Five favorite things about Telluride '07

Telluride 34 is over, and here are some preliminary thoughts, plus my five favorite things.

+ Perspeolis. A lovely, funny animated movie about growing up and out of Shah-controlled Iran.

+ The movie I did not see that got tremendous buzz: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, starring Mathieu Almaric and Max von Sydow.

+ People on Sunday, in 1929 one of the peaks of silent cinema, was conceived and filmed by the young quartet of Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Edgar Ulmer with non-actors playing themselves. Accompanied live by the Mont Alto Orchestra, seeing this was a rare privilege.

+ Rails and Ties is the worst movie I've seen in a long time, and its inclusion tarnishes the reputation of Telluride. It's a manipulative cancer soap opera perpetrated by inept screenwriter Micky Levy and Clint Eastwood's director daughter, who have kidnapped Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden and thurst them into the ugliest roles of their careers. There are no words. Well, maybe four: don't see this movie.

And now for the top five:

5. Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There. Audiences swung from praise to indifference to condemnation of Haynes' opus, but everyone agreed on one thing: Blanchett is a sensation. She looks the part of Bob Dylan, but physicality only goes so far. She's burning from the inside out here, and I couldn't take my eyes of the flames.

4. Encounters at the End of the World. Watch the absurd quest of Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo and then watch the "absurd" quests of the people Herzog follows around Antarctica. The quotation marks are significant. They represent the hopefulness (I dare not say mellowing) of Werner Herzog. In Encounters, he explores our motives for studying the inhospitable environment of the South Pole and, therefore, our motives for seeking adventure and knowledge and for struggling to place ourselves in and transcend our Earth. This is Herzog's most accessible movie -- so accessible it will play on basic cable (the Discovery Channel) -- but that does not diminish its value.

3. The Band's Visit. Eight members of an Egyptian police orchestra end up in a remote Israeli village on the way to a gig. What results is a wonderfully controlled concerto of deadpan humor and reveling in the slight or deep connections between people of different nationalities and similar lonelinesses. This is a very funny movie -- the TFF program accurately compares its minimalist humor to Tati and Jarmusch -- that turns beautiful and a little profound at the end.

2. Juno. This movie deserves the success hijacked by Little Miss Sunshine last year, yet make no mistake: Juno gets nowhere near LMS's forced quirkness despite being the most original, snappily written high school romantic comedy in forever. Sixteen-year-old Juno (Ellen Page, alchemizing the best traits of Janeane Garofalo and Christina Ricci) gets pregnant by Michael Cera (who else?) and decides to have the baby and let it be adopted by a nicely manicured couple (Jason Bateman and a revelatory Jennifer Garner), all under the weary and bemused eyes of her brusque father (J.K. Simmons, in a role that finally allows him to show his talents) and perpetually turtlenecked stepmom (Allison Janney, that delight of delights). The best thing about Juno -- other than its energizing pace and sardonically eloquent dialogue by rookie writer Diablo Cody -- is that its characters sidestep every cliche without making a stink about it; Juno isn't just a smartass, the adoptive mother of her child isn't just a hypertense Home-and-Garden creep and Juno's stepmom isn't just a prickly interloper. These characters are complex and they are played with love.

"Who's ready to laugh?" asked director Jason Reitman when he introduced the movie. The audience applauded, the movie started, we all laughed and laughed (I'm saying a good hearty laugh at least once a minute), and at the end the audience erupted in cheers and whistles. Some people even stood. I saw 12 movies and five shorts and this is the only time there was a swelling, elated response from an audience.

There is nothing as exciting as a movie that starts breathing on its own. Know what I mean? When a movie is totally confidant, competently assembled and executed with verve and passion. Juno breathes on its own right away and never stops or hiccups. The laughs keep on coming, the cast is sterling and the movie, most importantly, has joy and heart -- not the cutesy Sundance-y joy and heart of LMS, or the insipid manufactured cultiness of The Movie That Dare Not Speak Its Name, but something far more edifying. I will cease with my praising. I don't want to set you up with too-high expectations. Let me simply revel in one of the great lines and moments in the movie: "In a couple years, when you move out, I'm gonna get Weimaraners."

1. Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild. Holbrook plays Ron Franz, an elderly retired military man who lost his wife and son in an auto accident 40 years prior to his meeting Chris McCandless, the foolish and passionate 23-year-old vagabond whom he picks up on the side of the road. Franz has compartmentalized himself in his quaint one-story house in the Southwest, venturing only as far as his garage, where he makes leather. His rendezvous with McCandless incites a verbal and tacit struggle between lust and restraint, adventure and reservation. Franz recognizes and reproaches the selfish and futile aspects of McCandless' quest, but he is at the same time liberated by this passionate young man who acts both as a son figure and as a motivator to not only live out one's days but to live them out in the extreme. The way Holbrook reacts to this sudden shakeup of his life is masterful and grounding. He enters the movie in its final 20 minutes and temporarilty elevates it to excellence, sidestepping the opportunity to play Franz as a goofy old coot or a stone-cold curmudgeon. What Holbrook accomplishes is very real, familiar and moving.

Day 2: Herzog on ice

TELLURIDE, Colo. -- There are certain ecstasies one can only experience at a festival like Telluride. I had two within an hour of waking up this morning.

The first: I'm on the gondola ride up to the Chuck Jones Cinema to see Herzog's Antarctica doc. As is custom, I chat with my fellow gondola-riders about the movies. Turns out that the guy I'm talking to is Mark Stock, the San Francisco-based artist who designed this year's festival poster (which, for the past 24 hours, I've been telling everyone is the best TFF poster ever. There it is above left as part of the festival program). It's actually a six-foot painting that he plans to sell. So it was quite a coincidence to share a gondola ride with him to the Mountain Village. Some insider info from Mark: the Daniel Day-Lewis tribute was weird. DD-L was aloof and shy, and it came off like he didn't want to be there. After they played a clipshow of his performances, he came onstage and said "I can't believe you sat through that." And apparently DD-L just played Hamlet somewhere and actually saw his father's ghost on stage. DD-L exited immediately to his dressing room and wouldn't go back on. These are the rumors you hear on a TFF gondola ride.

So I park myself in the fifth row of the Chuck and who sits in front of me by Herzog himself, with a pert young blonde. He's wearing cargo khakis and is all smiles. Ken Burns, the master of verbose extemperaneous introductions, says this before the film: "In the search for some improbable alchemy, a calculus which yields one plus one equals three...that's why we find ourselves hungry for here...I can think of no one more valuable to us...than one of the greatest alchemists on Earth...He has a ferocious and unsentimental view of things...He is the only man to have produced films on all seven continents...The truth that he is after is an ecstatic one...He is one of the great film artists of our time...Werner Herzog."

Herzog gets up and says he was at the South Pole last year and in Alaska just five days ago, but what really matters now is what's in between: Telluride. "It's the center of the world right now for me and those who love cinema," he says in that warbly slightly robotic Gregorian accent.

His film, Encounters at the End of the World, is a gorgeous hodgepodge. He spends time with every manner of person who makes a living at McMurdo Station in Antarctica: molecular biologists, physicists, plumbers, seal experts, volcanists. He talks to the people who jump off the margins of the map: PhDs who are washing dishes, and linguists who are running greenhouses on a continent with no native language. He explores the reasons for their being in Antarctica, and he explores the vast above-ice and underwater terrain of the frozen continent -- which is not a static sheet of ice but a dynamic, changing organism.

This is like every Herzog film rolled into one. It is about the universe perceiving itself through our inquisitive eyes and minds. It is about man's absurd quests, about our small and tenuous existence in the expanse of time, about the intense and forbidding and intoxicating beauty of the surroundings we are systematically studying and/or destroying. It is also a more convincing account of the seriousness of climate change than anything Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio has conjured. You'll see what I mean once you see it. It's also very very funny. It's going to be broadcast on the Discovery Channel, I think. Google it. I'm in a rush. I was very moved by the beauty and the wonder throughout, but the dedication title card at the film's end almost made me cry.

FOR ROGER EBERT.

After the screening, a Sophie's choice: Q&A with Herzog, or Q&A with Todd Haynes? I chose neither. (Had an interview to do for a story.) But now more heartache: I'm working during a surprise preview of Brian De Palma's Redacted (he's being beamed in by satellite from Venice for a Q&A after). A publicist for Magnolia Films told me on a gondola ride that it's a fictionalized Iraq war drama that harkens back stylistically to De Palma's earlier stuff and to Haynes' I'm Not There. Getting incredibly buzz at Venice, says the publicist, but his job is to say those kinds of things. I'm also missing the outdoor screening of Into the Wild. How boss would it be to watch that movie in the open air, with the mountains behind the screen and the stars overheard in the sky? Alas.

Okay okay I have to get to work. I'll have photos later tonight. I apologize for the lack of polish on my correspondence, but you're getting the real stuff: unfiltered, unedited, super-emotional responses to the TFF experience.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I'm out of breath

Apocalypto is an event, and an experience. It is not a lesson in religion or history. It is a chase movie.

Then it becomes a lament on great civilizations whose hubris makes them rot, leaving them open to destruction either from within or without. It's Darwinian. It's about the swallowing of civilizations that, for one reason or another, aren't equipped to battle a stronger, more ruthless force.

The sheer scope of Gibson’s vision and technical achievement is like a riptide through the movie’s reef of missteps and headscratchers. There are moments in Apocalypto when I balked or laughed at the screen. And there are moments when I seemed to be staring into the heart of darkness that’s been handed down through humanity since the dawn of time.

The plot should be experienced, not related. Suffice to say that all my preconceived notions about Apocalypto were swiftly cast aside during the first scene. But know this: It is not a picture for the religious right. It is a universal fable. You may think it’s crap, but you can’t call it narrow-minded.

During the film's two riveting hours, I thought several times of Werner Herzog’s work. Aguirre: The Wrath of God would make a fine double bill with Apocalypto. Both are about man’s foolhardy quest to usurp his basic instincts. Herzog’s is bone-chilling and emotionally remote. Gibson’s tends toward melodrama, convention and blockbust. Of the two, only Apocalypto is guilty of the sin it seeks to illustrate: the folly of overreaching. It’s a movie that has little restraint, that resorts to some tired action-movie cliches, that features extravagant and gratuitous gore and violence, that betrays some of the fundamental flaws in Gibson’s directorial technique (which is sometimes a little too clean for the subject matter).

But when it’s on, it’s on. The central chase in the movie made me think of Speed. Complication piled upon complication, climax upon climax. It’s relentless. It throttles your stomach, tests your patience, tantalizes and adrenalizes. “Where is this going?” you think, and then it gets there, and all you can utter is a “whoa,” like Keanu.

With his giant casts and gianter production ambitions, Mel Gibson is a latter-day Cecil B. DeMille. Purely by the numbers and technical specs, Apocalypto is a serious directorial feat. It’s virtuosic. Gibson creates and maintains a world that is totally believable and organic (save for a few laughable anachronisms of language). If you're looking for history, look elsewhere. This is not about the Mayan empire; it uses the concept of an empire as a backdrop. This movie is pure experience (good or bad). It comes straight from Gibson's reptile complex. It is basic and visceral and lustful for blood and wants to wring you out like a sponge (which is better than most movies, which want to pet you on the head).

If a movie’s quality depends on the successful and thorough realization of its intention, then The Passion of the Christ was stellar. It was a vivid illustration of passion (aka torture) and is one of two films in the small genre of “bearing witness to sacrifice” (the other is United 93). I didn’t "enjoy" The Passion for a second. It made me nauseous and irritable (like Apocalypto). It was relentless. But I took quiet pleasure in Gibson’s drive to do whatever the hell he wants. He has a vision, and he throws it up onscreen without hesitation or obstruction. This is a filmmaker who has dark visions, and demons, and exorcises them onscreen. Perhaps it is therapy for him, even if it turns out to be torture for us (as in The Passion, in which Gibson sought solely to suffer along with Christ, and succeeded in that venture). Either way, there was more I liked about Apocalypto than disliked, even if I have no wish to see it again soon.

I want to talk about specifics, but only after the film opens (Dec. 8) and people have seen it. Til then, don’t read any more reviews. Hoity-toity critics will want to send you in with a prescribed mindset. They'll automatically discount the film's merits based on their prejudice against Gibson's personal wackery (which has nothing to do with the quality of his filmmaking). Keep an open mind, see it if you want, then come find me and we'll talk.