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September 03, 2007

Telluride Pre-Wrap Wrap

Telluride ’07 has turned into a love fest, as always. It is a mostly dark year in the indie world and Telluride, which could be subtitled “The Festival of Bad Parenting” this year (of 22 new fiction films at the fest, at least a quarter include bad parenting and/or dead parents as a central theme), took a turn for comic relief when Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking follow-up, Juno, landed as a TBA “sneak” and took control of the buzz on Sunday. (And by the way… in spite of a pregnant teen as the title character, the film is very parenting positive.)

But not surprisingly, the big films at Telluride have been the big films that were expected to fill that need and will be, with a few additions, the big titles at Toronto as well: The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, I’m Not There, The Savages, Into The Wild, and Juno. Aggressively missing from the fest is Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (festival director Tom Luddy is a Zoetrope veteran), which has decided to forgo any festivals in light of the lambasting the young Ms. Coppola took on Marie Antoinette in Cannes last year.

On the second tier of Telluride love – movies that are very well liked, but which haven’t become life and death must-sees – are The Band’s Visit, Persepolis, Brick Lane, My Enemy’s Enemy (ahead of the drier look at a similar bit of historic territory, Terror’s Advocate), The Counterfeiters, Blind Mountain, and Cannes hit 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and Two Days.

In their own little corner of the room are Margot At The Wedding and Redacted, which seemed to blast off with a lot of positive chatter that has quickly dissipated as days have passed. It’s not – I should point out, since I have issues with both films – a matter of people who have liked the films turning on them. It’s more that whatever the discussion heat is simply stopped featuring them on the tip of people’s tongues by Sunday night.

In a more specialized area, Todd McCarthy’s doc on Pierre Rissient, seems to have been very well liked by those who got to see it and the appearance of Norman Lloyd, who is sharp as a tack at 92, has been a favorite.

Also, it turned out that Paramount Vantage showed a full reel of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Will Be Blood as part of the Daniel Day Lewis tribute.

Posted by poland at September 3, 2007 08:28 AM

Comments

Posted by: marychan at September 3, 2007 06:06 PM

Posted by: David Poland at September 4, 2007 07:19 AM

Posted by: hendhogan at September 4, 2007 02:33 PM

Posted by: hendhogan at September 4, 2007 02:36 PM

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