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.
HE’s sleepover at a modest Airbnb near LaGuardia was…uhm, fine as far as it went. American #1626 (LGA to Dallas/Ft. Worth) leaves at 9:30 am — arrival in Albuquerque by 2-something this afternoon.
Likeliest, Well-Fortified, Semi-Inevitable (7)
Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer (Universal, 7.21 — Nolan’s pic diminished after my second viewing because — be honest — it’s overly dense and therefore punishing)
Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (Focus Features, 11.10.23….here’s hoping)
Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie (Warner Bros., 7.21 — enthusiasm is understandable, but it would be wrong, wrong, terribly wrong if Barbie were to win the Best Picture Oscar…don’t do it!)
Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon (Apple)
Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple / Paramount)
Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix)
Michael Mann‘s Ferrari (STX)
Semi-Likely (4)
Celine Song‘s Past Lives (A24)
Ben Affleck‘s Air (Amazon, 4.5)
Matt Johnson‘s BlackBerry (IFC Films, 5.12)
Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn (Amazon/UA releasing)
And The Rest…(10)
David Fincher‘s The Killer (Netflix)
Wes Anderson‘s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Netflix)
Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24)
Blitz Bazawule‘s The Color Purple (Warner Bros., 12.20)
Todd Haynes‘ May December
Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (Searchlight)
Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid(A24, 4.21)
Sean Durkin‘s The Iron Claw (A24)
Yorgos Lanthimos‘ And (Searchlight — anthology film)
Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest.
The late William Sylvester (1.31.1922 – 1.25.95) became a semi-legendary figure when he played Dr. Heywood R. Floyd, the smug and officious National Council of Astronautics official from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Almost a comically flavorless and dull-minded bureaucrat, Floyd didn’t do or say much — he just flew up from earth to visit Clavius, the moon base, to see about the recently discovered black monolith that had been “deliberately” buried under the moon’s surface some four million years earlier.
One other significant role that Sylvester played was in Gorgo (’61). Sylvester portrayed Sam Slade, a seafaring adventurer of some sort who, along with Cpt. Joe Ryan (Bill Travers), captures Baby Gorgo, a huge prehistoric reptile who is brought to London for public exhibition. Everything seems fine until Ma Gorgo — a much, much larger beast — visits and trashes the city in order to save her son.
I’ve never seen Gorgo but my understanding is that it’s a tolerable mønster flick, but generally second tier. I’m thinking of Sylvester because a new Gorgo Bluray is currently for sale.
…that Colman Domingo‘s performance as Bayard Rustin in Rustin (Netflix, 11.3) will be a bold-as-brass, James Baldwin firecracker-type thing (which the trailer suggests), it seems to me that a film about an historical civil-rights-movement leader who was both Black and gay…that’s two checked boxes right there…plus a film that was launched by Barack and Michele Obama‘s Higher Ground Productions…that’s a third box-check given the urge to show obeisance to the Obamas within liberal circles, etc.
Should we give the possessory credit to the Obamas or director George C. Wolfe?
During his second term in the White House, Barack posthumously awarded Rustin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the 11.20.13 ceremony, Obama presented the award to Walter Naegle, Rustin’s surviving longtime romantic partner.
The almost entirely all-black cast includes Chris Rock as Roy Wilkins and Jeffrey Wright as Rep. Adam Clayton Powell.
Rustin will have its first-anywhere debut at Telluride. If Barack and Michelle don’t fly in and take a few bows, the troops will be bitterly disappointed.
