The People's Telluride / Breaking Down TFF #45 / New UK Trailer for First Man / I Got a New Gig

Good Thursday TFF fans...


THE PEOPLE'S TELLURIDE

After a week and a half of voting and rating, here is the 2018 edition of The People's Telluride.  This year's TPT had 60+ respondents.  That's the largest response to my call for film ratings from the attendees of the Telluride Film Festival since I started the exercise back in 2012.

As a note for clarification, I have only included films that earned ratings from at least 20% of film goers that provided me ratings so as to provide a representative sample for reasonable purposes of comparison.  16 films had enough responses to earn a spot in this year's ratings.

The People's Telluride has been a solid barometer of success for films as we enter the awards season melee.  For many years, the film that was named #2 by the TPT poll won the Oscar for Best Picture.  Barry Jenkins Moonlight ended that string a couple of years ago by snagging the top spot.  Things returned to form last year as Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water finished #2 to Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird among the People.

Here are the top rated films from the People for each year since I started doing the poll:

2012:

1) Stories We Tell (4.80)
2) Argo  (4.75)
3) The Attack (4.70)

2013:

1) Tim's Vermeer (4.67)
2) 12 Years a Slave (4.55)
3) Gravity (4.40)

2014:

1) The Imitation Game (4.73)
2) Birdman (4.46)
3) Wild Tales (4.23)

2015:

1) Room (4.47)
2) Spotlight (4.45)
3) Beasts of No Nation (4.35)

2016:

1) Moonlight (4.37)
2) La La Land (4.33)
3) Maudie (4.29)

2017:

1) Lady Bird (4.38)
2) The Shape of Water (4.22)
3) Darkest Hour (4.04)

Going into this year's festival, these have been the top ten People's choices overall since 2012:

1) Stories We Tell (4.80) (12)
2) Argo (4.75) (12)
3) The Imitation Game (4.73) (14)
4) The Attack (4.70) (12)
5) Tim's Vermeer (4.67) (13)
6) 12 Years a Slave (4.55) (13)
7) Room (4.47) (15)
8) Birdman (4.46) (14)
9) Spotlight (4.45) (15)
10) Gravity (4.40) (13)

Sooo...drumroll please...here are this year's results (with the average rating following in parentheses:

1) Roma (4.47)
2) First Man (4.34)
3) Shoplifters (4.29)
4) Boy Erased (4.23)
5) Free Solo (4.19)
6) Cold War (4.02)
7) White Boy Rick (3.88)
8) Can You Ever Forgive Me? (3.81)
9) The Favourite (3.76)
10) The Front Runner (3.69)
11) Meeting Gorbachev (3.68)
12) Destroyer (3.44)
13) Trial By Fire (3.43)
14) The Old Man and the Gun (3.39)
15) Non-Fiction (Double Lives) (3.14)
16) Border (3.07)

That means that Alfonso Cuaron's Roma will join the top ten of The People's Telluride ratings tied with Lenny Abrahamson's Room from 2015.

Another tidbit for those of you who obsess over this stuff as I do...Here are what appeared to be the most watched films from TFF #45 (based on the percentage of my respondents that reported having seen the film at TFF:

1) The Favourite (78% of respondents say that they saw this film)
2) The Front Runner (70%)
3) Boy Erased (65%)
4) Roma (63%)
5) First Man (58%-tie)
5) Destroyer (58%-tie)
7) Cold War (55%)
8) Can You Ever Forgive Me? (53%)
9) White Boy Rick (50%)
10) The Old Man and the Gun (40%)

I'll have The Professionals' Telluride ratings up in Monday's post and The Composite Telluride a week from today.



BREAKING DOWN TFF #45

Now that TFF 2018 is in the books, I took a little time to inventory some of the information that helps me to come to some decisions every year.  It's sort of my post-action assessment to learn lessons and trends and then apply that to the process of predicting the TFF lineup for the following year.

So, if you're interested...

33 films were announced as a part of TFF #45's main SHOW.

Film Fest Crossover:

As best as I can tell, this is the count of films that crossed over between Telluride and various other film festivals-

Toronto-17
London-10
Venice-9
Cannes-8
New York-7
Karlovy Vary-4
Berlin-1

Distributors that had films play-

Netflix-6
Fox Searchlight-3
Amazon-2
Magnolia-2
Sony/Columbia-2

And one each from: The Orchard, Neon, Focus Features, Annapurna, Universal, NatGeo, A+E, Sundance Selects, Cohen Media and Sony Pictures Classics.

Notes on the unusual from distributors-

Only one SPC film and that was late breaking acquisition The White Crow.
No A24 films after some great success in recent years at TFF.
Big showing from Netflix fueled by Roma and the excitement about Orson Welles The Other Side of the Wind.
A larger than normal presence of big studios with 3 films from Sony/Columbia and Universal.

The Usual Suspects-

The list of people that are or seem to have become "TFF Usual Suspects" for 2018 includes Damien Chazelle, Pawel Pawlikowski, Matteo Garrone, Rithy Panh, Werner Herzog, Olivier Assasyas, Mike Leigh , Alfonso Cuaron, Jason Reitman, Peter Bogdanovich, Ralph Fiennes, Charles ferguson and Yann Demange.



NEW U.K. TRAILER FOR FIRST MAN


Anton Volkov's Trailer Track website reports that Universal has released a new trailer for Damien Chazelle's First Man for the United Kingdom.  Here that is from YouTube:

I GOT A NEW GIG

Though I am a little intimidated, I'm also pleased to announce that I have been invited to participate this Oscar season as one of Movie City News' Gurus of Gold.

The invitation came as a result of a recommendation made by my friend Sasha Stone who runs Awards Daily and is herself a Guru.

Here's my first chart (that's me on the far right, which will make my friends that know my political proclivities laugh really, really hard):

The complete set of charts from MCN and the Gurus is linked here.

Thanks to Sasha for the recommendation and to Davis Poland and Ray Pride at Movie City News for giving me this opportunity.  I'll try not to screw this up.


That's your MTFB for this Thursday.  More on Monday including The Professionals' Telluride.

EMAIL:  mpgort@gmail.com OR michael_speech@hotmail.com

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