HE Likes Telluride Thursdays

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9.2, 6:50 am: After 14 or 15 hours of somewhat uncomfortable travelling (including five hours on the carpeted floor at Washington National), HE pulled into Telluride yesterday afternoon around 4:15 pm.

What happened next was beyond thrilling. First the unpacking (I’m bunking at a spacious three-bedroom condo with Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone), then a little shopping, then a 40-minute nap and finally an elegant dinner at La Marmotte, hosted by Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho and birthday boy Roger Durling.

Yes, that’s THR‘s Scott Feinberg to Roger’s right. The trio on the opposite side of the table (l. to r.) are Amazon’s Justin Balsamo, Netflix’s Kelly Dalton and IMAX’s Julie Fontaine.

What unannounced film will be shown at this afternoon’s Patrons screening at the Herzog? How can it not be Todd Fields‘ Tar, the film that everyone is dying to see after the unanimous Venice raves? The people want, demand…okay, they’re pleading for this.

I’ve never before stayed in a Telluride condo with a breathtaking view of the mountains; now I have.

Picking up the pass in an hour or so, and then the bus to the Telluride brunch. Three films today — the unannounced Patron’s screening around 2:30 or so, a 6 pm Sarah Polley tribute + screening of Women Talking, and finally Alejandro G.Inarritu‘s Bardo at 8:45 pm.

“Darling” Tracking w/ Shallow Hals, None-Too-Brights

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Shelley Winters once said of Marilyn Monroe, with whom she had roomed, “If she’d been a little less smart, she might have been happier.”

By the same token, it can be surmised that a fair number of dumber (or less smart) people are interested in seeing Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry, Darling.

Okay, they’re not so much dumb as not especially attuned or curious, and so they don’t care about Wilde schtupping Harry Styles during filming or Styles getting paid more than Florence Pugh or any of that stuff. Simple folk, common clay, etc. Movie, darkened theatre, comfy seat, popcorn…done.

Choices, Phrases

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Delicious film reviews can be either pans or raves, but the raves are better. And the ones that really get you going and stick to your ribs aren’t just concise or articulate or well-phrased. The very best ones absorb the artistry and special energy of a film and somehow convert it into charged prose. You’re reading but you can feel the film.

Read Owen Gleiberman’s Tar review and see what I mean.

No Man of Honor

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…should ever wear a dark suit with a white-shirt-and-red-tie combo. Because Donald Trump has contaminated that scheme forever. No slam against Rod Lurie, of course — it just didn’t occur to him. Others may want to take note.

Beddy-Bye

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The squishy blue pillow saved my life. It made it possible to catch a few zees on the floor of Reagan National between midnight and 5 am. Terminal D is being vacuumed and wiped down by graveyard shifters. Could there be a sadder, grimmer way to earn a paycheck?

Noah Baumbach’s “The Nutty Professor”

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It would appear that Noah Baumbach‘s White Noise has been more or less downgraded, at least as far as Venice Film Festival critics are concerned. The last time I checked a 69% Metacritic rating signified something between teetering and over and out.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s less-than-ecstatic Variety review: “On the page, Don DeLillo‘s ‘White Noise’ achieved total heaviosity. It was a novel of ideas. But that’s a tricky thing to translate to the big screen. As a movie, White Noise announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them.

“Greta Gerwig has one of the best scenes — a tearfully extended, ripped-from the-gut monologue in which she confesses her adultery to Jack, though her transgression isn’t about any desire to stray so much as her compulsion to get those [mood-stabilizing] pills by any means necessary. By the time Jack heads out with a tiny gun to confront the man Babette slept with, White Noise has found its heart of darkness but lost its pulse. We no longer buy what we’re seeing, even as we’re told, explicitly, what it all means. The film ties itself into knots to explicate the bad news.

“How telling, then, that it’s so much more effective when it’s willing to be upbeat, notably in a triumphantly daffy closing-credits dance sequence that takes place in the brightly lit aisles of the A&P. Set to the joyful thumping groove of ‘New Body Rhumba’ by LCD Soundsystem, the place really does seem like ironic nirvana. That’s a quality White Noise could have used more of.”

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