The two Telluride Film Festival movies couldn’t have been more different.
One is a snappy yet moving comedy about pink slips and love, familial and otherwise.
The other drops audiences into a German village before World War I, where stern fathers rule over their troubled women and children.
Writer-director Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” stars a pitch-perfect George Clooney as downsizing expert Ryan Bingham. He’s the guy cowardly HR types bring in to fire, ahem, “transition,” their workers.
Winner of Cannes’ top prize in May, “The White Ribbon” is a stark and monumental drama packed with pained, believable turns by its many child actors. Writer, director and moral taskmaster Michael Haneke said during an onstage interview that the production auditioned some 7,000 kids for the roles.
Together, “Up in the Air” and “The White Ribbon” serve as a reminder that the illustrious festival (which ended on Labor Day) remains a harbinger of an upcoming movie season full of award contenders and engaging pleasures. (Sometimes both: Last year’s festival sneak preview, “Slumdog Millionaire,” triumphed at the Academy Awards, and Reitman’s “Juno” was a contender for top honors the year before).
Telluride is also the curtain-raiser to the festival season: Venice ended Saturday. Toronto is just underway. The New York Film Festival starts at month’s end. Closer to home: Aspen FilmFest (Sept. 30-Oct. 4) will screen “Up in the Air” and give Reitman the festival’s inaugural New Directions Award.
Here are five more Telluride- screened films that Colorado audiences may see at area art houses in the coming months — or, perhaps, screening at the robust Starz Denver Film Festival in November.
“An Education”: An audience favorite, the drama features a breakout turn by newcomer Carey Mulligan as a high school girl in 1961 whose plans for Oxford are muddied when she meets an older man (Peter Sarsgaard.) Deftly handling the ick factor of the age-inappropriate relationship, Mulligan, director Lone Scherfig and screenplay writer Nick Hornby (who adapted Lynn Barber’s memoir) give us a vibrant and true heroine.
“The Last Station”: This drama about Leo Tolstoy’s final year provided plenty of buzz in the festival’s long lines and lovely gondola rides — not least because it features charming turns by Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer and James McAvoy as Sofya and Leo Tolstoy and Tolstoy’s new secretary, Valentin Bulgakov. Mirren, a festival guest, provides one of the funniest moments in a film not short on them: “What? Am I shouting?” the chronically histrionic Sofya asks during a deathbed scene.
“London River”: Brenda Blethyn and Sotigui Kouyate do delicate, aching work as parents drawn together when their adult children go missing after the London subway-bus bombings of July 2005. She’s from Guernsey; he’s from Africa by way of Paris. Director Rachid Bouchareb sculpts a story of understated intimacy out of a collective tragedy.
“Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”: Blues-crooning iguanas and a gator-cam are just a couple of the offbeat gestures in Werner Herzog’s crime drama (rife with grim humor) about a pill-popping, powder-snorting cop. It stars Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes and Val Kilmer. Cage, who is in finest over-the-top form, was asked by a festival attendee if there would be a sequel. “I see an opportunity for some sort of sequel,” the star responded, “Maybe ‘Worst Lieutenant,’ with Val Kilmer set in Shreveport.”
“Red Riding: 1974”: In the end, a marathon viewing of the British television trilogy was not to be. But day by day, it’s become harder to shake the brooding mood stirred by the first installment, directed by Julian Jarrold and based on David Peace’s novels about child murders and rank corruption in West Yorkshire. Quite a few festivalgoers discounted the program book’s assertion that the trilogy (helmed by Jerrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker) was on par with “The Godfather.” Instead, the scraped-raw feeling and masterfully edited mood of “1974,” the first of the three, evoked an altogether different menacing work: David Fincher’s “Zodiac.”
