, dazzlingly upholstered version by young British helmer Joe Wright of Ian McEwan‘s celebrated 2001 novel.

“Period yarn, largely set in 1930s and 1940s England, about an adolescent outburst of spite that destroys two lives and crumples a third, preserves much of the novel’s metaphysical depth and all of its emotional power. And as in Wright’s Pride & Prejudice, Keira Knightley delivers a star turn — echoed by co-thesp James McAvoy — that’s every bit as magnetic as the divas of those classic mellers which pic consciously references.

“Released in Europe next month and as a U.S. specialty item via Focus in December, this should reap good returns on the back of positive reviews and figure heavily in upcoming kudo derbies. It proved a popular opener of this year’s Venice fest.

“Though clearly by the same director, film is almost the polar opposite of Wright’s debut. Where Pride took a relatively free hand in reworking Austen’s classic in more youthful terms, Atonement is immensely faithful to McEwan’s novel, with whole scenes and dialogue seemingly lifted straight from the page in Christopher Hampton‘s brisk adaptation.

“And where Pride took a deliberately unstarchy, more realistic approach to Austen’s universe, Atonement consciously evokes the acting conventions and romantic cliches of ’30s and ’40s melodramas — from the cut-glass British accents, through Dario Marinelli‘s romantic, kinetic score, to the whole starchy period look.

“It’s a gamble that could easily have tilted over into farce. But as in Pride and Prejudice, Wright’s approach is redeemed by his cast and crew, with leads like Knightley, McAvoy and young Irish thesp Saoirse Ronan driving the movie on the performance side and technicians like d.p. Seamus McGarvey and designers Sarah Greenwood and Jacqueline Durran providing a richly decorated frame for their heightened playing.”

I’m not saying Elley has necessarily lost hs bearings ro that Atonement isn’t a god, well-made film (I won’t catch it until it shows in Toronto sometime around September 8th or 9th), but we need to hear what a few non-vested smart-ass American critics hae to say. Until a few of these come along we’re in a holding pattern.