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…that Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn (MGM, 8.31 in Telluride) looks like a possible sophomore slump.

20 or 25 seconds into the trailer and I’m way ahead of it. The movie, set in the mid aughts, will basically say that British rich folk are diseased shits. A middle-class Oxford student named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is invited by a friend and fellow student named Felix Catton (the Paul Bunyan-sized Jacob Elordi) to hang at his family estate for a few days. Twisted upper-class shit happens, and Oliver emerges…well, what do I know?

Update: Okay, there’s more to it. A guy who’s seen Saltburn tells me the trailer doesn’t reveal what the film is actually about, which is basically a riff on The Talented Mr. Ripley with Keoghan as Matt Damon and Elordi as Jude Law.

The trailer for David Fincher‘s The Killer is triple-A brilliant…I want to see it right effing now. The trailer for Michael Mann‘s Ferrari, also first-rate, feels like a ’60s film on some level. Nice shadings, very primal.

HE picks are in boldface. The high-profile films that are giving me bad or iffy vibes…okay, I won’t highlight these. Let’s just take it as it comes.

It’s still fairly devastating that there’s no Pot au Feu, no Coup de Chance, no The Killer, no The Palace, no Maestro, no Killers of the Flower Moon, no Ferrari. I’m even sorry there’s no Priscilla in the lineup.

What happened to the time-honored tradition of Venice premieres concurrently (or almost concurrently) showing at Telluride? There’s some really brutal elbowing going on this year.

“All of Us Strangers” (d. Andrew Haigh, U.K., 2023)
“American Symphony” (d. Matthew Heineman, U.S., 2023)
“Anatomy of a Fall” (d. Justine Triet, France, 2023)
“Anselm” (d. Wim Wenders, Germany, 2023)
“Baltimore” (d. Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy Ireland-U.K., 2023)
“Beyond Utopia” (d. Madeleine Gavin, U.S., 2023)
“The Bikeriders” (d. Jeff Nichols, U.S., 2023)
“Cassandro” (d. Roger Ross Williams, U.S., 2023)
“Daddio” (d. Christy Hall, U.S., 2023)
“El Conde” (d. Pablo Larraín, Chile, 2023)
“Fallen Leaves” (d. Aki Kaurismäki, Finland, 2023…I’ve been warned off)
“The Falling Star” (d. Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, France-Belgium, 2023)
“Finally Dawn” (d. Saverio Costanzo, Italy, 2023)
“Fingernails” (d. Christos Nikou, U.S., 2023)
“Food, Inc. 2” (d. Robert Kenner, Melissa Robledo, U.S., 2023)
“High & Low-John Galliano” (d. Kevin Macdonald, U.K., 2023)
“The Holdovers” (d. Alexander Payne, U.S., 2023)
“Hollywoodgate” (d. Ibrahim Nash’at, U.S.-Germany, 2023)
“Janet Planet” (d. Annie Baker, U.S., 2023)
“La Chimera” (d. Alice Rohrwacher, Italy-France-Switzerland, 2023)
“The Mission” (d. Amanda McBaine, Jesse Moss, U.S., 2023)
“The Monk and the Gun” (d. Pawo Choyning Dorji, Bhutan, 2023)
“Nyad” (d. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, U.S., 2023)
“Occupied City” (d. Steve McQueen, Netherlands-U.K.-U.S., 2023)
“Orlando, My Political Biography” (d. Paul B. Preciado, France, 2023)
“Perfect Days” (d. Wim Wenders, Japan, 2023)
“The Pigeon Tunnel” (d. Errol Morris, U.K., 2023)
“Poor Things” (d. Yorgos Lanthimos, U.S.-Ireland-U.K., 2023)
“The Promised Land” (d. Nikolaj Arcel, Denmark-Germany-Sweden, 2023)
“The Royal Hotel” (d. Kitty Green, Australia, 2023)
“Rustin” (d. George C. Wolfe, U.S., 2023)
“Saltburn” (d. Emerald Fennell, U.S., 2023)
“The Teacher’s Lounge” (d. Ilker Çatak, Germany, 2023)
“Tehachapi” (d. JR, France, 2023)
“Thank You Very Much” (d. Alex Braverman, U.S., 2023)
“Tuesday” (d. Daina O. Pusić, U.S.-U.K., 2023)
“Wildcat” (d. Ethan Hawke, U.S., 2023)
“The Zone of Interest” (d. Jonathan Glazer, U.S.-U.K.-Poland, 2023)

There is one way and only one way to respond to the soon-to-screen Venice Film Festival films by Woody Allen (Coup de Chance), Roman Polanski (The Palace) and Luc Besson (DogMan). And that way is this: Judge these three movies according to classic standards — how well do they work according to their own scheme and aesthetic? — and leave your 100% repulsive, nickle-and-dime woke moralizing out of it.

Many influential artists have lived problematic lives (however you want to define that), and nobody gives a shit about this when they’re staring at a Paul Gaugin painting in a museum, or watching Mel Gibson in the first two Mad Max films or in Peter Weir‘s The Year of Living Dangerously, or listening to the music of James Brown or Richard Wagner or considering the work of any other flawed creator.

It’s called “separating art from the artist”…period. There is no mature or realistic way of responding to art without doing this. You’re not a bad person for finding spiritual payoff and transcendence in art created by questionable artists, but you are a bad person when you insist on ostracizing and diminishing artists not for their work but for certain personal, private behaviors.

Talk about their moral failings all you want (it has been the HE position all along that the accusations against Allen are exceedingly flimsy and unreliable, and strongly contradicted by official investigations), but keep them in a separate box.

Oh, and on a personal note? Aside from the woke-nutter chorus (some of whom unfortunately reside in the HE comment threads), most sensible humans out there despise judgmental scolds. I’m speaking in this instance of tiresome people like THR‘s Scott Roxborough, Agence France-Presse editor Eric Randolph and French feminism activist Ursula Le Menn. Wokesters are the plague dogs of our time. They are proponents of Soviet-styled social propaganda and the absolute enemies of free thought and free cinema.

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When the New York Film Festival announced on 8.17 that The Pot au Feu (i.e., The Taste of Things) would be among their selections, they didn’t claim that this constituted a North American premiere. Therefore there had to be another festival venue (pre-NYFF) that would be showing Tran Anh Hung‘s foodie classic as a North American premiere, and it wasn’t TIFF so it had to be Telluride…right? But it’s not showing here. The list is out and it’s missing. What the hell happened?

It all turned out well in the end.

After landing in Albuquerque at 4:50 pm (mountain time) I shuttled over to the car rental community, about a mile from the airport, and lo and behold the National attendant was still there! I’d found a better Priceline deal a few hours earlier , and wound up with a new white Toyota Corolla.

I drove out of town just before 6 pm, and headed north on 25 and then 550. A magnificent day with breathtaking topographical splendor and a vast, bright blue sky and sunlight piercing through the windshield, and a great sound system to boot.

New Mexico driving lifts you up and activates your soul, bruh.

I’d been struggling with airports (LaGuardia and Dallas/Ft. Worth) and a cancelled flight and all the rest of that exhaustion, and suddenly I was free and delighted and flying along at 80 mph.

I made it as far as the Mesa Verde motel in Mancos, Colorado — roughly 100 minutes south of Telluride, call it two hours with pit stops and photo ops.

First the Killers of the Flower Moon marketing team decided against booking Martin Scorsese’s murder-and-racism drama into one or two of the early fall festivals. Last May’s Cannes debut was enough, they seemed to be saying.

Now they’ve decided against a limited theatrical opening on 10.6 in favor of a big sweeping int’l debut on 10.20.

What the Apple / Paramount guys seem to be suggesting is that they don’t trust the word of mouth that may result from a limited opening, hence a preference for audiences flocking to the film wham-bam style, driven more by the name value of Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro than anything else.

They’ve also released a one-sheet that strangely attempts to sell a non-existent relationship dynamic between Leo’s Ernest Burkhart (a real-life, none-too-bright bad guy) and his wife, Mollie Burkhart, also real and played by the less-than-fully-emotive Lily Gladstone.

Ernest pretends to love and care for Mollie, but he’s half-playing her the whole time and then he does even worse in Act Three. Ernest is not her protector, and Lily can actually smell the duplicity early on, or at least from the mid-point. So the poster image is bullshit.

3:15 Dallas time: If everything had gone according to plan, I’d be in Albuquerque right now…actually I’d probably be drivin’ north to Telluride…drivin’ on the wide-open highway with the scent of damp desert filling my nostrils and yellin’ “yee-haw!”

Instead the second stage of HE’s New York-to-Telluride travel plan is pretty much fucked and in tatters, thanks to American Airlines. Technical issues cancelled the Dallas-to-Albuquerque flight, which should have left around 1:15 pm Central.

They’re either going to find a new plane that might leave this afternoon or put me on a flight leaving at 8:30 pm.

So I’m sitting inside the air-conditioned Terminal D within the Dallas-Fort Worth airport complex, and basically feeling used, abused, subdued and tattoo’ed.

4:11 pm update: I’m sitting in seat 30C on a new flight that’s supposed to be leaving now. The Albuquerque Avis guys go home home at 4 pm…thanks!

Friendo: “Have a great time at Telluride. Keep it real.”

HE: “I try to respond plain and straight every day, and double especially whenever the Crazy Town nutters go on the attack, which is every other day.”

Friendo: “I don’t trust many opinions that come out of that festival except yours and maybe two or three others. Most of the Telluride critics are dishonest whores. Anyway, I’m hoping a few winners pop up.”

HE: “I’m going to dislike Rustin — I can feel it in my bones. I know I’m going to love The Holdovers, and I can’t wait to re-experience The Pot au Feu, or the unfortunately re-titled The Taste of Things.”

Friendo: “Keep your eye out for Saltburn, The Holdovers, All of Us Strangers and Poor Things. Oh, and all the humorless NYFF elitists fell head over heels for Annie Baker’s Janet Planet.”

HE: “Strangers might work. A gay guy conversing with his deceased parents…interesting idea. What doesn’t work for me is watching the problematic Paul Mescal in any context. I don’t know what the solution is. Maybe if Mescal were to pop one too many tabs of mescaline and suffer an overdose.

“Isn’t Poor Things supposed to be a problem film? I read that somewhere.”

Friendo: “Oh yeah? Who said that? I’m surprised since Venice, Telluride and NYFF all selected it.”

HE: “It’s in the wind.”

I once ordered a narrow double shot of Aquavit, a kind of Scandinavian liqueur. I didn’t much care for the taste (i.e., black licorice) so that was all she wrote.

But the reason I ordered it was because Sterling Hayden’s Roger Wade kept a chilled bottle of the stuff in The Long Goodbye (‘74), and during a chat at his Malibu beach house offered a glass of it to Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe.

“Okay, that’s it,” I muttered in my 13th row seat at the Aero. “I’m ordering Acqavit the next time I’m in a bar.

Marlowe wasn’t an aquavit drinker himself — he merely told Wade he would “have whatever you’re havin’” out of politeness. Wade almost hugged Marlowe for that. Wade: “Well, God love ya…so many snooties say when I ask what they want, they say ‘I’ll have some of this and a little bit of that and a twist of lemon.”

In Marlowe’s own Hollywood habitat, the shadowy, down-at-the-heels bar where they take messages for him, he orders Canadian Club and ginger ale on the rocks. Plus he chain-smokes unfiltered cigarettes (Camels or Lucky Strikes or Pall Malls) — Marlowe would never touch any kind of filtered smoke…Parliament, Kent, Benson & Hedges, L & M…God forbid!

Anyway on the occasion of this, Gould’s 85th birthday, I felt obliged to point out the particulars to Kim Morgan, a Long Goodbye fan from way back.

I know it well. Unhappy, disappointed, despairing. It means trouble…hours or days of discomfort

Carey Mulligan’s Felicia Bernstein: “Yes, we love and care for each other and our kids, of course, but sexually the boys come first in the case of Lenny. That’s just how it is.”

Photo appropriated from Vanity Fair.