Telluride Film Fest Part 2

Hey Everyone, I'm back with the rest of the movies I saw in Telluride. On Sunday afternoon after Brokeback Mountain, Thomas and I tried to get into Paradise Now, a movie about a couple of Palestinian suicide bombers. It was supposed to be unbiased, but I have my doubts given the director. However, it had huge buzz at Telluride so we wanted to give it a shot. Unfortunately, the show that we wanted to get into was followed by a Q&A with the director, so only those lucky hundreds with passes got into that film. So we zipped down the mountain to see President's Last Bang, another movie that we'd heard good things about.

• President's Last Bang - This is a new movie from South Korea about the assassination of the South Korean president in 1979. It was interesting in the sense that I never even knew their president was assassinated. The guy introducing the film said it affected them like Kennedy's assassination affected Americans. After watching the movie, I'm not sure why. The film portrayed EVERYONE in it as a dim bulb - from the president to his hilarious Cartman-like chief bodyguard, to the Director of the KCIA (their version of the CIA, I think) who plotted the assassination and his crew of numbskulls. We expected Bang to be a story about a complex plan put into action. Instead, it seemed like spur of the moment spite prompted the bumping off of the prez. And though the slaying itself was pretty easy, the nitwit KCIA director didn't have an exit strategy. Overall, this movie was disappointing. It had some funny parts, but there wasn't much suspense or action after all.

Monday
Monday as we now know is the MOST important day of the Telluride Film Festival - especially if you don't have a pass. It seemed like at least half of the pass holders left, and the schedule was chock full of TBAs, so they filled it with all the films getting the best buzz. I saw a record
FOUR movies on Monday and they were all awesome.

• Capote - A few years ago I read a biography of Truman Capote by George Plimpton (Plimpton has a fabulous way of writing bios - I read my first of his in high school of Edie Sedgwick and it had a huge impact on me. Edie led a very interesting life, was Andy Warhol's original superstar, Kyra Sedgwick's cousin, descendant of a Mayflower passenger, the inspiration for Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" and New Bohemian's "Little Miss S", a member of the 27 club, and the subject of an upcoming movie starring Sienna Miller. If you like bios, you'll love this book (even if it's not about your typical historical figure). Anyway, as with Edie, Plimpton interviewed people who knew Capote throughout his life and reprinted their stories verbatim chronologically. So you feel like you're getting the inside scoop and the truth). From reading this book, I found Capote to be brilliant, creative, hilarious and monstrously self-indulgent. His own feelings always trumped those surronding him, regardless of the degree of actual suffering involved. The movie Capote stars the wonderful Phillip Seymour Hoffman and it focuses on the time Capote spent researching and writing In Cold Blood, the true story of the murders of a Kansas family by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. After reading about the story in the Times, Capote travels to Kansas with his lifelong friend Harper Lee (Capote was the inspiration for Dill in Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird) to interview all the players. Catherine Keener does a great job playing against type as Nell Harper Lee and her self deprecating manner is starkly at odds with that of Capote's. The movie also stars the fabulous Chris Cooper as the FBI agent in charge of the case who goes from entertaining Capote in his home to threatening him for endangering the case. Capote bribes his way into the prison holding the two killers and decides the story he wanted lies with Smith. He continually visits Smith trying to get the story of the murders out of him and trying to convince Smith that he's on his side and will somehow get him acquitted. Capote proves to know no side but his own. Capote is a fascinating movie. My attention did not stray from it for a moment. The similarities between Capote and Smith are captured in Capote's remark to Lee, "It's like we grew up in the same house, but he went through the back door while I went through the front."

• Walk the Line - This is the film we all wanted to see. We also all knew it would be coming to nearby theaters eventually, but we had to see it anyway. Walk the Line is the story of Johnny Cash. I'll admit that prior to this movie I wasn't a huge Cash fan. I don't own any of his cds, but I like his more popular songs like "Ring of Fire". And I didn't know anything about his second wife June Carter Cash, so I was pretty much a blank slate going in. Joaquin Phoenix gave an electrifying performance as Cash. You could not take your eyes off him, always waiting to see what he'd do next. He's my current pick for Best Actor. Reese Witherspoon gives her best performance to date as well as June Carter, she too needs a nom at the very least. Cash spends most of the movie touring, hooked on drugs and pursuing Carter. There are lots of songs performed in the movie and all of them are awesome - I just cannot believe that the two leads sang their own songs. Towards the end, Phoenix sounds just like Cash. You also get a good feel for what tours were like in the 50s and 60s. All of these guys would travel together - Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Cash and others. Both my parents tell stories of getting to hear acts like these all playing at one concert. They definitely had it good back then. Walk the Line is really a love story though. Cash's persistent pursuit of Carter over ten years!!! is incredibly romantic and they didn't make it easy for each other. But then you read about their 35 year marriage and that they died within six months of each other and you've just got to have a lump in your throat. That's what it's all about. I left the movie a huge fan of Cash, Carter, Phoenix and Witherspoon. This is easily the best movie (so far) of 2005. Unfortunately it's not getting released until Nov 18. So when you see it, you really will have a happy Thanksgiving.

• Conversations with Other Women - I lucked out and this one was right after Walk the Line and in the same theater , so I was able to sneak in. My fav thing! Unfortunately the rest of our crew had had it, so I went solo. But going to movies solo is another of my fav things, especially when they're this good. By the time this movie was over, I was in total love with the Film Fest - 3 wonderful movies in a row! Conversations stars Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter as two people who meet at a wedding. As the movie progresses, a back-story is revealed. It's too good for me to give away, so I'm not going to say too much. The script is wonderful story of What Might Have Been (and as Anj once told me at the GM Tech Center, "The saddest stories on paper and pen are those of what might have been" - see, I can remember some things!), the dialogue is so real you feel like you're eavesdropping, and the two actors are funny, bitter, sexy and imminently watchable. If you loved Before Sunset, you'll love Conversations - and if you haven't seen Before Sunset, you CRAZY! One caveat, the director made the unfortunate decision to show the entire movie in split screen. For example, if Carter and Eckhart are both on the screen at the same time, they're still split. Other times they'll be on the left half of the screen having a conversation and the right half will be showing something totally different. This proved to be nothing but a distraction for me, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Maybe those less prone to motion sickness would have an easier time with this device.
  
  
• King Kong - The festival ended with an outdoor screening of a cleaned up print of the original 1933 version of King Kong starring Fay Wray as starlet Ann Darrow. Man, does this movie hold up. You really feel for Kong and Wade noted that someone needs to Wickedize the story and tell it from Kong's perspective. This I would love to see. Fay Wray is beautiful and the movie is full of special effects that are remarkable when you consider they barely had sound in movies back then. It's also pretty funny - sometimes
  intentionally, sometimes not so. Kong is one chest-beating, native-stomping, dinosaur-strangling beast, but you can't help but love him. The movie we've been watching all these years on late night tv wasn't the full version. After the censors got to it in 1939, they removed seven scenes (some of the more violent ones of him chewing on people and the one of him stripping Wray). The cleaned up version has all of these back in, so it's as good as new. It will be very interesting to compare it to Peter Jackson's version coming out this Christmas. On looks alone, Naomi Watts's resemblance to Wray makes her a great choice as Ann Darrow and Jack Black should fair well as the lunatic director. As for the original, I highly recommend you see it on the big screen, preferably outside on a crisp star-filled night with a lot of rowdy hippies. I couldn't have asked for a better ending to the festival.

Here's the order of movies I liked best (because all things must be ranked):

1. Walk the Line
2. Conversations with Other Women
3. Capote
4. The Lost City
5. King Kong
6. Everything is Illuminated
7. Brokeback Mountain
8. President's Last Bang
9. Edmund

I feel really confident recommending 1-6 to everyone. So it's not like 6 sucked or anything. 1-3 were just all so awesome! Thomas heard local film critic Howie Moshkovitz on NPR this morning. From Telluride, he recommended four we didn't see: Cache (a new French film), Paradise Now, I'm King Kong (a King Kong documentary) and Army of Shadows (a movie made in the 60s about the French resistance during WWII - seems like they don't come off so well). Here's hoping a few of these come to the Denver Film Fest in October. If not, there's always Netflix.

Next time: A recap of the Telluride panel I saw and all my celeb sightings. There were lots!

Boulder Bumpersticker of the Day: Maybe the hokey pokey IS what it's all about.