More from France / Does Burns Vietnam Doc Play Telluride? / Inarritu at Cannes Means T-ride?

Good Monday to ya...

Welcome to the Monkey House...as Mr. Vonnegut might say...


MORE FROM FRANCE

We continue to digest the announcement of the bulk of the Cannes #70 lineup that was released last Thursday with analysis from some other outlets.

Initially, I should note that I hadn't paid enough attention to the announcement that Francois Ozon's L'Amant Double (The Double Lover) had been chosen to compete for the Palme d'Or.  My mistake was not catching this and also indicating that the film needs to be included on the list of Telluride possibilities as Ozon scored well at TFF #43 last year with Frantz.

So definitely put it on the watch list and take a look at this story from Indiewire that includes the teaser for the film.

Additionally, you might want to grab a look at in depth  Cannes coverage from some sources that I did not include in the post last Thursday:

from Nancy Tartaglione and Greg Evans of Deadline

And an additional piece from Tartaglione here.

Gwilym Mumford of The Guardian also takes a look at the lineup

and check this piece from Talia Soghomonian at Collider.


Meanwhile, Indiewire's Anne Thompson has posted an analysis at Indiewire that assesses the potential Oscar players that might be starting down that road by walking the Red Carpet next month in the south of France.  Take a look at Anne's perspective here.


DOES BURNS' VIETNAM DOC PLAY TELLURIDE?

Ken Burns has been a regular part of the Telluride Fest for a long long while.  He's one of its biggest supporters and has often been featured in the lineup.  It's been some time, however since his last inclusion.  I believe his last project to play was 2012's Central Park Five.

We've also known for some time that he has been working on a multi-part documentary about the Vietnam War and PBS has announced just this weekend that the program will debut on Sept. 17. That premiere date would work incredibly well if it were following a TFF #44 bow (Sept. 2-6).

So, it seems to me that there's a better than 50/50 chance that parts of the 10 episode series make their way to some of the screens in and around Telluride.

Here's the announced schedule from Uproxx.



INARRITU AT CANNES MEANS T-RIDE

Well, most years that there was announcement that Alejandro Inarritu was part of the Cannes lineup, I'd immediately think that we'd see his project 3 1/2 months later in Telluride but I'm not so sure about this.

Working with frequent collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, the Oscar winning director will premiere Carne y Arena at Cannes in May.  Thing id, it's not a film but a virtual reality project.  Reports describe it as a six minute experience that focuses on the current Latin American refugee situation.  I understand that the experience will be presented for groups of ten people at a time.

My inclination is to believe that it probably won't play in Telluride, despite Inarritu's affinity for the fest.  If I grasp it correctly, the presentation requires a fairly large dedicated space and I'd be a little surprised if TFF organizers would give up one of their current spaces or have a new space that they could use.  That said, however, Cannes has apparently put together a way to do it and and if Cannes can, why not Telluride.

I'll be interested to see reports out of France next month about how the presentation occurs.  That will definitely move the needle for me in terms of assessing the Telluride possibilities for a presentation.

Indiewire has the coverage here.



Come back for more on Thursday...

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Cannes #70 Lineup Revealed / Re-visiting TFF #32

Good morning on this Cannes Thursday.

CANNES #70 LINEUP REVEAL

The announcement came in the very early hours this morning.  The Cannes 2017 lineup...the majority at any point.  Here is what was announced:

OPENING NIGHT FILM

Ismael’s Ghosts (Desplechin)

PALME D’OR COMPETITION FILMS:

Loveless (Zvyaginstev)

Good Time (Safdie and Safdie)

You Were Never Really Here (Ramsay)

A Gentle Creature (Loznitsa)

Jupiter’s Moon (Mundruczo)

L’Amant Double (Ozon)

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Lanthimos)

Radiance (Kawase)

The Day After (Hong Sang-soo)

Le Redoubtable (Hazanavicius)

Wonderstruck (Haynes)

Rodin (Doillon)

Happy End (Haneke)

The Beguiled (Coppola)

120 Battlements Par Minute (Campillo)

Okja (Bong Joon-ho)

In the Fade (Akin)

The Meyerowitz Stories (Baumbach)

UN CERTAIN REGARD SECTION:

Barbara (Amalric)

The Desert Bride (Atan and Pivato)

Closeness (Balagov)

Beauty and the Dogs (Ben Hania)

L’Atelier (Cantet)

Lucky (Castellitto)

April’s Daughter (Franco)

Western (Griesbach)

Directions (Komanderev)

Out (Kristof)

Before We Vanish (Kurosawa)

The Nature of Time (Moussaoui)

Dregs (Rasoulof)

Juene Femme (Seraille)

Wind River (Sheridan)

After the Road (Zambrano)

OUT OF COMPETITION

Blade of the Immortal (Miike)

How to Talk to Girls at Parties (Mitchell)

Visages Villages (Varda)

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

An Inconvenient Sequel (Cohen and Shenk)

12 Jours (Depardon)

They (Ghazvinizadeh)

Clair’s Camera (Hong Sang-soo)

Promised Land (Jarecki)

Napalm (Lanzmann)

Demons in Paradise (Ratman)

Sea Sorrow (Redgrave)

SPECIAL SCREENING EVENTS

Twin Peaks (Lynch)

24 Frames (Kiarostami)

Come Swim (Stewart)

Top of the Lake: China Girl (Campion and Klieman)

Carne y arena (Inarritu)

MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS

The Villainess (Jung Byung-Gil)

The Merciless (Byun Sung-Hyun)

And the Telluride implications...

A number of Palme competition titles jump out as potential T-ride crossovers:

Todd Haynes Wonderstruck

Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here

Andrey Zvyasinstev's Loveless

Michel Hazanavicius' Redoutable

Michael Haneke's Happy End 

Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories

Among the other categories few titles are catching my eye.  Maybe Mathieu Amalric's Barabra and Laurence Cantet's L'Atelier among the UCR section.  AMong the Special Screenings The Vanessa Redgrave directed Sea Sorrow interests me as does Alejandro Inarritu's Carne y arena.

Other titles will be added soon.

As regular readers know, the Cannes/Telluride crossover averages between seven and eight films each year.  Last year there were seven titles that played both fests including Graduation and Toni Erdmann.

Here is Cannes election coverage from:

The Film Stage

Indiewire

Variety

 RE-VISITING TFF #32

I started this with my last post and here is the promised continuation with detail of the 2005 32nd Telluride Film Festival.  It's my first stab at creating a more detailed history of the festival using programs that I have just recently acquired.

Guest Director:

Don DeLillo

Shows:

Army of Shadows
Be With Me
Bee Season
Breakfast on Pluto
Brokeback Mountain
Cache
Capote
Chang
The Child
The Comedian
Conversations With Other Women
A Cottage on Dartmoor
Edmond
Everything is Illuminated
Fateless
I'm King Kong
Iron Island
Johanna
King Kong
Lemming
Live and Become
The Lost City
The Moon and the Son
Le Monde Vivant
Paradise Now
The Passenger
Les Pont des Arts
The President's Last Bang
Sisters in Law
Spirit of the Beehive
Touts les Nuits
Three Times
Walk the Line
Wanda

Tributes:

Charlotte Rampling
Mickey Rooney
Luc Dardennes
Jean-Pierre Dardennes


Guests:

William H. Macy
Michael Haneke
Liev Schreiber
Bennett Miller
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Catherine Keener
Helena Bonham-Carter
Aaron Eckhart
Andy Garcia
Leonard Maltin
Neil Jordan
James Mangold

The Student Prints section included a 14 min. film entitled Victoria Para Chino from a young director named Cary Fukunaga.



More on Monday...

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The Countdown to Cannes Gets Shorter / More from CinemaCon

Hello on the first Monday in April of 2017....as Kurt Vonnegut might say (well, he wrote it actually)..."Busy, busy, busy"


THE COUNTDOWN TO CANNES GETS SHORTER

April 13th...that's the day that we'll find out the bulk of the lineup for the 70th Cannes Film Festival and then we get to try to parse out the 7-10 films that will double up with a play three months later in Colorado.

Indiewire is the latest film outlet with apiece that they put up at the end of last week.  They package it as a 50 film Cannes wish list and there are a good number of the usual suspects including a couple that we have heard won't be ready for the fest (Wenders' Submergence and Frears Victoria and Abdul are what I'm talking about here).

Nevertheless, the Indiewire 50 includes:

Alexander Payne's Downsizing
Michael Haneke's Happy End
Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete
Abdelatif Kechiche's Mektoub is Mektoub
Michel Hazanavicius' Redoubtable
Todd Haynes Wonderstruck
Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here

But there are others among the 50 that might well make a case either because they have also played Telluride in the past or because I thought strongly in some past year that they would.  That group of five (from this Indiewire "wish list") includes:

Samuel Maoz's Foxtrot.  I thought strongly that Maoz's Lebanon was going to make the TFF lineup in 2009.  Didn't happen despite being distributed by frequent Telluride player Sony Pictures Classics.

Michelangelo Frammartino's Late Spring.  Frammartino played Telluride in 2010 with Le Quattro Volte.

Haifaa Al Mansour's Mary Shelley.  Al Mansour's Wadjda played T-ride in 2012.

Warwick Thornton's Sweet Country.  Thornton made a splash at the 2009 TFF with Samson and Delilah

Hirokazu Kore Eda's The Third Murder.  I thought his Like Father, Like Son was going to play in 2013 but it did not.

So there you have it... half a dozen usual suspects plus another five that are quite as "usual" but might end up with the Cannes-Telluride double play.

The complete 50 film wish list from Indiewire is here.



MORE FROM CINEMACON

CinemaCon was highlighted in my last post for having featured both Payne's Downsizing and Clooney's Suburbicon.  After that post Todd Haynes Wonderstruck was featured as well as Stephen Chbosky's Wonder.  After reading this reaction to the film from The Wrap I'm inclined to think that we might be wise to keep an eye on the film.  It's got some things going for it that make one think that it could make the trip to the San Juans.  Lionsgate has the film and they and their affiliated companies have been making Telluride a regular part of their Labor Day for awhile now with films such as La La Land, All is Lost and The Homesman.

And then there's Julia Roberts.  She's another one of those folks that I include some years as a part of the Unified Clooney Theory.  Last year, Casey Affleck was tributed and won an Oscar and is also part of the U.C.T..

Could you get behind a Julia Roberts tribute?  I could.

As mentioned above, CinemaCon attendees were also treated to footage from Wonderstruck.  Here's the link to the coverage from Indiewire.



That's it for this Monday.  More to come on Thursday.


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Downsizing and Suburbicon at CinemaCon / Cannes #70 Poster Features Claudia / Will Hazanavicius Return? / And from the Hopes and Dreams Dept.

Good Thursday to you.  Here's some film stuff that may or may not have anything to do with TFF #44:


DOWNSIZING AND SUBURBICON AT CINEMACON:  REACTIONS AND RELEASE DATES

George Clooney and Matt Damon at CinemaCon this week (via The Hollywood Reporter)

Both Alexander Payne's Downsizing and George Clooney's Suburbicon have been well received after the Paramount presentation at CinemaCon in Las Vegas this week.

Check here for the reactions coming out of Vegas for these two films which both feature Matt Damon and which could both find the Telluride program in September.

Suburbicon will be released Nov. 3rd.  Downsizing will be released Dec. 22nd.

Variety

The Hollywood Reporter


Here are reactions to the footage of both films that was screened at CinemaCon:

The Hollywood Reporter

The Playlist

The Wrap

Indiewire

CANNES #70 POSTER FEATURES CLAUDIA CARDINALE

There it is.  The official poster for the 2017 edition of the Cannes Film Festival.  The poster features Cannes favorite Claudia Cardinale.  Telluride fans may remember that Cardinale was a tribute recipient in T-ride in 2010.

Here's coverage of the poster selection and reveal from The Film Stage.

Cardinale in Telluride in 2010 (via Getty Images)

WILL HAZANAVICIUS RETURN?

Louis Garrel as Jean-Luc Godard in Redoubtable

His last film, The Search, played Cannes and was drubbed critically and resulted in a rather quiet disappearance and certainly no berth at Telluride but his latest, Redoubtable, which focuses on a real life love story from the life of film pioneer Jean Luc-Goddard has been getting significant pre-Cannes buzz.

Just this last couple of days, we began seeing stories focusing on the film, including some pics (see above).  That indicates to me that Redoubtable is a likely Cannes selection.  We'll find out, in all likelihood, on April 13th when the bulk of the Cannes lineup is announced.


Check out the french teaser  and other details here from Indiwire and here from The Playlist.


AND FROM THE HOPES AND DREAMS DEPT.

PTA via The Film Stage

Here's the latest...Paul Thomas Anderson's new film set in the world of high fashion and starring Daniel Day Lewis has been dated for release on Dec. 25th.  The Film Stage reports that its working title is Phantom Thread.

Insert obligatory note here about its unlikelihood for Telluride (for a number of reasons) as well as the expected wish that it would magically screen there.

Here's the story from The Film Stage.


That's a wrap for this Thursday.  Have a good weekend and come back for more on Monday.


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Battle of the Sexes Has a Date / Politics, The NEA and Telluride / One More Big Cannes Spec Piece / More from The Other Side

Welcome to the first Thursday of spring friends.



BATTLE OF THE SEXES HAS A DATE

It's a film that has been on the MTFB radar for many months.  The film is the Dayton/Faris' Battle of the Sexes which centers on the story of the tennis match for the ages between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs and starsEmma Stone and Steve Carell.  I believe I first noted it in this space in June of 2014.

Now Fox Searchlight has dated it for a Sept. 22nd release which means it could play Telluride (and/or Venice and Toronto).  Although, that doesn't seem to me to be a prime release window if you play Telluride (Black Mass and Sully both landed close to that date the last couple of years). Nevertheless, it keeps the film in play as a TFF #44 possibility.

Here's coverage of the release date announcement.

Fox Searchlight Press Release

Variety

The Hollywood Reporter

Entertainment Weekly

The Wrap



POLITICS, THE NEA AND TELLURIDE

I usually stay away from politics in this space but I noted this week an Indiewire post about the possible effect on film festivals should the Trump budget come to pass complete with its gutting of the National Endowment for the Arts.  It seems that a number of film festivals would take a hot including the Telluride Film Festival.

That seemed to me to be worthy to pass along to my readers.  Here's the story From Indiewire .


ONE MORE BIG CANNES SPEC PIECE

Variety posted an extensive piece yesterday with informed Cannes lineup guesswork.  Notable films mentioned among the possible titles included Todd Haynes' Wonderstruck,

Of as much interest is a paragraph about two Paramount films: Alexander Payne's Downsizing (which has been on any number of Cannes lists within the last month) and George Clooney's Suburbicon.  The reporters suggest that Payne may not be ready to bow in France in May but that Clooney might be.  Considering how hot the expectation has been that the Payne film would likely play, this is a bit surprising.

Other notable strong contenders are said to include Michael Haneke's Happy End, Michel Hazanavicius' Redoubtable, Abdellatif Kechiche's Mektoub is Mektoub.

Here's the complete piece from Elsa Keslassy and Peter DeBruge of Variety.



MORE FROM THE OTHER SIDE

As you have surely noticed, I am taking a keen interest (and have been for some time now) in the ongoing process to complete Orson Welles "final' film, The Other Side of the Wind.  The negatives are currently in Los Angeles and work is said to have begun.

Earlier this week, Indiewire posted a fairly detailed account of how and where this all came about.  If you haven't already immersed yourself on the details, their story is a good way to get up to speed.

Indiewire posted the story earlier this week.


That'll be a wrap for today.  More on Monday.


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Some Serious Cannes Possibilities / The Other Side's Work Has Begun / Tom Luddy Honoroed

Welcome to Monday...if you got a spring break, I hope you enjoyed it..


SOME SERIOUS CANNES POSSIBILITIES

During the past week Deadline and Screen Daily each dropped a large article commenting on film titles that they feel have serious Cannes potential.  As a matter of fact, they're the two deepest Cannes spec pieces that I've seen thus far.

As regular readers know, we parse the Cannes potential lineup to begin to glean thoughts as to which films might also be presented in September at T-ride.

So, lets's dive in beginning with the Screen Daily post which breaks down possibilities by various geographic regions.  From those lengthy lists, I have highlighted some films that seem like candidates for TFF:

France: Mektoub is Mektoub, Redoubtable, The Guardians
UK/Ireland: Lean on Pete, You Were Never Really Here
Germany: Submergence
North America: Wonderstruck
Latin America: Roma
Eastern Europe: Loveless

The complete Screen Daily article is here.


Meanwhile. Pete Hammond posted a big Cannes piece on Wednesday that includes hard core speculation about:

Michael Haneke's Happy End
Alexander Payne's Downsizing
George Clooney's Suburbicon (though Hammond suggests a fall fest is, perhaps, more likely...Venice?)
Todd Haynes' Wonderstruck
Lynne Ramsay's You Where Never Really Here


Hammond also pours cold water on the Cannes spec of a number of films that we've been keeping an eye on this spring.  Films that Hammond says will NOT be Cannes bound include: Wim Wenders Submergence, Stephen Frears' Victoria and Abdul, Alfonso Cuaron's Roma.

French films that Hammond suggests are in play for a berth include Mektoub is Mektoub, Redoubtable and The Guardians.

Other titles that Hammond highlights that stand out to me as having a shot at Labor Day in the San Juans include: Loveless, The Venerable W,

The complete Deadline post is here.



THE OTHER SIDE'S WORK HAS BEGUN

The people behind the effort to restore, edit, finish Orson Welles' final film The Other Side of the Wind have wasted no time getting right into the work.

We told you last week that Netflix had come on board with money and that all the legal ins and outs had been satisfied for the project to move forward.  We also re-posted a photo of the thousands of feet of film arriving in Los Angeles for work to begin.

Now we have a clip of film as the film was readied and packaged for the delivery to L.A. this week. Yahoo had the film to begin with and Indiewire re-posted it.

Here's that story with the film included.


TOM LUDDY HONORED

Telluride Film Festival co-founder and continuing director Tom Luddy was announced as the recipient of The San Francisco Film Festival's Mel Novikoff Award. The award "acknowledges an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema."

Luddy will receive the award in San Francisco on April 9th.

From The 60th SFIFF, here is the press release announcing the honor.


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