Sean Baker’s Red Rocket (aka “Dog Erection”) teeters on the line between mostly legitimate film festival-smarthouse cinema and relentlessly depraved and disgusting sociopath-porn. It’s “good” in the sense that Baker isn’t afraid to dive into gross and reprehensible behavior, and because he doesn’t feel obliged to deliver some form of moral redemption for the lead sociopath (i.e., “Mikey Sabre”), and because he occasionally flashes slick chops and whatnot, but the scuzz factor is REALLY rank. It was not a pleasant sit, but that’s the point, I realize. The Galaxy crowd totally hated it — a quick shattering of applause and then silence and hasty exits.

So I was lying on a first-floor cot at 4:50 am this morning, and floating on the surface of the pond — i.e., slightly more awake than asleep. It’s pitch black out, and suddenly I heard a light rapping on the main door, which faces the kitchen. Did I just hear what I might have just heard? Again: rap-rap-rap-rap. Not knocking, mind, but polite tapping. “No fucking way,” I told myself. “It’s not even 5 am and somebody wants to discuss something?” I decided that even if a couple of FBI agents with warrants were outside, I wasn’t answering the door or even making a sound. If it’s a thief or a druggie, I’ll wait until they break in to leap up and grab a golf club and defend the castle.

But they didn’t break in, and the rapping stopped after three tries. Very weird experience.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Here’s one useful definition of a great sci-fi fantasy film. It’s one in which the world-building is awesome but not more essential than the storytelling. In the first two Star Wars films, those dynamics were in perfect sync; they were, as well, in The Dark Knight and the Mad Max films. Blade Runner, in its way, is an amazing movie, but its world-building packs more punch than its transcendental neo-noir noodlings.

“Viewed in that light, Dune is a movie that earns five stars for world-building and about two-and-a-half for storytelling. If you stack it up next to David Lynch’s disastrously confounding 1984 adaptation of Dune, it can look like a masterpiece. (Most of the story now makes sense.) And for an hour or so, the movie is rather mesmerizing.”

Is “rather” mesmerizing the same as “somewhat” mesmerizing? I wonder. So for 60 or 70 minutes, Owen is saying, Dune is sorta kinda transporting, but not so much the remaining 85 to 90 minutes. Unless, one imagines or speculates, the viewer in question happens to be fucking RIPPED.

Gleiberman: “It’s not just that the story loses its pulse. It loses any sense that we’re emotionally invested in it. As the movie begins to run out of tricks, it turns woozy and amorphous. Will Part II really be coming? It will if Part I is successful enough, and that isn’t foregone. It’s hard to build a cliffhanger on shifting sands.”

HE to Gleiberman: How can you assess Dune without speculating on how it plays if the viewer is STONED out of his/her gourd? Do you personally get high? I suspect not so just this one time, shouldn’t Variety hire Seth Rogen or some ex-High Times contributor to write his/her own kind of review? Might it be a different entree if viewers were to consume a potent edible 20 minutes before showtime?

Denis Villneueve: “But I would not feel so all alone…”

I’d been planning all along to catch four films today — Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (9:30 am), Pablo Larrain’s Spencer (1 pm), Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground (6:45 pm) and Bernard MacMahon’s Becoming Led Zeppelin (9:45 pm).

But I’ve suddenly decided I need some morning time so I’m blowing off Dispatch, which I don’t feel all that anxious or heartbroken about given the general Cannes consensus (i.e., Wes doubling down upon his signature style). No worries — everything in its own time.

I can catch Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog tomorrow at 9 am or 12:45 pm.

Choosing this or that film is always an anguishing decision here in Telluride as it always means missing or postponing two or three others. I’m often sometimes torn between what I know I have to see vs. what I’d actually prefer to see.

The evening temps (45 to 50 degrees) aren’t what a reasonable person would call “cold” but it’s fair to say “chilling,” especially if you haven’t brought anything truly warm to wear, which describes my situation. I’d be in good shape if I’d brought my heavy leather motorcycle jacket and maybe a scarf or two, but it was so sticky hot when we left WeHo last Monday night that I somehow couldn’t envision nocturnal cold shudders in the Colorado Rockies. But that’s the reality.

I’ve been advised that I need to surgically remove the crab-head tone of certain Hollywood Elsewhere posts and to forsake the idea of assessing the deep-down reality of things as I understand them, and instead adopt a glowing positive outlook.

“Don’t say this or that aspect of a film doesn’t cut it,” I’ve been told. “Talk only about what’s good and what’s glorious…focus on the award-worthy, admirable, soothing, stirring, uplifting. Celebrate, don’t denigrate. Refuse to acknowledge mediocrity. Accentuate the positive. Re-tool Hollywood Elsewhere into the ultimate ‘safe space.’”

Okay, but if I do this I’ll probably have to rename the site…right? Because my head will no longer be “elsewhere”, so to speak, but concentrating on alpha stuff. Remember that 1930s song “I Want To Be Happy”? A tinny recording of that tune could activate each and every time you visit the site. I’m getting chills just thinking about it.

What does everyone think about re-christening the site as Hollywood Lobotomy?

Will Smith and Reinaldo Marcus Greene‘s King Richard (Warner Bros./HBO Max) is effing aces, and Smith will obviously be Best Actor-nominated and almost certainly win. I’m sorry but that’s simply the truth of it — the man has hit a grand slam.

It’s not just a first-rate sports drama (the story of how Richard Williams launched his tennis star daughters Venus and Serena Williams in their teen years) but a supremely effective, crowd-pleasing, character-driven “fall movie” — you know, those things they used to make for award season and that people would go to see in theatres and root for in terms of potential Oscar triumphs?

I was sitting there in a state of near-amazement and muttering “wow, this is so great and so unusual for this day and age…a first-rate, phenomenally well acted, sagely written, smartly edited, adult-angled film that isn’t infantile or depressing or diseased and is not just engrossing but rousing on a spiritual and emotional level…whatever happened to movies like this? Because corporate Hollywood has all but stopped making them.

There will be no King Richard haters…trust me. It radiates the right kind of vibes…the kind everyone wants.

…if this is in fact true.

Joe Wright and Erica Schmidt‘s Cyrano (UA Releasing, 12.31) had its first-anywhere screening Thursday night at the Palm, and when it ended around 9:25 pm a few things were obvious.

First and foremost, this poignant romantic tale about unrequited love “works,” and that the audience (composed of the usual mixture of press people and wealthy Colorado liberals) was deeply moved.

There was a kind of a hush outside the theatre — people were talking in groups, whispering praise, sifting through their emotions. (Me included.) Cyrano will probably do well with the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic gang, but it will surely become a hit or at least develop an ardent following among ticket-buyers and streamers. Because it gets people where they live…soul, passion, exquisite ache.

I’ve been watching filmed adaptations of Edmund Rostand‘s Cyrano de Bergerac for decades (Jose Ferrer‘s 1950 version, Steve Martin‘s Roxanne, the 1990 Gerard Depardieu version, Michael Lehmann‘s The Truth About Cats and Dogs) and the newbie — an inventively choreographed musical, fortified by first-rate production design and wonderfully lighted cinematography — is arguably the most spiritually and poetically buoyant version of them all.

The acting is top-tier, the musical numbers are arresting, the dialogue is as good as this sort of thing gets, and it’s a truly authentic time-tunnel experience (except for the “presentism” in the casting, which is par for the course these days).

Peter Dinklage has absolutely hit the jackpot with his titular performance — he’ll definitely be Best Actor-nominated. The film will almost certainly end up being Best Picture-nominated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the year-end consensus is that Cyrano is a “better” musical than Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story and Jon Chu‘s In The Heights combined.

Based on Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical of the same name (in which Dinklage and Haley Bennett costarred before moving onto the film version), Cyrano is easily Wright’s best film since Anna Karenina. Seamus McGarvey‘s exquisite cinematography reminded me of David Watkins‘ lensing of Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) — it’s a real trip just to watch and sink into on a visual level alone.

Kudos to Cyrano costars Kelvin Harrison Jr., Bashir Salahuddin and Ben Mendelsohn.

I have to get up early so that’s that. Four films — Belfast, The Velvet Underground, The French Dispatch, King Richard — slated for tomorrow. I might even fit in a fifth — Speer Goes to Hollywood at 1 pm.

Tatiana and I just saw Encounter with Riz Ahmed — a reasonably effective action melodrama / road movie about an unstable dad (Ahmed) kidnapping his kids, getting into gunfights and car thievery — everything is violent and anxious except for the very end.

No one’s idea of a “Telluride flick” — a lot of it feels rote, familiar…the old PTSD blues. (With insects.). I didn’t care for the over-reliance on extreme close-ups and the high-impact sound editing.

The Wikipedia page calls Encounter a “British sci-fi thriller” — it’s not sci-fi, trust me. Directed by Michael Pearce from a screenplay by Pearce and Joe Barton. It costars Octavia Spencer, Janina Gavankar, Rory Cochrane and Lucian–River Chauhan.

The actor who portrays Ahmed’s older son is especially good.

At 6:30 pm we’ll be catching Joe Wright‘s Cyrano + a Peter Dinklage tribute, and then Sean Baker‘s Red Rabbit Rooster Rocket at 9:30 pm.

For me, Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus was a hate watch — easily earning a slot on my “ten most despised films of the 21st Century” list. There have been many, many films released over the last 20 and 2/3 years that I didn’t care for or couldn’t muster interest in, but which I half-respected or could shrug my shoulders h. But from the moment when I first recoiled in horror when I realized that Michael Fassbender was wearing “space mandals” in the opening scene…well, I’ve said it.

I was therefore taken aback when I read Dom Nero‘s “It’s Time To Redeem Prometheus,” which appears in the 9.1 edition of Esquire. He calls it a “masterpiece,” in fact.

From “I Remember Prometheus,” posted on 10.5.12: “In my mind, Prometheus happened so long ago it doesn’t even feel like it came out this year. I saw it in Prague on a rainy afternoon. Mostly I remember the humidity and how warm it was in the lobby as all the journos and media people stood around and waited for the doors to open. And how I was sweating under my baseball cap and shades. And then wondering why the projectionist was showing it in 1.85 and not 2.35. And then trying to make sense of it…and failing.

“Prometheus is visually striking, spiritually frigid, emotionally unengaging, at times intriguing but never fascinating. It’s technically impressive, of course — what else would you expect from an expensive Scott sci-fier? And the scary stuff takes hold in the final third. But it delivers an unsatisfying story that leaves you…uhm, cold.

“It’s a gray, forbidding film about howling winds and chilly people. It’s a watchable, well made, at times better-than-decent ride, but it really doesn’t hang together. I’m sorry but anyone who says ‘wow, this is really great!’ is just full of it. But there’s no way to kick this around without dropping all kinds of spoilers so I’m going to keep things vague.:”

“For what it’s worth Scott shoots the hell out of Prometheus, but the script isn’t integrated. It’s half-assed and lacks a clear hard line. The fault, I hear, is mainly with Damon Lindelof‘s rewrite of Jon Spaihts‘ straightforward Alien prequel script. Roughly 40% delivers some absorbing futuristic technological razmatazz and exposition on a long voyage to a distant planet, 30% to 35% is proficient scary-icky stuff (slimy alien snakes) and 20% is some kind of half-hearted spiritual quest film on the part of Noomi Rapace‘s Shaw character, a scientist who wears a crucifix.

“The spiritual-religious angle is what disappoints the most because it’s only flirted with. The script starts off in a semi-solemn, semi-thoughtful vein, asking questions about the origin or spawning of humanity and the possibility of alien creators or “engineers”, but none of this develops or pays off, and things eventually devolve into standard shocks and creep-outs.

“Most ticket-buyers will go looking for a standard alien flick and come away going ‘hmm, I dunno but this isn’t quite it.’”