One of the ways a celebrity or noted filmmaker will show respect to a journalist, at least in my experience, is to toss out a friendly “fuck you.” They would never say this if they thought you were some kind of easy-to offend asshat. Profanity conveys man-trust.

22 years ago in Cannes I was part of a round-table group speaking to George Clooney, who was promoting O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I began with a compliment about George’s performance in From Dusk ‘Til Dawn. I explained that I thought he had a certain edge and intensity in that 1996 Robert Rodriguez film that I quite liked. I didn’t mean that he was flat in the films he’d made after that (One Fine Day, Batman and Robin, Out of Sight, Three Kings) but that I really enjoyed what he was putting out in in Dusk to Dawn and that I kind of missed it.

Clooney frowned a bit, looked down, thought it over for four or five seconds, glanced in my direction and said “fuck you.” Laughter all around. I’ve liked him enormously ever since. Good fellow.

Two days ago I ran into James Gray, director-writer of the widely praised Armageddon Time (Focus, 10.28), at the annual Telluride brunch. We were talking about Flushing, Queens, which is where his new film takes place, and also the culture of Forest Hills. I told him I saw the Beatles perform at the Forest Hills stadium in August ’64. “You saw the Beatles in Forest Hills?,” he replied. Gray worshipped the Fab Four as a kid, he explained, and so the idea of a Connecticut guy scoring tickets to a Beatles concert right in his backyard provoked mock indignation, expressed by a hale and hearty “fuck you.”

I quickly added that I also saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium in August ’65, and so Gray gave me another “fuck you” to grow on.

The 21st Century version of the French terror is ebbing. Okay, weakening. Those occasional “uh-oh” expressions among the fanatical faithful tell the tale. But societal cancers don’t just evaporate overnight. So for the time being, the woke brigade still holds sway, although the whole cancelling mentality is being rethought and/or downgraded by just about everyone as we speak.

I was going to say there are three kinds of cancellations, but I’m thinking the categories may actually number four.

Category #1 is owned by Harvey Weinstein…no forgiveness, no redemption….J.J. Hunsecker to Sidney Falco, “You’re dead, son — get yourself buried.” It’s been argued that Roman Polanski is in this category, but there are some (many?) extenuating circumstances. We all know that ignoring a safe word is an awful thing to do, so Armie Hammer may belong in this slot even though he’s mainly guilty of being a sexual obsessive. He certainly didn’t eat anyone’s rib or cut off a woman’s toe and put it in his pocket.

Category #2 is for middle-range offenders for whom arguments in their favor have been made, and whom many people think got an unfair deal. In my book Woody Allen is a category #2 because it’s all over one alleged incident…one…that doesn’t really add up when you consider all the particulars. Who else in this category?

Category #3 is a soft cancel…Aziz Ansari, Louis CK. The basic thing is, you were guilty of something bad but you get to inch your way back into the swing of things after a couple of years. Others?

Category #4 is an even weaker soft cancel…for people whose careers have been hurt to some extent but who never really did anything you can point to, or whose alleged offenses were due to alcohol or substance issues but are now moot because they’ve gotten sober.

This afternoon I finally saw Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking, which has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It’s not a “bad” film — just interminable.

And yet it’s a well-written, well-acted dialogue piece about eight Mennonite women (plus the wimpy Ben Whishaw) discussing whether to leave their community because of years of suffering sexual violence from several brute beast males.

Of course they should leave! And yet they spend the whole night in a barn, debating the pros and cons. And there I was, grinding it out in row #3 at the Werner Herzog theatre.

The three best performances are delivered by Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Rooney Mara.

Every critic in Telluride loves this bleak, suffocating film, and their motivation is almost entirely political. Given the political climate in this town and in other woke regions around the globe, there is no upside to rendering a negative verdict. Play it safe, go along, keep your head down.

I kept telling myself “this isn’t interminable…it’ll be over after 100 minutes and then you can get up and move on with the rest of your life.” And that’s what happened. I’m fine. My future is before me.

If this film turns out to be Best Picture nominated, I’ll be flabbergasted. But it could happen. There are plenty of hardcore types who will push for it.

A fair number of average industry Joes & Janes, trust me, are going to hate this film. (But don’t tell David Pollick.)

If my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.

Every time I buy one of these canned La Croix soft drinks, I regret it. I choose a different flavor every time, and I always hate it. Give me Perrier, Evian, Diet Coke, etc.

I’ve been scrambling and struggling since late Saturday afternoon, trying to understand what Todd Fields‘ Tar is conveying or not conveying (is it anti-cancel culture or is it slyly condemning Cate Blanchett‘s brilliant but callous conductor and more or less saying “well, she made her bed”?), and venting with friends about how I found Field’s decision to obliquely hint at plot developments occasionally infuriating.

Key HE passage: “This movie is so beautifully made, such an immersive pleasure, and yet so infuriating I could just punch a refrigerator.”

A friend believes that “the film’s elliptical quality is one of the things I absolutely adored about it…it kept me on the edge of my seat. And it’s what made me hungry to see it again (and I hardly feel that way about movies anymore).”

I feel the same way — I’m so upset by my negative reactions to aspects of Tar (while loving so much of it) that I want to sit through it again so I can (hopefully!) settle some of my issues.

Another friend insists that “the information you need is all there. It’s elliptical…but it’s not ambiguous. Some might disagree about this or that, but I think you’d find viewers disagreeing on what happened in many scenes in Bardo, a movie you seem to be cutting a thousand times more slack than this one, even though — sorry — it is borderline unwatchable.”

The focus in Tar is (a) the magnificent work and lifestyle of Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar — I wanted to move into this movie and live there and never come out — but primarily (b) the fanatical determination of “Millennial robots” (as Lydia calls them) to destroy careers of people they see as cruel and abusive.

It’s mainly about a faintly alluded to, stubbornly non-dramatized relationship between an ambitious student and Lydia, a powerful God-like figure in her realm, and how it went wrong and why, and how this resulted in a kind of blood feud — a deliberate act of career assassination and a form of sexual harassment.

But who rejected who exactly, and why do reasonable intelligent viewers of Tar have to argue about this hours later and still not be certain about what happened?

All kinds of exposition is deliberately left out of Tar, and it’s triggering. I’m sorry but Tar takes forever to get going (at least 45 minutes if not longer), and once it does it’s too elliptical, too fleeting, too oblique, too teasing and (I guess) too smart for its own good. It made me feel dumb, and I really hate that.

But I loved the flush world of brilliant, arrogant, confident Lydia. Not to mention the textures, the autumnal Berlin atmospheres, the perfect scarves, the dinners….I wanted to live in it forever.

The bottom line is that Field can’t be bothered to tell a story in a way that most people would find satisfying. He doesn’t show the stuff that we’d like to see and be part of, obviously because he feels that’s the most interesting way to deal the cards. But not for me. Elusive narrative games and coy hintings and teasings and dingle-dangle maneuvers…nope. Maybe if I watch it again it’ll somehow come together?

I’m terribly unhappy about how Tar played for me. It’s made me almost miserable.

A friend lucked into a screening of Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, which just premiered in Venice. Reaction #1: “It pains me to say this, but it just doesn’t work.” Reaction #2: “It’s just too stagey,” which is to say, I gathered, too visually confined, too static. But how can an adaptation of a play about a 600-pound guy who never leaves his apartment be opened up?

Let’s be fair and free — let the air and sunlight in — let’s see what develops.

Oh god it’s happening The Whale lived up and Fraser is coming pic.twitter.com/XjsaYYFi3X

— The Oscar Expert (@expert_oscar) September 3, 2022

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich is trashing the finest, most exquisitely composed, most emotionally moving film I’ve seen thus far at Telluride ‘22 — Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light (Searchlight, 12.9). Olivia Colman is 100% locked for yet another Best Actress Oscar nom; handsome and gifted newcomer Michael Ward is also amazingly effective. Utterly exquisite Roger Deakins cinematography. Extra–fine supporting turns by Colin Firth and Toby Jones.

Light will absolutely be Best Picture-nominated — I’ll make bets with anyone. I thought it might be some kind of woke interracial romance, but it transcends all that shit. I agree about Belfast but otherwise Ehrlich knows nothing…trust me! (And you can dismiss David Poland‘s reaction also,.)

Today’s schedule: Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light at 1 pm (Herzog), Mary McCartney‘s’s If These Walls Could Sing at 4 pm (Sheridan Opera House), Todd Fields‘ Tar at 6:30 pm (Herzog), and then Luca Guadagnino‘s Bones and All at 10 pm (Herzog).

Followed by my second-favorite Jason Reitman film, The Front Runner. The other Rietmans, ranked in order of preference: Thank You for Smoking, Young Adult, Juno, Tully, Men, Women & Children, Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

At the last minute I decided to bail on last night’s (6 pm) screening of Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking, an adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel about eight Mennonite women confronting a horrific pattern of sexual assaults within their community. Because of the all-female ensemble factor (except for the allegedly wimpy Ben Whishaw character) and an allegedly gripping feminist current, Polley’s film is being hailed a Best Picture contender by a fair number of award-season sniffers (including Variety‘s Clayton Davis).

On the other hand THR‘s Scott Feinberg has derisively tweeted about the Telluride air being filled with “hyperbole”, a friend whispered to me last night that I’ll “hate it”, and another friend joked that Polley’s film is “strongly, almost hilariously anti-male.”

I’ll be catching it either Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening. If it’s good, I’ll say so but not because I’m down for #MeToo flicks as a general rule. Never trust the in-the-tank crowd. The only people who count when it comes to honest assessments in this realm are independent straight shooters, or persons of a rare stripe.

So instead of Women Talking I caught Ryan White‘s Good Night Oppy, which had been strongly recommended by a certain seasoned columnist. I’m not saying I was sold a bill of goods, but the columnist did oversell it. Oppy is a decent-enough, family-friendly NASA heart doc about two Mars rovers (Opportunity, nicknamed Oppy, and Spirit) Mars rover who explored Mars for nearly 15 years. It’s basically about parenting, and particularly the pride that sometimes comes with that. It’s a good film but calm down.

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Sprawling, story-less, Fellini-esque, strikingly conceived (to put it mildly) and somberly meditative, Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), which I saw last night at 9 pm, is one motherfucker of an older man’s interior dream-trip epic.

Because it’s basically a series of Tony Soprano-ish dream segments, or so it digressively seemed to me…flicked with foreboding and dread and yet darkly amusing. And there’s no way Bardo qualifies as a comedy, by the way…glumly satiric is a better description.

And yet you can’t say that Bardo isn’t delicious — “intermittently brilliant” is how a friend put it — in terms of all the visual seductions and titillations and wild-ass whatevers. It’s a feverishly imaginative, inwardly-focused, interior-dialogue art film that never once shakes hands or even acknowledges the mundane aspects of life as most of us know or perceive them. It’s a dream-realm thing, top to bottom and into the vortex.

“Bardo” is a Buddhist term that means “transitional state between death and rebirth.” Hence the dream-stream.

Understand that the dreams of Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a 50ish hotshot Mexican journalist and documentarian who, like Inarritu, has been living and thriving in Los Angeles with his family for the last 20-plus years…understand that Silverio’s dreams are somewhat darker and certainly more grandiose in a social-indictment sense than the more personalized and modestly-scaled dream sequences cooked up by Sopranos creator David Chase.

Inarritu’s dream trips are more imaginatively complex and cliff-jumpy and (here’s where the indulgent Netflix syndrome kicks in) big-budgety. All kinds of fragments and fantasies and social metaphors and projections of this or that, but most of it boiling down to “who am I and what am I doing?” as well as “fuck all the predators and cheapeners of this planetary existence that we’re all sharing” as well as an occasional “fuck me”.

There’s no debating the instant assessment that came out of the Venice Film Festival, which is that Bardo is Inarritu’s 8 1/2. There are other films in this self-examining, “I’m pissed off because I’m getting old and have run out of fresh ideas” fraternity — Bob Fosse‘s All That Jazz, Woody Allen‘s Stardust Memories, Paul Mazursky‘s Alex in Wonderland and (I’ll bet no one’s mentioned this one) Blade Edwards‘ That’s Life! (’86).

Seriously — the Wiki synopsis of That’s Life! is 90% Bardo: “Harvey Fairchild is a wealthy, Malibu-based architect who is turning 60 and suffering from a form of male menopause. He feels aches and pains, real or imaginary, and seems unhappy with his professional and personal life.”

Bardo often delivers the same kind of long and occasionally mystifying head-trip cards (“intermittently brilliant” means now and then) that 8 1/2 does, but it’s also warmer and more family-embracing at times. (I was especially taken with Griselda Siciliani‘s performance as Silvero’s middle-aged wife.) Stardust Memories is tighter and more entertaining. It’s deeper and stranger than Alex in Wonderland. Portions of All That Jazz struck me as more filling and exciting and urgent than Bardo, I have to say. It’s better than Edwards’ film — I’ll definitely give it that.

And yet portions of Bardo are glorious. I loved certain scenes so much that I didn’t want Inarritu to cut away. The opening desert sequence (a shadow running and leaping and flying, and then falling back to earth) is a wow. There’s a magnificent dance-party sequence that goes on for I-don’t-know-how-long, but it’s so exuberant and crazy-good I got lost in it. Not to mention a sexual episode here and there that did the trick. Not to mention a knockout battle sequence + piles and piles of dead bodies.

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Speaking as a huge fan of Bryan Fogel’s Icarus (‘17), I’m not all that impressed by Fogel’s follow-up, Icarus: The Aftermath. A tale of whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov, a hunted man stripped of the usual emotional comforts, it mostly feels like one of those in-depth extras you might find on a Bluray. It’s interesting as far as it goes and certainly well made, but it’s recycled material.